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Gleducar joins the FTA

We are happy to announce the joining of Gleducar into the FTA network. Argentine non-profit organisation Gleducar has been working in the Free/Open Education field for almost ten years. It has built a community with over 500 educators and learners and is one of the most important educational initiatives of Latin America.

Wouter Tebbens, president of the Free Knowledge Institute, says about the new partner:

"Gleducar has been practising the ideas of sharing educational materials without restrictions for many years. Experience with Free Software within the educational sector is one of the areas where we can all learn from. It makes me happy to see plans to turn Gleducar's experience in this field into a course for teachers and I am sure that we can benefit from that with the FTA, its learners and the educational community at large."

Franco Iacomella, representing the Argentine organisation, explains:

"It is really important to build an international network of cooperation around the idea of learning and teaching free technologies. The key to reach a deep and global transformation in this field is to collaborate and build together. The Free Technology Academy is great place to meet and develop common strategies, ideas and projects towards a more open and free education."

Gleducar NGO will contribute relevant feedback and review FTA Course materials. It will also participate in the development of future courses about open and free educational tools for teachers.

We plan to expand the FTA in Latin America through the participation of the Gleducar community in our dissemination strategies. As an official associated partner Gleducar members are encouraged to represent and communicate the Free Technology Academy with the objective to grow the network of participants in the community and partners in the project.

We hope to continue adding members to the FTA project, in order to increase its scope and boundaries. If you are a member of an organisation linked to free technologies and you think it would suit you to become part of the FTA Associate Network, please contact us: contact@ftacademy.org

About the Free Technology Academy

A Consortium formed by the Open University of Catalonia (Spain), the Open University of the Netherlands and the University of Agder (Norway) and led by the Free Knowledge Institute (FKI), the FTA has received the support from the EC's Lifelong Learning Programme to set up an international educational programme on Free Software. The courses are taught completely online in a virtual campus based on the Campus Project interoperability framework.

Following the Open Educational Resources movement, all learning materials are freely available through the Internet. The use of Free Software (also referred to as Open Source software or Libre Software) is rapidly expanding in governmental and private organisations. However, still only a limited number of ICT professionals, teachers and decision makers have sufficient knowledge and expertise in these new fields. The Free Technology Academy aims to address this gap by providing high level courses that fit into larger Master Programmes at the participating universities.

About Gleducar

Gleducar is a free educational project that emerged in Argentina in 2002. It is also an important NGO (Civil Association) from Argentina in the field of education and technology.

Gleducar is an independent community composed of teachers, students and education activists linked by a common interest in collective work, cooperative knowledge building and free distribution of knowledge.

The project works around different themes, such as Open Education, Free Knowledge, Popular Education, peer education, collaborative learning and Free Technologies, and promotes the use of Free Software in schools as a pedagogical and technical system, with the objective of changing the paradigm of production, construction and dissemination of educational content.