Linux : 100% open source based education
 

Purbaya Polytehcnic Institute is a small -but still developing- vocational education institution located in Kabupaten Tegal, Central Java, Indonesia. We believe that in forthcoming years, free/open source technology (FOSS) will play a more important role in are of information technology. Thus, our goal is to be a 100 per cent FOSS Campus.

Our initiation to achieve that goal is to install open source based softwares as replacements for properiatery softwares since 2007.

But we do realize that we need a more substantial change in order to be an open source based institution. We plan that in 2008/2009 academic year, education processes in Department of Information Technology are 100 per cent based on Open Source Software.

Therefore, contributions from you, Open Source researchers and/or activists to construct a comprehensive Information Technology curricula are greatly strongly desired.

Thank you.

Suggestions
 

I looked on the web and found one reference to your college:http://www.bkpm.go.id/en/news.php?mo...a&info_id=5579

I use GNU/Linux in high schools in Canada (14-18 year old students). The best curriculum in Canada is probably that from the province of Alberta which emphasises career development in CTS(Career and Technology studies). You can check out their curriculum here:http://www.education.gov.ab.ca/k_12/curriculum/

• http://www.education.gov.ab.ca/k_12/curriculum/
• Curriculum by Subject
• CTS
• Information Processing
  

This curriculum is agnostic about FLOSS/proprietary software, but the government seems intent on using proprietary software. However, I have taught the curriculum several times using FLOSS and had no problem. In fact, for information processing, FLOSS is ideal because it is a system created by developers of software to do information processing.

Software that I recommend for new installations or migrations from proprietary software include:

• Debian distro for its large repositories, many hardware architectures, FLOSS philosophy and world-wide base
• Moodle course management system to permit instructors to generate a sequence of web pages leading students and to collect data for evaluations
• OpenOffice.org office suite for general purposes
• FreePascal for introductory computer science because it is an easy language to learn and strongly typed
• Ruby, an interpreted language for learning object-oriented programming
• C++ for learning to code in many FLOSS projects
• Centre school management system to plan schedules and make reports
• MySQL, phpMyAdmin, MySQL Query Browser for database
• Apache web server
• PHP scripting language
• LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) to incorporate existing PCs and thin clients into a network. This minimizes software maintenance and permits hardware to be used longer. LTSP can be installed on the server by APT, a fantastic package manager used by Debian, or installed directly with distros such as K12LTSP, EdUbuntu, and SkoleLinux
• Beagle desktop search
• Swish-e search for servers

I hope this was helpful. I have written articles about LTSP in schools at http://pogson.6k.ca/homepage/

For more advanced curriculums, you may find MIT's Open Courseware interesting.

Last year, I installed a complete FLOSS computer system in a school using this technology and found it suited the purpose very well. see

• Chemawawin story on Canopener.ca
  
• Follow-up

Setting up an LTSP server can be very easy with distros that include the installation as an option. See the process with EdUbuntu.