Well I have had an amazing day today!
Back in December The Open Learning Centre (which is myself and Alan Lord - The Open Sourcerer ) was invited to meet up with The Open Forum Europe to discuss ways we could work together. They invited us to go to the BETT show and help out on their stand talking about Open Source software. I said I would bring along my OLPC laptop as an example of Open Source in education.
Come last week, my laptop had not arrived. We had nothing to show, not much to say. HELP!! We needed a new plan. I borrowed a bit of space on the olpcnews.com website to appeal for anyone with an OLPC to let us borrow it for BETT. A couple of days later we got a call from Tomi Davis, the chief executive of OLPC Nigeria who lives in North London offering some laptops. Yesterday we went to see him and he lent us three of the most excellent OLPC XO laptops. We had a good play with them whilst munching meatballs in the IKEA restaurant then we were ready. Today was manic. The OLPC laptop was on BBC breakfast news this morning. We had loads of people come up and tell us they had just seen the laptop on the TV. One teacher told us that just seeing the laptop made his vist to BETT worth the effort. Tomi joined us for the afternoon and we were interviewed on camera by the show TV crew. We made loads of interesting contacts in the UK and abroad, everyone wants these laptops and they want Open Source software in their schools. Today BECTA (nice bunch of folk, they liked the laptops too) released a report on Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 I think their conclusions are just as appropriate for business as for schools.
So today we have been demoing someone else’s laptops on someone else’s stand which we got at the last minute through an appeal on someone else’s website and they are all really really happy that we did it!
January 10th, 2008 at 2:07 am
Alan,
This is a great story. Congratulations and may you have many more days like it.
cheers,
Neil
January 10th, 2008 at 6:59 am
Great stuff - your name from now on is Alan “I love it when a plan comes together” Bell
Interesting BECTA report too, and the final section on the Microsoft’s School Agreement licensing model is a must-read. No wonder they made the OFT complaint!