Kerala - Kochi   

A day for free thinking

Kochi: It was a rare sight to see students congratulating handlers of classes. The Vocational Higher Secondary School, Irimpanam, on Tuesday witnessed high voltage student participation and interaction as Indian Linux Users’ Group (I-LUG), Kochi chapter, conducted a full-day ‘swathanthra software sangamam’ (free software meet) for the benefit of the student and teaching communities.

Held as part of its ongoing campaign to bring the teaching community closer to the free software community, the programme had three objectives, as explained by Jay Jacob, I-LUG founding member, to teachers at the interactive session: “To enlighten teachers about the concept of free software and how it can create a new generation of students with core social values and technical abilities, to provide support to teachers for implementation of free software in schools with a view to making them self-reliant and to help students explore the possibilities of free software outside academics.”

The opening session was handled by Mr. Jacob, who spoke on the significance of the movement.

Zadeek handled the workshop on Blender software, a 3 D content creation suite that gave rise to movies such as Elephants Dream ( www.elephantsdream.org) and Big Buck Bunny ( www.bigbuckbunny.org).

Sreenadh conducted the workshop on Inkscape, a free software vector graphics editor with capabilities similar to Illustrator and Corel Draw, using the W3C standard scalable vector graphics (SVG) file format.

Later in the day, in the interactive session with teachers, Mr. Jacob spoke on what drove the group to spread the philosophy of freedom.

Speaking on ‘copyright’ and ‘copyleft’, he said knowledge was increasingly being monopolised and that the new generation should be able to have access to have free knowledge.

M.R. Sanalkumar, Malayalam teacher in the school, coordinated the programme. School principal V.A. Thampy proposed a vote of thanks.

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