If you are ready to make that move to Linux, but don't know where to start, the Open University's new ten week short course Linux: An Introduction might have caught your eye. First though, a bit of disclosure, my day job is with the Open University (but don't take my views and comments as representing them) and I'm an open source enthusiast. I met up with Andrew Smith of the Maths, Computers and Technology Faculty, who is the academic behind the course, to find out more. I had many questions for him, including some from colleagues and those of you who follow me on Twitter.

Programming a computer is actually quite an intellectually stimulating way to spend time, you also usually end up with something to show for your labour. Getting into programming now though can be very confusing, there are so many computer languages out there, where would you start? An additional problem is that this is not the 1980s anymore, printing out “Hello World” ad infinitum is not going to impress anyone. This is where “Quickly" comes in, a new template based programming system making its first appearance in Ubuntu 9.10. It is designed to be easy and fun and is there to help you from getting an initial program together right through to distributing it.

From the olnet.org site:

The aim of OLnet is to tackle gathering evidence and methods about how we can research and understand ways to learn in a more open world, particularly linked to Open Educational Resources (OER) but also looking at other influences. We want to gather evidence together but also spot the ideas that people see emerging from the opportunities. 

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is supporting The Open University to work with Carnegie Mellon University to develop OLnet.

Today is a big day, we find out tonight how well the Open University entry has done in the Boxee App Development challenge. A small team of us had been thinking about big screen (web experiences designed for interactive television to be viewed at about ten feet away) web sites and what an OU experience might be like in such a setting. When the challenge was announced it was a fantastic opportunity to quickly develop something to get ourselves started in this exciting area, so we decided to go for it and in about four weeks went from having nothing to having a fully working application, complete with full user interface and graphic design by Dave Winter, client and server side code by me and communications, testing and creative input by Stuart Brown and Matt Rawlinson. It was hard work which gobbled up a few evenings and weekends but it was worth it.

I was really lucky this week to be able to attend the Game Based Learning Conference 2009 in London, one and half days of presentations that never failed to be thought provoking and very interesting with the latest ideas and practice surrounding the use of computer games to assist learning. It is a topic which can immediate provoke scepticism, many people associate games with having fun and few people associate having fun with education, so how can games help in education? The answers could be found in this conference, with teachers and researchers finding out how to use games to make a real difference and use them to build up all sorts of skills such as numeracy, literacy, business acumen, military skills and many others. I mention military skills as it is a good reminder that using games in learning is not actually a very new concept, e.g. in the Middle Ages, Chess was used to teach war strategy.

It can be quite a strange experience to read a book where you know you are not the target audience, I'm not a teacher or an academic, but I work for a university and use Drupal, and, of course, like most people have been on the receiving end of the education system! Despite this though I still enjoyed reading Drupal for Education and E-Learning by Bill Fitzgerald after being asked if I would review it by the publisher Packt Publishing. The book is not aimed at developers like me, but instead to those who want to use Drupal “to support teaching and learning” and to explore opportunities to use social media in the classroom in a safe way. You don't even need to know PHP. However, even though it has this non-techie targeting it could still prove very useful to many people using Drupal in other contexts. Occasionally though a tension would surface in the book between the desire to talk to a non developer audience and the subjects being discussed.

The Course Profiles application for Facebook has been praised in a report by Childnet International and funded by Becta, the UK Government body for learning technology. The report's author, Josie Fraser left a message on the forum for Course Profiles to let us know: "I'm delighted to let you know that Course Profiles has been featured in Childnet's Young People and Social Networking Services report ... thank you for providing such a great example". The report covers the use of social networking services by children and young people in education and coverage of its contents (including a link to the full report) can be found on Josie Fraser's blog.

Last week I had the pleasure of being at the SocialLearn workshop held for OU students, staff (including many Associate Lecturers - the vital members of staff who act as learning mentors to students) and alumni to discuss and get input for the SocialLearn project (a next-generation educational social network platform, more information can be found in Martin Weller's slideshow). A few of the participants have already written blog posts describing their experience of the event, Jo Badge asked if this is a new OU philosophy, Nigel Gibson reflected that the event was a chance to "an opportunity to share space with some really imaginative, smart, intelligent, bright, awesomely clever and switched-on people", ok I like that quote I have to admit! Martin Weller reflected on the use of Twitter and how it added an extra dimension to the workshop. I've been working with my OU colleagues Nick Freear and Alex Little to produce some add-on applications for the platform, early forms of which were demonstrated. I also got the chance to run a small spin off workshop (for the first time) to explore scenarios for the use of mobile technology with SocialLearn.

I can't help noticing the number of Asus EEE PCs around now, it is strange to think that twelve months ago these weren't really about and there was still discussion of when will be the "year of the Linux desktop". Of course, events took a different turn, and suddenly the desktop didn't seem so important anymore. The real prize was a computer that was small and convenient, inexpensive and easy to carry about. The EEE PC came supplied with a version of Linux called Xandros (which I'd never heard of until then), but more importantly, in a fatal blow to the argument that Linux is too difficult for non-technical users, it came with an "Easy mode" menu that made finding and running applications very easy, with a tabbed menu and large icons. Now other manufacturers are working on their competitors to the EEE, and Canonical, the company that provides commercial backing to Ubuntu, has been working with a couple of them to produce the Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

After the relative ease of getting a local Moodle installation going on Kubuntu, is it possible to shrink this whole situation so we can get a few Moodle powered OpenLearn courses onto the Asus EEE PC and then take them with us wherever we go? It could be very handy to those who would like to learn but don't want to take a full sized laptop with them or even to those who are on the other side of education, the people who write the courses and would like the convenience of being able to work on them while out and about.