Open Source initiatives showcased at NECC
Open source software made a big showing earlier this month at the National Education Computing Conference (NECC) in San Diego.
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ke Huffman, Indiana Department of Education Special Assistant for Technology, did a presentation on the state of Indiana’s InACCESS project, the largest K-12 desktop Linux deployment in the United States. With 24,000 Linspire desktop computers built by Wintergreen Systems rolled out at various high schools, the program has already saved the state about US$1 million. The deployment, which started in 2005, will grow to 170,000 computers within a year and could potentially reach over 300,000 within several years.
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“Public education can sometimes be a budgetary black hole, and technology spending in the public school system is no exception. In California, the recently approved budget increases education spending by almost US$3 billion, bringing the total percentage of the state budget spent on public education to a lofty 58 percent. Open source software could potentially reduce the burden on taxpayers and help the state increase the quality and efficiency of public education. As Mike Huffman says, “As long as we keep waiting for big bags of cash to fall from the sky, we aren’t going anywhere.”
Read the whole article at …
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060727-7361.html