[Fsf-friends] Open Source/Free Software: Political science

[Frederick Noronha (FN)]

There's this course on FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) that is just 
getting underway in Sweden. See 
https://winner.informatik.gu.se/moodle/course/category.php?id=2

Its self-description: "The course will study the development of politics, 
policy and law in relation to the role of software in society. Subjects which 
will be treated in depth are the role of free software/open source in relation 
to property theory, the politics of technology, community governance and the 
economic foundations for the assessment of free software/open source 
development."

It might be of interest to note that the course is pretty much 'open' and 
'free'. In the many senses of those words. Students from across the globe can 
(maybe 'could', since the cut-off date for joining might be passed) join the 
course with just a simple email application. Best of all: no fees!

It's also running on a FLOSS-based e-education platform called Moodle. Haven't 
used Moodle myself, but here's the self-description:

OPENQUOTE: http://moodle.org/

Moodle is a course Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a software 
package designed to help educators create quality online courses. Such 
e-learning systems are sometimes also called Learning Management Systems (LMS) 
or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). One of the main advantages of Moodle 
over other systems is a strong grounding in social constructionist pedagogy.

Moodle is Open Source software, which means you are free to download it, use 
it, modify it and even distribute it (under the terms of the GNU General Public 
License). Moodle runs without modification on Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, 
Netware and any other system that supports PHP, including most webhost 
providers. Data is stored in a single database: MySQL and PostgreSQL are best 
supported, but it can also be used with Oracle, Access, Interbase, ODBC and 
others.

Moodle has 50 language packs, including: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese (simplified 
and traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK and US versions), Finnish, 
French (France and Canada versions), German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, 
Italian, Japanese, Maori, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), 
Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai and Turkish.

To find out more, see the features demo, try the demonstration courses on this 
site, or see the growing number of Moodle sites around the world. To meet other 
Moodle users, join us in the Using Moodle course. ENDQUOTE

FN

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