SFD around the Commonwealth/John Lesperance

My Life Experience with Open Source Software
I have known about the existance of the LINUX OS for many years and I have always heard that one has to be an expert in programming to be able to use it. This statement alone gave me the fright and evidently kept me away from using any LINUX distributions.

Ubuntu

I was selected, in July this year to form part of a team of the Virtual University for Small Island States of the Commonwealth project. A meeting was planned for the team to meet up in Vancouver and to plan for a workshop to take place in Mauritius. The project was about creating open content for small island states of the Commonwealth. Obviously, we were introduced to open source applications and OS. I was really amazed with Ubuntu, the open source OS to which I was introduced to for the first time. I never realised that using Ubuntu would have been this straight forward. I had the impression that LINUX based OS's were really difficult. I do accept that one needs to be IT literate in order to use Ubuntu, nevertheless once you use it, you cannot say no to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu has almost everything I need in an OS. Eventhough it's free, it still has a number of advantages when you compare it to other OS's and it's a damn good OS. while playing with it, it gave up on me twice and I thought that was it. However, I was able to repair it in the command line. Is Ubuntu crash free? For those who have never used it before, don't be afraid, just try it.

In education, when it comes to using Windows we have to pay huge licences and this can be avoided if we use open source OS. If we want to bridge the gap between the digital divide, then open source is the answer.

Open Source LMS
I have also had the opportunity to be exposed to Moodle, ATutor and eXe. Moodle is a great LMS. We have a number of great applications at our disposal if we want to develop online learning content. If we use open source LMS we will avoid the pitfalls that comes with licences and be able to create learning materials that would be able to reach a larger community at very little cost.