Wow! It has been a while since I posted. I won't go into details but a radical change in my personal life has kept me a bit preoccupied of late. So as I climb back on the blogging wagon I need to bring everyone up to date as to what has been happening recently.

Today I attended the 2nd Annual FOSSVT conference at Lake Morey, Vermont where I gave my first ever keynote speech. FOSSVT is a small, mostly vermont, open source conference. The location of the conference doesn't get much better. The picture at the right was taken from the deck ouside of my room. It was absolutely beautiful. This was a wonderful little conference where I had the chance to meet a great many people who are very passionate about open source, technology and education.

My kenote speech was actually quite a difficult speech to put together. A few days before the conference I was informed that I only had 25 minutes to speak and so I had to cut my speech down a bit. I agonized over what to talk about given the audience was going to be comprised of about 1/2 teachers and the other half technician types. I decided to focus on the reasons why a school district should consider using open source software and how the open source philosophy ties in quite nicely with the characteristics of 21st century learners. The speech was titled: "The Road Less Traveled. One educators journey down the sometimes bumpy road of open source adoption." My reasons for using open source as stated in the speech are:

• It is free (value added)
• Edit the source code
• Provides equity for all students (meaning that all of your students can run the same software that the schools use, regardless of computer platform or  socioeconomic status)
• Fits nicely with the 21st century philosophy of collaboration and community.

During the presentation I showed this Mac vs PC spoof when I talked about our transition to OpenOffice and how much money it saves us annually.

After I talked about the reasons schools should use open source I talked about how the open source philosophy ties in nicely with 21st century learning skills. The skills that I mentioned are:

• Inquiry
• Collaboration
• Community
• Project Based 

After briefly talking about these skills I showed another You Tube video called "A View of 21st Century Learner" by Nathan Lowell. After watching a part of this video I quickly talked about how we tackled the adoption of open source in our district and then listed the main open source apps that we use on the desktop and on the server side. I didn't quite make the 25 minute time line but only went over by 5 minutes. I hope that people enjoyed it and heard that people thought it was okay.You can download this pdf to view the slides from the presentation.

Later in the day I did a lightning session on Mahara and another lightning session on Drupal. These were short 25 minute sessions to give an overview of the particular project.

In the slides there is a reference to using vlc to stream the 2009 presidential inauguration to all of our classrooms. I will write about this in my next blog post. Thanks to Lucie deLaBruere and Bryant Patten for inviting me to come and speak. It was a wonderful experience.