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Open Source convention concludes in Delhi

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CIOL Bureau
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NEW DELHI: The Education Forum drew healthy and vigorous debate at the three-day LinuxAsia 2006 convention, the region's premier Open Source conference and expo, which concluded here on Friday.





The role of open source solutions as a means of extending education to all and raising the standards necessary for India to be a human resource centre for the global Knowledge Society was highlighted. Successes, best practices, as well as challenges were raised by different speakers during the deliberations.





The Forum began with a keynote address by Dr. M.S. Vijay Kumar, director of Academic Computing at MIT, and an advisor to the National Knowledge Mission. Dr. Vijay Kumar said the power of Open Source as a collaborative platform was demonstrated by the "Open Courseware" project of MIT, under which a wealth of knowledge in the form of courseware had been made public. The project had indeed become a model for different departments to come together rather than work in their own pockets. He revealed that the MIT courseware is even hosted in India on a mirror site (located at MIT's sub-campus within Anna University in Chennai), and that this could help Indian universities, colleges and schools get trained staff, the lack of which was hampering the widespread adoption of open source tools and teaching in education.





The Education Forum at the conference also saw panel discussions on Open Source Solutions for Schools and Colleges, and on modernising the curriculum. Panelists and speakers included School Principals, administrators, University professors and representatives of industry. Sadhana Bhatia, Principal of Mira Model School, Delhi, one of the panelists averred that the institutions were taking the OSS path in a big way, as there were no licensing issues and they were getting more choice. She said, however that they were hampered due to lack of availability of some school applications and of the trained teachers.





Easing these concerns were speakers from Red Hat Inc, and Google, which have spearheaded numerous educational initiatives. RedHat Inc's "Lord of the Code" program for university students and Google's "Summer of Code" program, both of which are worldwide programs that include Indian participation, were lauded.





Zaheda Bhorat, head of Open Source Programs for Google said, "Of 2000 applications received last year for the Summer of Code program, only six were from India. However, all six passed the program." She added that this was probably a pointer that more mentors were needed at the college/university level who would act as evangelists for Open Source among the coming generations.





A major attraction was the presentation from V. Ponraj, director of Interface Technology for the office of the President of India. Ponraj said that Linux and Open Source were being used to enable the President's initiatives in Education, Healthcare and e-Governance.





He outlined the President's vision of the "World Knowledge Platform", a foundation for collaboration, resource sharing and real-time computation, that would create, disseminate and share/reuse knowledge across the world. Linking it to the good of the common Indian, he said, "Knowledge-based systems and products have to emerge to take our over 500 million youth aged below 25 years to become engines for growth at a global level in the Knowledge Society". The President's office is actively pursuing and directing policy that would see Open Source solutions becoming the base for efficient delivery of e-government services and modern education and that will empower a human resource cadre.





The last day of the LinuxAsia conference had sessions running in two more tracks, in addition to the Education Forum. The Developer Forum had sessions hosted by Oracle and IBM, while the Technology Forum had workshops and panel discussions on Open Standards and some of the many distributions of Linux. Industry majors Oracle, Dell Computer, Intel, HP, IBM, RedHat, CDAC and several others continued to attract enthusiastic visitors to their displays and exhibits.























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