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

He missed one point.

[khasim]

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.

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.

Dentists agree...

[dws90]

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!

True.... but not important

[jmorris42]

> 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.

Re:True.... but not important

[Dunbal]

better to understand concepts rather than specific implementations.

      From what I remember of grade school this is something applied to all subjects, not just computer science. The teachers who actually try and get students to think about the stuff they're learning rather than memorize by rote is sadly very disappointing. Teaching a step by step "click here then there then do this then do that" fits the mold much better when you want to breed worker drones.

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.

It's hard to break through non free propaganda.

[twitter]

The following is a typical frustration for free software advocates:

Recently I gave a conference presentation about the benefits of F/OSS for educators -- how all teachers and students could use these tools and that they were free and would remain so. I distributed copies of TheOpenCD and talked about the F/OSS programs that it includes. Near the end of the hour-long presentation, a participant raised her hand and asked, "So I can use this software for free?" Even after an hour, F/OSS still did not quite make sense to her.

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.

You missed the point

[cecil_turtle]

From the header of the first article, had you bothered to read it:

Free software gives everyone the freedom to run, study, change and redistribute software. It is these freedoms, not the price, that is important about free software. Free software advocates make the distinction between free, as in speech, as opposed to free, as in beer. Though many people would gladly accept a free beer, it is not one of the fundamental principles of democracy.

The article doesn't even make the argument about cost to the schools. It does make another point about the cost of F/OSS vs. proprietary software however (one I hadn't considered):

I once spoke to a vendor of an online grade book who, upon learning that I train teachers, was very interested in my using it in my classes.

"What does it cost?" I asked.
"It will cost you nothing. You can use it for free for as long as you like."
"And once I addict my students to your software," I asked pointedly, afraid that I was being rude, "what will it cost them?"
The vendor became excited. "That's exactly what we were talking about in our last sales Free White Paper - What Retailers Should Know about M-Commerce meeting!"

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.

It made another 8 or 10 points that were not at all cost related. So overall, it was a good article. You should read it sometime.

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.