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."

Comments

Open source & commercial publishers

[WPIDalamar]

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.

Re:He missed one point.

[tknd]

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.

Let me summerize both of these articles

[Actually, I do RTFA]

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:

• The Power of the Source: Free as in speech is good
• Property Rights Turned Upside Down: Copyleft is good
• On the Annoyances of Proprietary Software: Buying licenses is annoying, and people asking if they can pirate off your legit copies is annoying.
• Understanding Open Source Software: Filler
• Myth: You get what you pay for: With F/OSS you can buy your documention and tech support piecemeal.
• Myth: F/OSS software is created by amateurs and must be inferior: Both parts of this arguement are wrong.This marks the last non-poor argument
• Myth: With F/OSS I cannot get support: The best support is friends/teachers. Hey, we might have different versions, let me rehash the licensing point.
• Myth: Moving to F/OSS will require retraining and relearning: All software UI is practically the same. Look for him contradicting himself soon.
• Myth: Students need to learn the standard applications: 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. Oh, what, it has so much monopoly power that professional computer artists have to learn it to work? Nevermind.
• Page 2
• Educators Pay for Software - Twice: Complains about licensing costs again. Contradicts his retraining point by insisting that you are teaching students to use only a proprietary solution and getting them locked in or making them throw all their years of training away. But that was the page before, who expects that much consistancy?
• raining Teachers on Tools They Do Not Have: Has he mentioned that teachers can use this software free of cost?
• On the Allure of Free Proprietary Tools: Sometimes, companies that offer free versions of their program no longer do so. With F/OSS you never have to worry about the dreaded licensing costs
• Productivity Applications: OpenOffice is almost as good, all it needs is a grammar checker. It's not as bad as it used to be!...

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.