FOSS Meets IT Education at ACM-SIGITE

The Association of Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group in IT Education (ACM-SIGITE) met at West Point's Thayer Hotel on the first day of the three-day conference--and free and open source software (FOSS) was one of the top items on the menu.

The conference offered a three-paper session and a panel on using FOSS in the classroom that were well attended and generated good questions (and answers) about approaches, tools, and techniques for bringing students into FOSS.

The paper session went from broad to narrow, beginning with Learning in the GNU/Linux Community, presented by Donald Davis and Iffat Jabeen from the University of Texas at San Antonio. They presented the results of a two-month survey with a staggering 4,603 respondents. The survey asked questions about learning activities in FOSS communities. The bottom line question was essentially this: "Is the GNU/Linux community a 'Community of Learners."...