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The Argument For F/OSS In Schools
pfaffman sends us word of a two-part article in LinuxInsider that lays out to an audience of non-tech educators a cogent argument for using F/OSS in schools. The piece was written by a University of Tennessee professor for the education journal TechTrends. It makes the case that proprietary software is inconvenient and that when schools choose to use proprietary products they spend their constituents' money. The article won't contain a whole lot of surprises for Linux initiates (save perhaps some software recommendations for educational use), but it's interesting to see these ideas presented so clearly to a wider, and influential, audience."
Yeah but when you get into the real world you have to use microsoft products anyway.
If the students are using F/OSS throughout the K-12 years, some of the students will go on to college to study programming.
What better projects for them than enhancing / bug-fixes for the software they've been using for so long?
In essence, the educational system ends up teaching students to write software for the educational system. So it just keeps evolving and improving.
Why does the "Education" icon contain an incorrect equation? Are the Slashdot editors so bad they'll screw up a simple addition as well as their stories? Or are they simply representing the state of the US Public Schooling System?
Floss at school would be tremendously useful. Kids everywhere are told to "Brush after every meal", but if they eat at school, how do they get the necessary tools? Since we can't expect the kids to bring a toothbrush every day, providing floss will go a long way to better, brighter teeth!
> Yeah but when you get into the real world you have to use microsoft products anyway.
As addressed in the article, had you bothered to RTFA, it doesn't matter. If you teach word processing instead of Word that is. And you had better be doing that because the version of Word you are teaching on (likely to be a version or two behind already) will almost certainly be obsolete by the times the kiddies enter the labor force. Software changes, see the Ribbon if you don't believe me. "Gotta teach what everyone else uses" is just a crutch to avoid change. By that logic everyone would still be using Word Perfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase.
No, the problem I hit is 'must have' software that has to have Windows. From the crappy Reader Rabbit level stuff in the lower grades to Accelerated Reader in the later ones to state mandated testing software that only works in IE on Windows, etc.
Even worse the schools here love to spend money on crap. Why would anyone spend for PC Anywhere when VNC is free and works? But they do. And yea, they get the licenses really cheap but new Netware servers everywhere? Yup. Supposedly it is some dependency on a mandated package somewhere.
Still no reason not to try infecting as many schools as we can with Free stuff that runs on Windows. Eventaully we might get a few of em adopted.
Democrat delenda est
Proprietary software at educational pricing is, in most cases, dirt cheap.
Almost every single software company I know provides software to schools at a significant discount.
Our small little school gets windows for $60/copy. We also buy office for $60/copy. Bigger schools get an even bigger discount than that.
Our largest costs are humans and hardware; neither of which have a free/open source equivalent. If you look at the entire budget for a school or a school district, software costs are a tiny blip on the radar. Those costs pale in comparison to payroll, benefits, insurance, utilities, facilities.....etc.
The point is that software should be selected based on ONE criteria: suitability of purpose. The best software that does the job for the lowest total cost should be selected. Sometimes free software is the way to go, sometimes it's not.
We are already struggling with religion creeping into schools, we don't need software religions creeping into schools.
-ted
It makes the case that proprietary software is inconvenient and that when schools choose to use proprietary products they spend their constituents' money.
There are so many reasons to prefer F/OSS (and yes, lack of up front licensing costs is really nice). However, this is the worst "benefit" to pitch. In reality, the software will very likely require the same amount of support as other software (which many times Adobe or MS will give gratis or close to gratis). In any case, sysadmins and tech support people cost more than software (unless your software is built by Lockheed to NASA safety specs or you are using custom production and manufacturing control software).
Some better arguments include: freedom to roll out additional seats without tracking licenses; freedom support something yourself if that is better for your organization than upgrading (upgrades often being forced by proprietary vendors); the money spent stays in the local economy instead of going off to some software company's home state/county/whatever; heck, even altruism.
The point is that even F/OSS requires that "they spend their constituents' money."
I know I'm going to be modded troll here or off-topic, but terms like 'Schools' are extremely vague. For the purposes of this article, which I refuse to read because I am to lax, what type of schools are we looking at here? K-12? Elementary? Secondary? Post-Secondary?
I believe there is a place for open source and commercial software in schools. I better since I work for a commercial Educational software publisher.
I'd love to have our stuff run on Open Source platforms, but we currently only release for Windows/OSX. We don't produce for OS platforms for the simple reason that nobody asks for it. Ever. I talk to our sales guys from time to time. I ask them if people ask for Linux versions. The answer is always no.
So Educators, administrators, curriculum people, make sure to ask your software vendors for versions that run on open platforms. You'll probably get a "no". But keep asking. It's not that they can't, they just don't know you want it.
the scools can get FOSS for free and MS software for cheap but later when students want to/need to use the software their school uses they end up paying for MS. at least with FOSS they wont need to spend their already limited student cash on MS software. Lastly, this isnt just limited to K-12, in college, office software is very important to have, for homework, projects, research etc. so any cost savings is greatly appreciated.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The following is a typical frustration for free software advocates:
Every other source of information teachers have is full of non free propaganda. Don't copy that floppy (flash warning) is an annoying classic. The basic tenants were laid out by Bill Gates in his famous 1976 whine which says, "if you don't pay me, your computer won't work". Broadcasters and publishers justify their existence with a similar but more realistic story that reinforces the software lie. The lie is reinforced with confusing language, bogus arguments and, ultimately, name calling. The tactics are covered in detail here. Microsoft spends a billion dollars a month on marketing and each piece of that marketing conveys their propaganda.
It's very effective and can only be eliminated by free software use. The idea that software can be shared and improved is so completely foreign to them, so much that you can perform almost any demonstration with free software and they still won't understand, as evidenced above. It's only after they use free software, like Mozilla, that they can see that it is not only good enough, it's what they want and that's what free software is all about. At that point, the rest of the lies start falling down and they get very angry.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Author does not assume the cost of IT/training actually costs time or money and implies that neither are necessary. Most schools don't have IT staff or the money to hire IT staff (particularly qualified staff in something other than Windows... Unix/Linux administrators typically are hired at higher salaries. One option is that the school may get volunteers from either the higher level grades or from parents/supporters, though.
This passage sounds very whingy. It then uses examples of one similar group (amateur astronomists) but then uses musician/art and then a genius (obviously an exception, not the rule). Instead of touting the strengths such as professional programmers who contribute in their spare time, college students who work on projects because they are eager, etc.
The only option the author gives is to go talk to someone else in your building who, if they have a different version than you, can upgrade your software to the latest version without cost. What about drivers? What about any number of other issues like bugs? What about turning to forums, actually buying support, newgroups, mailing lists, etc?
So... you've nailed down Office.... what about the host of other applications that people use? Like Photoshop, etc.? What about switching from IIS to Apache? MSSQL/MSDE to MySQL? Exchange to whatever (plain email?) Windows point-n-clicky to something different (point-n-clicky with some side helpings of editing text configuration files)? Drive mapping to NFS?
Again, you nail word processors and spreadsheets... what about everything else?
Author mentions that the first round is given to the school like the first taste of a drug... Then they buy it for home use... where is the second buy?
Finally a reasonable paragraph.
FUD. Companies that tend to offer free trial offers don't back out on that in anything other than extreme circumstances (being bought by another company that changes licensing agreements) and even then, it is very rare. This section is pure FUD.
Finally... some concrete and founded sections but mostly it's just listing alternative software.
For those who do not already know it, Microsoft has settled its anti-trust case in California, resulting in a settlement fund that allows every school district in California to get a set dollar allotment per student per school district. This website has all the deets:
http://www.edtechk12vp.com
So if you have been wanting more FOSS in your school district, but haven't had the budget, step right up!
When technology leaders train teachers and students to use proprietary software, it obligates those teachers and students to buy or steal that software or to have wasted their time on the training.
This seems to be a purely economic reason for using free software. This was the one point I chose to make my comment about.
You even included it in your response!
Yes, if you want to teach a class on Photoshop, you obligate the students, and the SCHOOL to buy Photoshop. If you want to teach GIMP, you obligate no one to buy the software, but it may not be suitable software for the curriculum, and teaching that software - while free - might still be a waste of time and tuition dollars.
Sure, the article made some very nice, feel-good points. It warmed my heart. The only points that school administrators seem to care about are: "Do we need this?" and "What does it cost?".
My post focused on the cost. I'm sure that isn't important to you, but it is important to a lot of other people.
-ted
First, the executive summary: In spite of starting by explaining the difference between free as in speech and free as in beer, let me outline why educators should use F/OSS: It's free for the teachers, the students, the insititution, the graduates, and will remain so in the future. Oh, and it's almost as good. Then here's a laundry list of applications that you may want to use that I started tunning out during.
The more detailed summery using his bullet-points:
He then goes on listing applications and their uses, organized fairly well, but I got tired of paraphrasing.
Isn't the F/OSS community capable of having a better spokesman? Or at least reasons that refer back to letting students tinker with applications so they can see how the code/math/grammar checker works? And that teachers can customize the code to tailor fit the school's needs? And... actually, now is when I stop preaching to the choir.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
The article was well written and does make an excellent case for using F/OSS. I kind of consider it a pain factor. In my most recent project of phasing out a small special ed school's Win2K SBS Active Directory server, pain was the motivation. We were lucky to have reliable uptime. I went to diskless freebsd workstations running GNOME, FireFox, and Evolution. Teachers were amazed that F/OSS was so good. After using the system for only a few weeks teachers and students raved about the system. Since december, we have had only 8 hours of downtime due to total power failure. Plus, I could get students input into customizing the system with snappy login screens and desktops. You can do this with Microsoft, but it is *unsupported* and *discouraged* We can provide a high degree of customization of look, feel, and security.
hi,
I am a level one tech support volunteer for a public middle school in San Francisco. We have money to spend pursuant to the Microsoft California Anti-Trust Settlement, and we are trying to figure out the best way to make our creaking old Xeon server move a little faster. If you are in San Francisco, and would like to join our little school LUG, please feel free to email Christian Einfeldt at einfeldt at digital tipping point dot com. Thanks!
It depends on priorities. If you want to teach kids to be Mc-Happy consumers of software that was written elsewhere, then proprietary software is the way to go.
Alternatively, if you want to empower them to affect change themselves, then they need the tools to do this.
Proprietary software just can't compete when one starts thinking about the freedom to learn.
I work part time as a school teacher Saturday mornings. We have old Celeron 800 Mhz computers with 128 megs of RAM, an nVidia TNT 2 16 meg VRAM that just barely manage to run Windows XP Pro SP2. Weak frackin' hardware, I know. So I burned several copies of Ubuntu 7.04 hoping I could demonstrate that version of Linux to the students, and after the initial menu selection, all the machines (the hardware is identical) got to where the X Server is coming up with the tan color, and then nothing else happened. What is supposed to happen is the two desktop icons show up for installing, but it never got that far.
This doesn't affect my favorable Linux view, but this is the first time I have tried a Linux distro on old hardware and it just wouldn't work. I works fine on my Dell Insprion 8200 laptop though. I would have expected Mandriva to do this, but not Ubuntu.
Just because you get modded "insightful" on Slashdot doesn't mean you actually are in real life.
Yep, they're probably not that good when they first start.
But remember that F/OSS is developed in the open. They'll have some of the best minds critiquing their patches. And they'll be able to see how a project evolves, in real time.
That kind of interaction with skilled programmers on an evolving project just can't be had at most colleges.
But they'll get it just because their school system was smart enough to invest in F/OSS for their students.
I'm not sure to mod or reply...guess by the time you read this I've chosen.
I'm not certain that really good linux admins are more or less expensive than really good windows admins. The key for schools is that - given 20 or 30 adults in one building - someone on staff probably knows enough to load windows and do very basic OS maintenance. They can't do it well, and they're likely to screw something up, but they are "free" in teh sense that you don't have to pay them extra to do that work. The chance of having one of those same adults even know what Linux is is depressingly small, and to be confronted with something that doesn't look _exactly_ like their box at home is truly frightening to them.
Although I'd like to say that F/OSS software is "vendor neutral" or "corporate neutral", I think another poster was onto somehting bigger - freedom from licensing accounting. Shools have as much budget for mundane IT tasks as they have for the hardcore ones - none. I'm sure there are enough applications to satisfy most needs on either side of the fence, but the installed base of training is high enough for the corporate software that it would take real effort to switch people over. And as anyone in a school system is aware, teachers are some of the most stubborn, change-averse creatures in the universe.
It is my general opinion that for F/OSS to take over the schools, it will take an effort equivalent to the corporate "free dime-bags" that is academic software pricing. In this case, it will need to be local volunteers providing the service side of the equation for free. For MS et. al., low cost software and free/low-cost installed-base support can only be countered by F/OSS software and _reliable, long term_ donated support. Until that is a reality on a large scale, corps will always win.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
A nasty little AC troll shows their ignorance of software creation by taunting:
Do YOU work full time on F/OSS projects? Do you get paid for it? Do you actually have another job to put food on your table and subsidize the F/OSS project(s) you work on?
Everyone has a job to put food on the table except people who are independently wealthy.
I do not work full time on free software but no one needs to. Free software provides tools for all jobs so it will be used everywhere and improved as a byproduct. The vast majority of programmers make general tools work for specific clients. They don't care who made those tools and would be just as happy if other people could use the results of their work. This especially true in education and research, where education is the mission. All of the software I'm writing for my research is free. I'm not a CS person, so it's not the best code in the world but it works. Because all of the tools I used to make it are free, I can actually share it with anyone who's interested. When tools can be improved and shared everyone is better off. There are more than enough companies willing to support basic work on the tools that run their business to keep all of the tools working well. That's why free software has grown without corporate sponsorship and will always be around and it's why I have at my disposal first class software from a stable desktop to a bug free compiler.
The basic stand against free software is selfish and morally corrosive. If you and your friends could help themselves, you would not need people who own software. They seek to ruin your trust in your neighbor and yourself so that you will be helpless and divided. 22 years of GNU prove they are simply wrong.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
In reality, the software will very likely require the same amount of support as other software (which many times Adobe or MS will give gratis or close to gratis). In any case, sysadmins and tech support people cost more than software
What ever gave you that idea? Non free software cost more in every way. The hardware is always more expensive and you have to replace it more often. It always takes more time to keep up, so you get less for the money spent on staff. Staff that's not busy with the patch time of the month, rolling out "upgrades" and fighting virus infections have time to work on tools the school actually wants. Finally, licensing costs are an issue no matter how "good" a deal you get. All of the issues you mention, easy roll out, fewer "upgrades", and local spending are cost and convenience issues in free software's favor. It's hard to imagine free software will ever be as expensive and inconvenient as non free software and experience is making the case clear.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Where are you pulling you $1 billion a month figure from?
From Microsoft. They spent 2,191,000,000 in three months according to the quarterly report filed September 30, 2006. More recent reports have more and that's what I remember, nearly a billion dollars a month in sales and marketing. Spending more on marketing than anything else! That's insane unless you are selling carbonated sugar water.
All M$ reports are kind of slushy. The sited report has a strange 1.6 billion for "cost of revenue" and a further 1.8 billion in "research", much of which we can assume lands in "get the facts" reports. It sure did not put new features into Vista.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Companies like Apple, Lenovo, HP actually give money to schools just like Nike does. I supposed Microsoft at least gives a discount in lieu of payment. So there's not a lot of incentive to stick with them if there are any alternatives.
> All the applications you learn now will be out of date when you use them. I'm sure all the artists who spent forever learning Photoshop will love to hear that.
There's no real replacement for Photoshop, anyhow, if you want to do print work. It's improving, but they're incredibly finicky about color (CMYK, device profiles, etc.). For other things like Office & Windows it's probably right. Almost everything I knew about where to find settings in Windows 3.1/95/98/NT/ME/XP is utterly and completely useless in Vista.
But you should learn to use software, not learn one specific UI. If all you know is a single UI, the software "training" you got was useless. Learning to use more than one application that does the same thing isn't always a waste of time.
> Has he mentioned that teachers can use this software free of cost?
My mother was a teacher. She and all the other elementary school teachers in my town paid for *LOTS* of stuff out of their own pocket simply because they cared about the kids and the community. You're severely overestimating school budgets if you think that the reduced price educational versions are cheap enough, especially in communities where the teachers aren't that nice.
> OpenOffice is almost as good, all it needs is a grammar checker.
Ugh. If you're using Word's grammar checker for anything the least bit important, you're insane. There are exactly two things I can imagine it being useful for:
* Counting words, paragraphs, etc.
* Removing passive voice for a school assignment.
Passive voice has its place. It shouldn't be overused and should be avoided in certain types of writing, but it isn't even wrong. It might be a very poor style to use but it's not wrong. You will note that I excluded doubled words from that list. Those get caught by the spell checker, not the grammar checker.
> Isn't the F/OSS community capable of having a better spokesman?
Feel free to speak up. I don't think anyone gets to choose who else may and may not speak on behalf of some issue.
Just two days ago, there was a front page story here on a Kamloops, British Columbia school district success story with Linux and thin clients.
There are many benefits to using Open Source in schools, such as: local tax money does not go to a foreign country (for most of the world at least), no licensing fees, just pay for local contractors/consultants, if that, and kids learn transferable skills not products (they use Open Office and can make their way thru MS Office when they work, if needed).
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
We did this too in high school. We got the opposite result. Some of the projects became commercial products. Two of mine remained in use (and not by me) for more than a decade.
The trap of experience is thinking it's universal, or even representative of some nonexistent norm.
If you give them a computer with Windows and Office, you'll teach them to be a typist in a voice recognition world.
Give kids a real, free and open operating system with a compiler that's not programmed for obsolecence and some real tools constructed to international standards, not some fragile ornamental toy. Teach them how to use real tools. Start young. The result may be that they're not interested in programming. It may be they devise a cool shortcut for computing protein synthesis or AI, or something entirely unexpected. Do us all a favor and don't cheat the future of that protein synthesis shortcut. We may really need it when the population hits 9 billion.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Did anybody else notice that he correctly gave credit to Stallman, but didn't mention Torvalds? That's fairly unusual. And yet, he didn't go so far as to use the incomprehensible (yet justifiable) "GNU/Linux" moniker.
;-)
These Slashdot editors are falling down on the job... allowing posts that aren't quite on the cutting edge of rabid idealogy.
-J'n
... Students should learn to use multiple operating systems, office tools, etc. Its better that they LEARN TO USE COMPUTERS and not learn to use Microsoft Office and be afraid of anything which isn't.
Maybe they could rotate the operating systems on a per year basis. One year the class uses Windows, the next Ubuntu, the next year *BSD.
I think it would be a great learning opportunity and gives many students the confidence to experiment and learn about the differences between operating systems.
Right now Tech teaching is a joke.
We don't want to have our kids learn something that they could use in real world business. Colleges just started teach M$ networking because they could make a buck. Novell as a product is still going strong....oops. Quit with the idealism and teach the practical. That's what I'm paying for.
Hell, the first few hits are free! When you're hurtin' for more, come back and we'll take care of you real good.
Try and think ahead. You're supposed to be responsible for teaching small humans to do that. Set a good example.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I think there are several examples of better F/OSS advocates, and even a few who do educational research.
No. That's exactly wrong, and exactly why most people in schools if they can even understand that it's legal to copy F/OSS, they're sure that there's some other catch, like if they want it to work they'll have to become computer programmers. As someone else pointed out, it's unrealistic to think that many high school students are going to tweak a grammar checker. (Most of them don't have a very good understanding of grammar in the first place, hence the need for a grammar checker.) It's patently absurd to suggest that teachers will. Have you met any teachers?
I am the director of technology at Little Flock Christian School in Fairfax, VA. While we are still running Windows XP for an Operating System, we switched to open source for most of our desktop apps and it has worked out great. We are currently switched to the following applications in our curriculum: * Microsoft Office -> OpenOffice.org * Microsoft Publisher -> Scribus * Microsoft Frontpage -> Nvu * Kid Pix 4 -> Tux Paint
And you need to calm down.
Schools teach you how to use Apple, not Microsoft, products. Outside of CS classes (which were Windows based in HS and Linux in University) all the computers were Macs.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
thats so much common sense i want to vomit..
ever notice how the point of school is to learn concepts and methods, not the answers to problems.
i.e. you don't learn that 2+2=4 you learn how to ADD
you don't learn that the force of gravity is -9.8 m/s^2
you learn the laws of mechanics and how to apply them
you don't learn a language by learning several sentences. You learn the grammatical strucutre how to conjugate verbs etc
why the heck would computer skills be any different?
you don't learn Visual Studio
you learn how to program in various languages.
heck at my middle school we learned most of those skills on mac's, and in clarisworks which furthered the whole APPLICATION doesnt matter thing.
a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet, be it 1-2-3, excel, clarisworks, oofice, etc
the same goes for word processing, and databases (ok a little less so there...) and just about everything else.
in essence its the difference between memorization and learning. Do you learn to memorize a book or do you learn to actually read english (and it or whatever language its written in)
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
It's not enough that the software that schools buy should be free open source - all the textbooks and educational materials should be as well. Textbook companies make a killing selling mediocre books to school districts, college students, etc at inflated prices. If the students have laptops, why not make all their books fit on them, for free, and openly editable (wiki-style or better) as well? Handouts, presentations, even reports by other students (fine, put 'em in a free database for plagiarism checking).
Quite simple. It's Other People's Money.
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Not unlike your interpretation of them, regardless of your creative spelling and phrases like "mouth of the beast". Who are you trying to impress? The moderators?
You're spinning the 2.1 billion per quarter as some evil thing that somehow results in some more evil? Do you even understand how corporations work? Didn't you learn anything in school? Oh, wait. Apparently not:
That would be a term that covers cost of good production (or just "cost of goods"), if I remember my remedial econ course from high school. Did you say once you had a PhD or something?
It doesn't really matter if you use quotes around it. Why don't you browse around the MSR website for a while and educate yourself? That would be grand, because maybe we wouldn't have to hear all your pointless FUD.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
The hardware is always more expensive and you have to replace it more often.
This is a complete lie. If I'm looking at a FOSS OS, then I have a much smaller list of products I can use, INCREASING my cost compared to say, running Windows, which allows the use of whatever hardware is cheaper.
It always takes more time to keep up, so you get less for the money spent on staff.
That's completely made up.
Thanks for spreading the FUD!
I don't respond to AC's.
My software: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/
A similarly featured bit of OSS: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards/
Capsule summary: Like the name suggests, it creates bingo cards, and that is all. At least, that is how most computer programmers perceive the problem, and that is why Bingo Card Creator is in use in a couple hundred classrooms and bingo-cards sees about as many downloads in a year as my free trial sees in a mediocre week.
Programmers hate writing boring code, which is one of the reasons why Ruby on Rails is so phenomenally popular. Printing logic is a good example. There are few things in life which are more boring than getting text to be properly sized in a grid on an arbitrary printer, without crowding the grid lines. Roughly 1/3 of the LOC and 90% of the complexity of my program is making printing pretty and easy enough for your grandmother to do it. The writer of bingo-cards, on the other hand, decided to punt on this: seeing as how many browsers have perfectly good printing routines already, he just exports to HTML and then you can print the resulting files yourself. Simple, right? Well, not to put a fine a point on it, while that is a great choice for the programmer it is a terrible, terrible choice for the user... and there are users out there who *don't know how* to print an arbitrary file in the file system. Trust me, I answer emails from them on a weekly basis.
Another example: aesthetics. My downloads doubled the day I replaced some old freeware new/open/save/print icons (which looked, eh, lets call them "utilitarian") with the big, attractive stock icons you now see on my screenshots. Look at Apple: design is a feature! bingo-cards' design is overly complicated and aesthetically unpleasant. If you can get it to run on a Windows box* take a looksie -- the main interface has several dozen controls on it and will overwhelm many users.
* The install blows up on some systems. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Support: If you mail support@iprintedmydomainabove.com, you'll always get someone happy to help you. If there were hypothetically a mailing list for bingo-cards, most of the technically non-adept teachers asking it for help would be told to RTFM and go away. (Typical support request: "help i cant print. Thanks, Suzy") Folks have been terribly treated by the software industry, and many of them actively fear software. They have been made to think that its both natural when something goes wrong and that, by the way, when something goes wrong it is their fault. I treat every emailer with respect and when Suzy can't print thats because I clearly haven't made it easy enough yet.
Marketing: I know there is a bit of scorn among some in the OSS community for this, but hey, technically superior programs do not always win... and thats a good thing. bingo-cards, for example, has much worse performance in search engines than I do despite the fact that SourceForge has PageRank out the yin-yang and I do not. The main reason is that I actually took the time to write in comprehensible English about how you can use my program to (fill in the blank), and that nobody ever did this for bingo-cards. Documentation adds value to the user! (So do screenshots! And websites which don't make you search for the "What the heck do I need to download to get this running on a Dell?" button.)
"OSS is a great idea because you can have students and teachers reprogram it." Yeaaaaah, you get right to that. My guess is that most elementary English teachers think that programming is similar to papermaking: fascinating that people can do it, truly a worthwhile skill, but just give me something to let me get back on track for the lesson plan because I have 10 kids here who aren't reading at grade level yet. They don't want to spend hours of their acutely limited time hacking any more than they want to physically transform pulp to paper so that they ca
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Some people have touched on this but not in detail,
The problems with f/oss are, as they relate to a k-12 environment:
There are simply no alternatives to the many valuable programmes that are in use.
The core software we use is made by evil Microsoft accounts for 1% of our software spending.
Then there are the other 47 software packages that account for the other 99%.
What are the f/oss alternatives for:
Accelerated Reader
Star Math
Star Reading
Odysseyware
HeartBEEPS
Compass Learn
Eduphoria
Plato
Etc.
These packages all need some platform to run on and its usually Microsoft or Apple when it comes to education.
Educational Institutions are not evil because they buy microsoft products, they have been tasked with a job and they are using the tools they have at their disposal.
You want to take a word processor class and give them openoffice, fine. Then dont use the tax payers monies as an argument because the district is going to have to pay
for the microsoft/apple guys that support their part and then the linux/redhat/ubuntu/mandriva/debian/flavotheweek distribution expert they need to support the "free" software.
The open source movement needs more than a list of programmes that all have admitted short comings when compared to commercial alternatives.
The "REAL" TCO for f/oss is more than commercial sofware when you add the cost of support and maintenance on these systems.
Say you already have a guy who is an expert at microsoft/apple/oss
This guy learns to support one more or all of the os's that you plan to use.
He will not be an expert over night. Hes going to have to call someone for help.
The microsoft side has a set rate and the abundance of experts has driven the cost down.
The linux/OSS Experts carry a premium pricetag, this goes for hiring linux people in house as well.
There are just not enough hours in the day to go over the managament side of windows verus linux.
Security:
In 8 years with microsoft systems I have not seen one virus outbreak or infection inside the networks I have maintained. The insecurities with microsoft systems
are well documented when they happen and with proper firewalls and education this is a non issue.
In closing, educators are not slaves or borg to the microsoft machine. And you guys should not be the same for f/oss. In time when there are real alternatives maybe this will be a largescale option, but at this point the benifits dont warrant five slashdot articles a week about the inroads of f/oss into education.
I can get any software working in one lab, the problems I face are slightly larger with 7000 students and 700 employees with 5 People in the support department.
*cringe*
Read my blog: HansMast.com
In order to complete a degree in graphic design, engineering, game development or architecture (for instance) you are commonly expected to do homework (at home) using expensive proprietary software. Even at educational discounts (if you're lucky enough to have them) the costs are simply absurd on the average student budget: far outweighing that of books and in some cases the annual course fees themselves. An 'Interactive Media' degree at a university I teach at has students developing accredited projects in Lightwave, 3DSMax, Director, Flash, Final Cut Pro, Maya, Rhino, Illustrator and Photoshop, MaxMSP - to name just a few - in the first two years of study. That's a bus-load of money supposedly going from student to software vendor.
The argument that the industry in which the student expects to work is itself dependent on this proprietary software - and that students must study such proprietary tools to be employable - is beside the point: it dos not absolve the given educational institution of responsibility in this case. It's an unwritten rule, a nudge and a wink from teacher to student that to learn a given software it is the student's responsibility to aquire it at any cost.
Indeed. Back in the day I learnt a great deal of lessons from doing open source development before I even went to college. College taught me the nuts and bolts of algorithms and approaches, but doing open source development taught me how to write good, maintainable code and code that has the potential to last for several years rather than being thrown away as soon as the requirements change.
Sure, I submitted some awful patches in my formative years, but the people I submitted them to were usually friendly, helpful and courteous. I would recommend this approach to all up-and-coming programmers: find a couple of open source projects whose software you use and enjoy -- I think small- or medium-sized projects work best when you're new because you can build a better relationship with the other developers -- watch the community, study the code, and then write some patches. If you stick at it, it has the potential to put you ahead of most other college graduates in terms of real-world software development experience.
Getting fiber to the customer premise can involve ripping up streets, sidewalks, driveways, drilling sideways, ruining lawns, new equipment, etc... this is expensive and might disfigure the property.
Depending on your area you can use the existing copper to get speeds up to 45 megs with a simple ethernet hand off.
Spending $5-20k to install fiber that is going to support a 10 meg crk is not financially responsible when other solutions exist that will supply the exact same needs. How much bw do you currently need? How much bw will you need in the future? How much is it going to cost? How long will it take to be up and running? You will find that copper is the logical solution. (depending on you area of course).
(btw, this is based on actually real world experience, not conjecture. Save fiber for 50m> crks or internal network runs greater than 350 feet. And call around to see what the ISPs around you have to offer.)
Many of the software vendors we deal with have been in business for 20 years, and have yet to "take care of us real good", as you put it.
Why is it so hard to believe that software companies may actually want to provide software to schools at a discount just to be good guys?
Do you really think an anti-virus vendor or a backup software company is trying to get the kids "hooked" on their software? The kids aren't even aware we use the software.
-ted
Now they'll recommend its use when they go out to work in the real world
That may be a nice thought to have a world where the employees can demand the work environment they want. If that was the case, no one would work in cubicles, everyone would have a corner office with tons of window space, and everyone would have a top of the line computer sitting at their desk.
The real world doesn't work that way (mostly). I doubt, even if you teach students "the right way" they will not be able to demand "the right way" from their employer.
Can you imagine an young new engineering student going into industry and demanding that an Autocad or Solidworks shop use something else? I'm sure his/her employer would say these are the tools we've standardized on, use them or don't come back.
It's nice to think that young kids out of school have that level of influence, but that is not realistic.
-ted
Giving children the basic understanding of the fact that computers and not just about Windows or GetAMac, and that they have a choice.
It's like religious education where everyone is given basic knowledge of other religions and are left to make their own choice.
So the computing in school is similar to being stuck in a catholic school and being taught that there is one god (i mean 3 in 1) and other religions are all fanatics (hackers and pirates in terms of software).
as a student you should have a ms track or a f/oss track option. the ms track is for those that do not want to learn the low level details of operating systems or programming and the f/oss track is for those that do.
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
Name one other thing that people produce that can be used and copied for free.
A teacher should know that ideas are free. Songs, stories, facts, concepts, associations, recipes, laws and software programs are all things that can be coppied and used without cost to the creator. The means of conveying those ideas have been more and less expensive but electronic publishing brings the cost close to zero. The only reason a teacher would miss that is because publishers have tried to convince people that ideas are property, complete with ownership and limitations that defy common sense.
People immersed in non free propaganda are trained to act with that suspicion. The phrases "you get what you pay for" and "too good to be true" are favorites truisms designed to eliminate thought. Combined with sabotage of "competing" software on "their" platform, this is one of the most effective weapons they have.
The cure is to explain the economics of free software form eveyone's vantage point along with the history of that development. The ordinary user has an obvious gain. Without effort they get tools better than they can buy. People who make software to solve their company's problems also get a good deal, all of the tools required to solve the problems are provided without cost other than assembling and modifying them. Those modified programs are what everyone else sees as the prize so things only grow when a copyleft license is used. Some people do it for fun. Some people do it because they are angry that their work or publically funded work like Maxsyma, was stolen by an "owner". You can also point out that Microsoft, Apple and everyone else has helped themselves to free software released under licenses that let them close that work off and behave anti-socially. For whatever reason, free software has snowballed to the point where anyone wanting to do anything with a computer would be a fool to ignore free software.
Teachers should understand these things intuitively because the free software world acts as an ideal school. It's free, everyone is welcome, the best examples are easy to find and peer review comes with use. Teachers only with their math classes worked that way, and maybee they will. Western thought and education started with interested people scratching lines in the sand at public markets. Everything since has been extra.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This is a complete lie. If I'm looking at a FOSS OS, then I have a much smaller list of products I can use, INCREASING my cost compared to say, running Windows, which allows the use of whatever hardware is cheaper.
I don't think so. Free software can be deployed on dozens of architectures, from embedded to big iron. Windoze does i368 only and the newest only comes with drivers for the very newest, most expensive i386. 64bit Linux and BSD have better hardware support than Vista does right now. XP only works with i386 that's as old as it is, but free software can use all of that AND other architectures. So are right only if your idea of cheapest hardware is the cheapest of the newest, most expensive i386 compatibles. Outside of the intentional churn of i386, the world is much cheaper.
Bill Gates has done his best to make life difficult for other software, so there are some problems. Winmodems, cheap wifi chips and other hardware are best avoided and perform poorly under Windoze too. Once you get past that, your hardware always works better and longer if you use free software and that represents significant savings.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Star Office is NOW CURRENTLY based on OpenOffice. That's why it lags BEHIND the capabilities of OOo. A very old version of StarOffice code was used as the progenitor but that bears about as much resemblance to being "based on" that older code as WinXP being based of MS Dos: you'll find SOME code replicated but compared to the whole, there's no comparison possible.
Mozilla/Navigator are similar. However, Firefox is based on Mozilla, so it's likely that NOTHING from the original released base gode of Navigator now exists (except blank lines, "{" and "}" and the like...).
So if you reckon OOo/FF *really are* based on SO/NN then you must also admit that XP is based on MS Dos and that Access is based on Foxpro database, etc.
There exists a blog (sorry, it's in French) aiming to share experiences about deploying F/OSS and expecially Ubuntu Linux in (Junior High) Schools.
"I may never prove what I know to be true, but I know that I'll still have to try" Dream Theater "The Spirit Carries on
I was looking at molecular models on our workstation at the lab, from home, over a modem line in the nineties. Nobody ever thought of giving me my own workstation and $25000 worth of MM software (*sniff*) or making me pay for one (luckily..). Instead I got by on a i386 (a real one) with 4 Mb memory and a 14 inch color screen. It was dead slow, but doable. Biggest problem was that my screen at home didn't have 32-bit color depth but 8-bit.
If those students have to acquire their own copy of such heavyweight modelling software instead of just using it at the lab (from wherever the students themselves are located at that moment) then I think that university shows some serious neglect of 1987's state of the art of utilizing windowing systems for end-users in a network-transparent way.
Students who don't know Linux exists and can be used as an X terminal could be excused in, say, 1994, but that's hardly an excuse anymore. And sure, it puts a much higher load on the internet's tubes, but those have improved in the meantime as well, and clever people thought about compressing the protocol. And you can easily tunnel X over ssh.
I mean COME ON, if a problem is that expensive, nobody tried to find a solution? wtf?. </rant>
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
I also make it clear to the students that much of the software I use in class is free to download. This way the students may use the software outside of class. This year is the first year I taught my web design students how to install Apache on windows. At least one student now has a church web site running from his home computer and uses dyndns.org to provide a hostname.
If you are a math teacher there is a piece of software that I have been playing with that I'm excited about. It's called SAGE and the package has really good 2 and 3-d graphing capabilities. Anyway, just plug F/OSS with your students in any way possible.
"Drug related crime" is a misnomer, "prohibition related crime" is the more accurate and correct phrase.
Maybe Windows and office are dirt cheap, but take a look at "educational software" (sometimes this is the same stuff at WalMart, but with an education certification sticker on it) That software can be (usually is) two to three times the cost of the retail equivalents.
And don't think there is any break on other school related programs such as for student tracking or library management.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
This is a big word to the educational community, wikipedia definers it in education as:
"...In formal education or schooling (see education), a curriculum (plural curricula) is the set of course and their content offers an institution such as a school or university..."
More or less it is the educational plan for educating. A big part of that is all the related 'materials', that are pre-designed to follow the curriculum. Many of the computer related materials (books, tests) focus on either Windows or Mac OS, and also, as usual, are a generation or two behind the "cutting edge" of OS or program technology.
Part of making FOSS useful to school is to have available curriculum materials that work with the FOSS applications and concept. Some teachers can get it and adapt as needed, but there are quite a few that take and use their curriculum materials completely in a rote fashion (try to teach them you instruct them in a concept (i.e. you say: "after you click Save, you enter a file name such as 'mydocument.doc'") they write it as a literal ("click Save, enter 'mydocument.doc'") I kid you not on this. Those are the ones that are more vocal of change as they do not have any clue on how to adapt other OSs or programs than what is spelled out in the course guides they have.
I think it's a great ida, but I know you will have to get more then just software resources together to get it to work more in more than schools with adaptable staff.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Hello,
If you'd like to see requests for Educational Software Package X to run on GNU/Linux, then join the K12LTSP mailing list. You will see plenty of such requests. Then show that to your bosses.