We’re back for another season of the EdTech Posse podcast. After a long summer break, we are back with another round of discussions about education, technology and learning. I’ve also changed the numbering for the podcasts. Instead of numbering sequentially, I’m using a notation to show the season and episode of the podcast. Here’s our first one of the new season EdTech Posse Podcast 2.1 - Open Source in Education On September 6, Rick Schwier and I had a discussion, along with Heather Ross about open source in education. This is such a huge topic that I’m sure we have only barely started to explore it. This discussion was prompted by an email that Heather sent to Alec Couros and I noting that there was no open source presence at this year’s SACE conference. We are organizing an information booth in the vendor area. I invited Rick to join us for a planning session, and recorded the first part of our conversation for this podcast. Notes We are joined in this podcast by Heather Ross Benefits of open source Budgetary benefits for schools Encourages experimentation by eliminating cost Software can be customized easily Lack of software that works “out of the box” may be a limitation to adoption of open source Software mentioned in this podcast Journler - note taking and desktop blogging for Mac, freeware, closed source Firefox - web browser, an excellent alternative to IE, all platforms, open source Moodle - web based course management system, an excellent alternative to Blackboard or WebCT, requires PHP and MySQL/PostgreSQL, open source WordPress - really terrific and widely used server based blogware, requires PHP and MySQL, open source Elgg - web based learning community software, requires PHP and MySQL, open source Drupal - widely used (including the edtech posse web site) content management system, PHP and MySQL, open source AbiWord - word processor, excellent alternative to Word, all platforms (although it has been a bit flakey on my Mac), open source Audacity - sound editor with many powerful features, all platforms, open source CyberDuck - FTP and SFTP client, Macintosh, open source Filezilla - FTP client, Windows NT, 2000 and XP, open source FreeMind - mind mapping software, all platforms (Java based - requires Java Runtime Engine), open source CMAP - concept mapping, all platforms, free but unknown license for source code GIMP - image editing, Linux but distributions for Windows and Mac are also available, open source Google Earth - like Google Maps but a desktop application, stable version for Mac and Windows, beta version for Mac, Windows and Linux, free (or higher functionality paid versions), proprietary source code. Warning - this will cause more of your time to be wasted than you might think! Camino - web browser based on Mozilla (as is Firefox), Macintosh, open source OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice - office suite software, Windows/Linux (openoffice.org) and Mac (neooffice), open source Plone - content management system built with Zope, programmed in Python!, all platforms, open source Spark - instant messaging, all platforms, open source Text Wrangler - text editor (from the people who brought you BBEdit), Macintosh, free but proprietary Vienna - desktop RSS reader, Macintosh, open source, only software I know of named for a Billy Joel song Quicksilver - launcher and more (almost like a command line for a GUI interface), Mac, free but proprietary, One open source package I forgot to mention on the podcast, but which deserves mention, is Zimbra. Zimbra is an open source communication and collaboration tool. It has the greatest open source webmail interface I have seen, and provides calendaring and other groupware features as well. Do you have any favourite open source or freeware apps? Add a comment and let us know what they are. Less