Amachu

A day long conference titled “Open Source Tools in Education: Benefits & Challenges” was Organized by SCMS School of Technology & Management, Cochin on 07 Oct 2009, jointly with Redhat.

The day long session had speakers from different backgrounds sharing experiences from their respective field works. Anwar Sadath, Executive Director of IT@School Project shared his experiences on taking FOSS to the teachers & students of Kerala. Later Sri Ramadoss, of Gemini Communications, FOSS Services Division, shared with the participants the importance of Free Software and its relevance to a healthy society covering the Business aspects and more.

Krishna Das, Director of Open Source Solutions ICS Ltd., later shared few notable a case studies that made customers (both Public & Private sector) realize the importance of FOSS. Ignatius Kunjumon, CUSAT gave an insight on FOSS Productivity Tools & their use in Research. It was and in-depth overview covering all aspects of Arts, Science, Engineering & Technology and usage of FOSS in them.

Kumar Chander of SCMS-Cochin shared his views on Role of Intelligent Agent in Learning Management System. Dr. Vijayakumar, Reader & Hon. Director, Centre for Information Literacy Studies, Univeristy of Kerala, elaborated the audience on Open Source Tools for Library and Information Services covering major FOSS solutions for Library/ Digital Library management like Koha, DSpace etc.,

Dr. Clifton M Kussmaul, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Muklenburg College, Pennsylvania, US shared his thoughts on FOSS in CS & SE Education. Later, Mr. Hiran Venugopalan of Swatantra Malayalam Computing initiative introduced Localization & Swatantra Malayalam Computing to the participants.

The participants were provided with a kit that had a Fedora 11 Live CD with the contents related to the talks mentioned above.

Indu Nair, Director of SCMS Group of Institutions said in her post-event remark,

As an outcome of the Conference we at SCMS are to have “Individual Contribution to Open Source Community” as a component in the Internal Assessment for MCA students in Semester 5. Hope this will bring in motivation and enthusiasm among the students in campus towards FOSS contributions.

Myself & Salvadeeswaran (of SSN College of Engineering & Fedora Ambassador) took part at “Linux Poison” conducted as part of Aarush, 2009 held at SRM University today.

We introduced Free Software and its Philosophy to the participants gave an installation & overview of Fedora.

More than 50 participants took part in the event. We thank the student Event Organisers (Shiv Deepak, Vipul Jain, Anisha Kaul and Prakhar Agarwal) of the Linux Poison event for the great enthusiasm they had shown in organising this event.

Today they have a Gaming Session under GNU/ Linux environment & tomorrow a session on Introduction to python