Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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 problem with having the students work on the actual software projects is that often they may not have enough experience to correctly perform the change. I certainly wouldn't trust pretty much all first and second year CS students with changes and I'd feel more at ease with 3rd and 4th year students. A good portion of the first year students end up dropping out and a good portion of the remaining students still can't write good code. That doesn't mean they're bad students, in fact they might even be very good computer scientists. But there's a big difference in understanding and having experience in the basic principles of software engineering.
For example, my school required all students to take project courses (one where you work on a project the entire quarter rather than sit through lecture) and one course I took was software engineering. We were required to make a team of four students (our choice, at the beginning of the quarter) and we were given a "customer" who was either a graduate student or a representative from a company. In the class we were tasked with constructing a complete proposal and presentation for our specific project, capturing requirements, designing the solution, implementing it, and testing and documenting it. It was not and easy class (there were times where we were in the lab for more than 24 hours) and often teams failed. The teams that did succeed, did not necessarily put together something that met the customer's initial expectations. Often, requirements were scoped down, the final product was not completely finished, and so on. There were even bad customers who poorly communicated with the team (if at all). My assumption is that most of these customers understood that the work done by the students was likely to not meet their expectations, but they're still getting free labor with few hours invested.
The students, however, benefited immensely from this experience--it gave everyone in the class a real perspective of what was beyond the lecture room. But as I said, often what the students produced was of considerably lower quality. I'm not sure that's good for all open source projects as it's quite likely that the quality of work many students will put out can introduce more defects than they solve. I do think it is good for companies and grad students trying to get some free/cheap research done on the side, and I do think that it is a good experience for the students.
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!
Feisty apparently requires 256MB of RAM, try Xubuntu 7.04, should be fine with 128MB.
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.
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?
"Teach someone how to use Word and they will be able to use Word. Teach them how to use a word processor, and they will be able to use any word processor."
I agree, so this is why I entered education and tried to spread this concept. It failed miserably. I found few teacher or admins that would believe this. Of course, these were the same people that save files, and haven't a clue where the file is saved. They call IT when their number pad isn't working (numlock), and need their password reset every monday. Lets not forget how they remove a toolbar every time they try to do something more complex than change fonts, and cannot get it back. These are the teachers and admins at every school I have worked at (4), so I gave up. Good luck to anyone else who wants to continue the fight. I might jump back in the fight in a few years.