Back in February I attended a couple of sessions about free software in education. One was the kickoff meeting of OLPC Europe (the European support group for One Laptop Per Child). The other, was a fantastic talk by Knut Yrvin, who’s done a lot of work with free software in education in Norway.

His focus in the talk was on cross-platform free software – that is, free software that can be used in schools and runs on Windows, Linux, and (usually) Mac. He gave four examples of free software that he thinks is great in schools:

GCompris (award-winning software for younger end of primary school children) (www.gcompris.net/-en-). Having since met a 5 year old at LugRadio Live USA whose favourite activity on her OLPC laptop is GCompris, I’ll happily recommend it too.

StopMotion (for older end of primary school) (I’ve just been hunting for the URL for Windows but can’t find anything about it – can only find the page for the LInux version developer.skolelinux.no/info/studentgrupper/2005-hig-stopmotion/index.php – will let you know if I find the Windows one cos it looks really cool software)

OpenOffice.org (for secondary school level) (www.openoffice.org) – He made a point of saying that we shouldn’t inflict office skills on young children cos it’s boring. But at secondary level, this is a great alternative to paying for Microsoft Office. I use it all the time at work and at home. It’s free now but used to be a product from Sun Microsystems who sold it as Star Office. Much better now and is compatible with MS Office documents (eg .doc, .xls, .ppt files). Just download it and have a go.

Firefox web browser (all ages) (www.mozilla-europe.org/en). Again, I use this all the time (alternative to Internet Explorer) at home and at work.

If you’re a Windows user and want to know more about free software in education, there’s more free software that will run on Windows here: www.schoolforge.net

LugRadio Live US 2008 (in San Francisco) was fantastic. And that was with a bunch of people who hadn’t all even heard of LugRadio Live before.

Here are the details (listen out for the trailer on your favourite Linux/OpenSource podcast, such as Linux Outlaws)…

LugRadio Live UK 2008
The Lighthouse Media Center, Fryer St., Wolverhampton, WV1 1HT

LugRadio Live UK 2008, the most popular community Open Source event in the UK takes place in Wolverhampton on the 19th and 20th and features three stages full of 25+ speakers including:

• Chris DiBona (Google)
• Max Spevack (Red Hat)
• Steve Lamb (Microsoft)
• Robert Collins (Canonical)
• Benjamin Otte (GNOME)
• Rob McQueen (Collabora)
• Edward Hervey (Collabora Multimedia)
• James Hooker
• Kevin Sandom
• Barbie (MessageLabs)
• Daniel James
• Emma Jane Hogbin
• Bruno Bord
• Ben Thorp
• Rufus Pollock (FFFI)
• Sam Birchall
• John Carr
• William J Giddings
• and many more…

In addition to this the show will feature over 20 exhibitors, special debate sessions, the legendary Gong-a-thong Lightbulb Talk Extravaganza (read: a series of small talks chaired by a man in a very small pair of pants and a very large gong – not to be missed!), parties on the Friday and Saturday evenings and much, much more.

All of this is just £5, and there are even a raft of hotel deals available to make your trip simple and cost effective. Head over to www.lugradio.org/live to find out more.

Less than 24 hours ago, we arrived home from a great weekend in Brussels at FOSDEM (see the photos).
FOSDEM is an annual 2-day conference for free and open source software developers (or users, in many cases) in Brussels, Belgium. The conference programme describes the event as:

 4000+  GEEKS
  200+  LECTURES
     2  DAYS
     0  €

Yep, 0 €. That’s free and gratis! Which is rather impressive for such a big event.

My other half has been to FOSDEM a few times but this was only my second experience of Brussels geekery. Last year, I remember enjoying the weekend (we went with a lovely group of people) but apart from some specific talks (inc Jim Gettys on the OLPC, and a talk about the KDE documentation project), I wasn’t so blown away by the conference itself; my general memory is of being cold and tired.

So I wasn’t sure about going this year but in the end I did – if nothing else, it’d be a weekend in Brussels (which is a really lovely city) and good food and company. Which it was. *And* I enjoyed the conference itself!

As ever, I’m planning to write up some of the talks that I went to. As ever, I probably won’t (though I will try!). In the meantime, here’s what I saw:

• Tux with Shades, Linux in Hollywood
• How a large scale OSS project works
• Status updates on Software Patents
• OLPC Europe Kickstart Meeting
• Drupal theming
• Usability and Drupal
• Amazon WS with Drupal
• Free software in education
• Debian accessibility
• The long road to Debian Edu in main

As Tony says, none of the keynotes were that great; the Tux in Shades one, which I thought would be interesting, was particularly disappointing (though the guy seemed to know his stuff).

So, what was cool and uncool for me?

Cool	Not so cool
Knut Yrvin, who did the OSS in Education talk in the CrossDesktop developer room. Best presenter I saw.	Having two presenters for the Linux in Hollywood keynote. Unnecessary, pointless, and annoying.
Lots of OLPC laptops around!	Mine’s not arrived yet.
The green OLPC hand-crank.	Not being able to find the guy to get a closer look at the green hand-crank.
Good presentation on accessibility issues (Debian and accessibility talk) with explanation of how Braille output works.	Developers who don’t realise thatCommand Line != GUI with your eyes closed.
Yummy dinner and beer in the evenings.	Yucky burger and crappy coffee during the day.
Chatting to lovely Josette at the O’Reilly stand.	Impulse buying at the O’Reilly stand – as usual!
Tony’s phone worked abroad!	Vodafone website not updating my unbilled usage for 72 hours – still don’t know what it’s cost me!
Getting there and back in a group of about 12 people and losing only 1 of them.	Arguing over directions – as usual.

Slightly late to the party but, in case you’ve been living in a cave the last couple of weeks, here’s the trailer for LugRadioLive 2008 USA!

Lovingly prepared by my other half using Free and Open Source Software only: Kino and Audacity on Ubuntu.

At the beginning of September, I went to the HCI 2007 conference at Lancaster University (in the North of England).

I was Chairing the HCI Practice Day (the Thursday) of the conference so it was all a little bit hectic but still, as usual, a lot of fun.

This year, in line with the times I guess, there was a fair number of papers on Second Life and other virtual environments, including one about BDSM in Second Life. In fact, there was definitely a bit of a trend this year for erotic HCI… (that, as a statement, either makes HCI cool, or it just goes to show that academics can make *anything* boring ).

There also seemed to be a fair amount about emotions – that is, how we engage with technology; eg why we happily waste an entire evening on Facebook or watching random videos on YouTube. Web2.0 was also in there, of course.

There were also some papers on bluetooth, several (as usual) on eye-tracking, and stuff about Accessibility, usability of the Web, methods of evaluating interface usability, and so on.

IBMers featured quite heavily in the HCI Practice Day (as you might imagine):

• Mark Farmer (IBM Warwick) introduced the IBM Task Modeler tool that he develops (the link takes you to the Task Modeler page on Alphaworks where you can download a copy to try yourself).
• Colin Bird (Master Inventor and Information Architect at IBM Hursley) followed up Mark’s introduction with a presentation about how you can (and we do) use Task Modeler to support information architecture: to model user tasks and create the navigation for information centres.
• Ben Fletcher (Senior Inventor at IBM Hursley) did a great presentation on deafblind technologies, including the possibilities of virtual worlds in supporting deafblind (and deaf or blind) users.
• Me (Technical Author at IBM Hursley) – I was raconteur for Alan Dix‘s panel discussing the HCI issues in Web2.0 technologies.

The keynote speaker for HCI Practice Day was Jared Spool (the usability guru who isn’t Jakob Nielsen – and is much better and more credible, IMO) who moved heaven and high water (kind-of) to get here. He did a fantastic presentation that was very very funny and entertaining while being relevant and interesting too. He also attended as many of the other conference sessions as he could and participated by asking questions and making suggestions.

In fact, all the keynote speakers were great this year. Sometimes keynotes fly in, do their thang, then collect their expenses and go. All three (the others being Stephen Payne from Manchester Uni and Elizabeth Churchill from Yahoo!) all got involved in the conference, especially Elizabeth who was able to stay for the whole conference and seemed to be on every discussion panel going!

You can get the full proceedings of HCI 2007 (and, at some point, previous HCI conferences too) from the BCS eWIC site.

As a delegate, I also got the full proceedings as pdfs on a funky little USB drive, which I like.

It’s not long now until the call for papers will go out for HCI 2008 (to be held in Liverpool, City of Culture). If this blog is still active by then, I’ll post the call here. I encourage you to get involved in HCI – it’s more than user interface design or usability; it’s also about being innovative in how to design technologies for human beings.