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The Argument For F/OSS In Schools

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the teaching-freedom dept.

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."

1 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. He missed one point. by khasim · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.