Into the Digital Light

School Year 2013 – 2014 promises to be exciting in the field of information communication technology in education. A number of schools have partnered with textbook publishers to implement a eTextbook program and they promised to bring learning through digital technology to a higher level of experience. As early as two years ago textbook publishers became interested in digitizing their content and offering a whole new learning experience to the students and teachers. They have either partnered with an IT company that develops the IT platform to be used or have invested in a new company that would handle the digitization and selling of the solutions. De La Salle Greenhills had their pilot project implemented last school year and other schools not only in Metro Manila but also in the provinces had expressed their interest in implementing one starting this school year. The advantages cited by the textbook publishers in shifting to the digital versions are the following:

  "I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place." - Richard Stallman The other day I received an invitation from a friend who is also an advocate in the use of the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to be part of a team that would propose and implement a FOSS program for a private school in the province. He is in touch with the school's MIS head and they are trying to find alternatives on the use of their P4's and dual core computer systems that is running on a Window's XP operating system in their computer lab. This is every FOSS advocate's dream to be able to come up with a working FOSS program for implementation by a school and the challenge is how to make that dream into a reality.