EU's Free Software Education Programme

Excellent news out of Europe:

A Consortium formed by three universities and led by the Free Knowledge Institute (FKI) has received the support from the EC's Lifelong Learning Programme to offer an international educational programme on Free Software. Following the Open Educational Resources movement, all learning materials will be freely available through the Internet. The use of Free Software (also referred to as Open Source software or Libre Software) is expanding rapidly in governmental and private organisations. However, still only a limited number of IT professionals, teachers and decision makers have sufficient knowledge and expertise in these new fields. In order to cover this gap, the Free Knowledge Institute and three European universities have founded the Free Technology Academy. The first course materials will be available after this summer.

I'd rather forgotten about the Free knowledge Institute. It's a spin-off of the Internet Society Netherlands, and apparently :

a non-profit organisation that fosters the free exchange of knowledge in all areas of society. Inspired by the Free Software movement, the FKI promotes freedom of use, modification, copying and distribution of knowledge in four different but highly related fields: education, technology, culture and science.

(Via Heise.)

Free Knowledge Institute

More reinforcements are arriving all the time:

The Free Knowledge Institute (www.freeknowledge.eu) is an initiative from three Amsterdam-based professionals who currently work for Internet Society Netherlands. In the past years ISOC.nl coordinated a large-scale EU-project SELF which embraced the same objectives. The need to share knowledge freely has become so important that the institute now turns into an independent organisation.

"More and more governments realise the benefits of free knowledge and free information technology", says Wouter Tebbens, the president of the new institute. The Free Knowledge Institute intends to be a knowledge partner helping to show the way in available free knowledge and technology. "That way, we can elaborate on the existing pool of free knowledge and free software, which is growing enormously. Look at projects such as Wikipedia, Linux, and the internet itself", Tebbens states. "Why reinvent the wheel yet again?"

Its main lines of activity are Free Knowledge in technology, education, culture and science. Free Knowledge in education focuses on the production and dissemination of free educational materials; Free Knowledge in IT mainly refers to free software, open standards and open hardware; Free Knowledge in culture includes open content; and Free Knowledge in science includes open access and anti-privatisation of scientific knowledge.

The actionplan 'Netherlands Open in Connection', initiated by the Dutch ministries of Economic Affairs and Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK), reflects the momentum of sharing knowledge. State secretary Bijleveld from BZK emphasized in December 2007 that sharing of knowledge is essential for further progress and development of society. The statesecretary committed to pay more attention to the valuable use of free software and open standards in education, government and business.

It's happening, people, it's happening.