What weve done so far?

Foss in AABC has a long way to go.

From starting in Open Office, mozilla firefox, GIMP, Blender and Foxit, AABC has gone quite some distance in trying to go .

Since we've installed Linux on our classrooms,faculty room and administrative offices Ubuntu (versions 6.10,7.04 and 8.04) and Ubuntustudio (multimedia room). And so far our students are adjusting relatively well.

We were quite lucky that we have open source buffs in our IT department. Sir Dennis Jorolan, our animation guru and Sir Brian de Vivar , our PhPMySQL guru.

Our teachers also have been undergoing in house trainings in open office, Google Docs (for document collaboration among students and faculty , Blogger (for faculty who would post lectures and advnace assignments). Though blogging among teachers still has to be reminded (of which takes time).

Were still trying to master Open base and hopefully well also be able to implement that. weve been actively trying to put FOSSpective into our students.

Among the significant things we think we were able to do outside of our regular students was our short courses among them the introduction of Blender as a 3d animation tool, introducing Open source tools in our COffice Shipboard office productivity course for seafarers and our webdesign courses.


This is just the start of our journey. We hope to do more

FOSS Films a requirement in IT education

I recently realized the value utilizing film as a way of popularizing open source, recently we hired a new teacher Mr. Brian De Vivar, another Open source advocate and Ubuntu buff.

When he had to accept another training session in C-office (shipboard office productivity suite for seafarers) which conflicted with his computer fundamentals class, i subbed in his class period. and trying to introduce the concept of open source, I let the students watch "Codebreakers" a documentary of the Free software movement.

I soon realized that it raised a lot of questions from our students. (we have been using open source for quite some time now and Open office/gimp/blender being some of our mainstays).

when the film viewwing was over i gave them time to write reaction paper which was never submitted in time. This also gave Mr. De Vivar time to watch the movie and another one "revolution OS". he later required his students to watch this other film and other students as well.

so our present crop of IT students realized that indeed, theres a new and big world out there with open source.

and so our journey to FOSS continues.

for those who havent seen the movie....

watch them!!!!