"In a significant corporate move to bring the benefits of open source to education, Sun Microsystems announced it will spin off the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC) as a nonprofit organization serving the needs of the education community. The move helps to improve education through the sharing of open content and best practices through online access. The GELC provides an online portal for teachers to share resources and knowledge that would otherwise go undiscovered, breaking new ground in free and open source computing and helping educators meet the needs of students by sharing best practices around the globe. As a nonprofit, the organization will have access to more resources, including participation from other major corporations and governmental entities as well as benefit from independent direction from a seasoned advisory board and an executive director.
‘Technology is changing our daily lives, yet significant work remains in providing teachers, students and parents access to the educational resources they need,’ said Scott McNealy, CEO and Chairman at Sun Microsystems. ‘Sun started the GELC to drive knowledge sharing, and now we’re giving it to the education community to continue the development of resources they need to improve the quality of education worldwide.’
The GELC is a growing community for developers, teachers and Ministries of Education (MoE), who are collaborating on 324 projects. Leading project examples include recent contributions made by the Curriculum Corporation of Melbourne, Australia, and the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education. Coupled with curriculum contributed by the Curriculum Corporation, the GELC is initiating a pilot with the Shuttleworth Foundation to utilize these materials in South African math and science middle school classrooms. The GELC is focused on curriculum in the math and science area for middle school and high school students."
More at http://www.hardwarezone.com/news/view.php?id=2908&cid=11
The GELC is at https://edu-gelc.dev.java.net/