Bruce Perens is a visiting researcher at Agder University in Grimstad, Norway.
He spent a month there in the summer of 2006 and again in 2007, and makes
week-long visits several times each year. His main focus area at
Agder is political and institutional policy regarding
Open Source, Open Standards, copyright, patent, and innovation. Part of his
role at Agder has been to advise various agencies of the government of
Norway.
Perens also pursues these areas of interest:
-
Learning Without Teachers
-
Systems for education for those to whom teachers are not available,
practical, or even desirable. In general, Perens believes that
discovery-based learning
is superior to pedantic systems in delivering students that are capable
of creativity and who can conceive of and produce new products. Some of
his recent work has been to create economical means of building college
laboratories for wireless communications, where previously the school
had no lab for that program. Perens' prototype lab uses GNU Radio and the
Universal Software Radio Peripheral to produce an economical wireless
communications laboratory (from $2000 to $1000) where previously a
laboratory with $500,000 worth of test equipment from Agilent or a
similar vendor would have been necessary.
-
Amateur Radio for Education
-
Amateur Radio is one of the few ways that a student can gain hands-on
knowledge engineering real wireless communications systems, including
space communications.
It's the only system capable of worldwide communications without
a commercial or government-owned infrastructure. Such infrastructures
are always blocked from student tinkering for the protection of the
network. Using Amateur Radio, a student can become a global network
operator with significant responsibility.
The Amateur satellite program, AMSAT, has launched
about 60 satellites since 1963 as "hitch hikers" on commercial
or government payloads, and is the only significant
operator of space technology outside of government and large corporations.