IT: Youth department city of Modena organises open source classes
The youth department of the public administration of the city of Modena is promoting school students' use of open source software. The department is working with a local training institute, which will start courses on open source this autumn, a local news web site reports.
Consorzio FIT (Formazione ed Innovazione Tecnologica) will be teaching primers and follow-up courses on IT and open source, organise computer labs and will host several seminars on this type of software.
According to the local newspaper, local companies will be involved to plan internships for the youth that participate in the trainings.
The youth department already operates nine so-called Network Net Garages, where computers are made available for young people, based on open source software. These computer labs are jointly managed with the University of Modena and Reggion Emilia.
Teaching youth about open source will increase their job opportunities, says Walter Martinelli, the coordinator of the Net Garages at the Modena municipality.
According to Martinelli, one of the more successful projects at the Net Garages is 'Il Pinguino d'oro', the 'Golden Penguin', in which school students compete with two-minute long movies made with open source software.
A second popular project organised in part by the Youth department, is the 'Il pinguino tra i banchi', in which secondary and high school students, 27 in 2008 and 25 in 2009, where given a week-long training at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, on how to install, configure and maintain GNU/Linux PCs. This course covers partitioning of hard disk, configuring of network services and installation and configuration of desktop applications useful for schools.
More information:
Youth department city of Modena
Sassuolo 2000 news item (in Italian)
Il pinguino tra i banchi (in Italian)
Il Puinguino d'oro (in Italian)
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