Slashdot Mirror
When Teachers Are Obstacles To Linux In Education
jamie found this blog post up on the HeliOS Project, which brings Linux to school kids in Austin, TX. It makes very clear some of the obstacles that free software faces in the classroom. It seems a teacher came upon a student demonstrating Linux to other kids and handing out LiveCDs. The teacher confiscated the CDs and wrote an angry email to HeliOS's founder, Ken Starks: "Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. ... This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older version of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them..." Starks pens an eloquent reply, which contains a factoid I have not seen mentioned before: "The fact that you seem to believe that Microsoft is the end all and be-all is actually funny in a sad sort of way. Then again, being a good NEA member, you would spout the Union line. Microsoft has pumped tens of millions of dollars into your union. Of course you are going to 'recommend' Microsoft Windows."
It's still less ignorant than what this teacher is saying. Maybe this teacher has no clue how the union is funded, it doesn't mean that millions of MS advertising dollars are at work doing a fine job here...
That's what I thought at first. Then I read the full letter. I have a hard time believing that someone who actually installed and tried linux in college would believe it was illegal. If the teacher thought it was some sort of install party for pirated versions of windows, well she was right in what she did and was just ignorant of the facts but then she goes on to say that she understand what linux is, to have tried and installed it. How could she be uninformed to the point of saying that no software is free and that linux is illegal ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Here is a teacher, accusing a student and an Open Source software organization of breaking the law (and no doubt intimating as such to her class) and confiscating the student's property for no valid reason. I believe the teacher is guilty of criminal acts. I also believe she leaves herself and the school board open to civil action. I am not an admirer of the US legal system, but this might be a good time to use it to send a message to the world's ignoramuses that, yes, some software is both good and free.
It's interesting that some of her statements are not strictly inaccurate. I might even say enlightened, without the enlightenment.
Amen to this. There is always an associated upkeep to software, alluded to by the reply about releasing improvements incrementally.
Kids aren't a commodity, you have to take the rotten apples with the good ones. School teachers are just people who have a lot of different kids to deal with. Imagine grading kids' papers, errors, and half-thoughts for years. I'll cut that person a little slack for what they get paid. Much like my 6th Grade teacher (with a Master's in Psychology) who was at a loss to figure out how to properly spell Chameleon (stuck in the Ca and Ka sections of the Dictionary), people are ignorant about different things. Welcome to the world. I'm surprised she wrote a letter. I saw it as a plea for help worded in a defensive manner. Now she gets educated. The circle is complete.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
I recently had a conversation with a recently retired friend of mine.
He barely uses the net- I think he has an email address with his ISP and that's about it.
He was complaining about how everything was so expensive and how he's had to pay for some antivirus software after their old computer got infected with something. etc.
I ask: "why didn't you just get some free one?"
His response: "There's so such thing as a free lunch! Either it's stolen or they'll be cheating you somehow"
I then tried to explain about linux and FOSS but he had grown up with the solid idea that nothing worth having is ever free unless you're being scammed in some way.
He could not be convinced that FOSS was legal and genuinely free. There had to be a catch. There had to be a law being broken.
This attitude is common with the older generation who aren't used to the net. "Free" rings alarm bells and this is an issue I rarely hear mention of when people talk about the problems linux has spreading.
As a fellow teacher, let me speak in this woman's defense:
As a teacher, and especially as a K-12 teacher, no one has ever asked her to be anything other than an ignorant, time-wasting simpleton bent on convincing the children in her charge that all adults are blathering morons and that education is for douchebags. In fact, I'm pretty sure "Time-Wasting" and "Self-Righteous Ignorance" are required courses in most teacher-training programs.
There is a reason why most people don't learn much until they get into college. College professors have never had to take any classes in the education department.
So cut the lady some slack, folks. She's just doing what she was trained to do.
I find what works best is to supply examples of fine open source software that runs on Windows and Linux. Once they grasp the concept of free open source software and the missing hurdles to it's use, the next step is to note the OS itself is free software. As an example, this page I wrote concerning an engineering challenge for launching t shirts at a NBA game. The engineering task was to find the optimum length for the launch tube. Note the use of open source software in the solution. When the teacher compared the open source solution to the Microsoft Sound Recorder or other packaged solution, then the seed for the concept is planted. Have the teacher read the license. um End User License Agreement. On a side note, the final and winner announcement will be this Friday. Our team has an excellent chance of winning. The teacher knows that I use The Gimp to size photos for the wiki, etc on a Linux machine. Windows is not needed.
https://inteltrailblazerschallenge.wikispaces.com/Barrel+length+trim+method
When Open Source is the best solution, it gets noticed. It is no longer just hobbiest software.
The truth shall set you free!
Ken Starks is a tedious and shameless self-promotion artist. He won't ever reveal the real names of the teacher or the student because they don't exist. He's a serial troll. The choice of Helios as a moniker is partially apt because he is at the very least *ego*centric, though certainly not effulgent. Free software would benefit greatly if "Helios" and Roy Schestowitz beat each other into dumb oblivion or if /. and lxer and similar just stopped taking any notice of these arseholes. They're embarrassing.
And still - does that give the teacher the right to confiscate something that's not criminal to possess?
If I was a parent then I would at least file a complaint with the school. If they didn't respond in a responsible manner then it would have been time for legal action.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
"At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful"
The law isn't just there for assholes to misuse. She's calling him a thief and accusing him of corrupting children. She's also hindering his business and bringing his him into disrepute. I think it would make an interesting case and that it would have merit even if he didn't win.
To the best of my knowledge she's got every right to choose to keep Linux out of the classroom if the laws and regulations of her school, district, state etc. give her that power. However she has no right dictating what software the children use after hours or what their political views should be. So get a parent or two involved as well/
Of course you could use this as an opportunity to demonstrate that she's wrong, but you're not going to win her over, and if you did you'd have won one hell of a prize ally.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Even better:
I had a Networking teacher confiscate my laptop, which was running ubuntu, cause he thought I was running some hacked version of XP. A friggin computer teacher. Had to explain to the dean of students what linux was, provided several wiki pages, and pleaded my case before two department heads. Two weeks later, I get my laptop back and the teacher still thinks I'm doing illegal stuff on there. Classic quote from my interrogation.... "What is this Gimp? Is it some hacked Photoshop?"
So yes, they do exist. And they're growing more stupid by the moment.
I've read enough articles from reputable news sources about people claiming to be university trained computer experts saying some very ignorant and fallacious things to say that this story is definitely in the realm of probability. There are too many people in positions of authority who haven't a clue what they are either doing or talking about. Ted (the Series of tubes) Stevens rolls off the top of my tongue quite easily (though he never claimed to be a computer expert AFAIK).There are many more examples I would need to Google for.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/23/1330220
"The idea that Free Software can be sold has some government officials perplexed. Times Online has the story. A UK Trading Standards officer contacted the Mozilla Foundation to report catching a business selling copies of Firefox. The organization confiscated the CDs with the intent to prosecute said business. When informed that such distribution was authorized, the officer first expressed disbelief that Free Software could be sold then said 'If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation'."
there ya go
Not all teachers are members of NEA. My wife is a teacher in Georgia, and she is not a member. Considering that Karent is a teacher in Texas, I would bet she's not in a union. Unions have never been strong in southern states.
Yes, teachers can confiscate pretty much anything. The child or his/her parents have a right to have it back, but anything that the teacher deems to be unlawful or harmful or disruptive can be confiscated. Sure, this teacher made a mistake, but if they were treading on eggshells all the time then their job would be impossible.
Eighteen years ago, I discovered emacs. I got hold of a printed copy of the whole manual for it, which was pretty thick, even back then. I took it to a copy shop so I could have one for myself. (Remember, this is back when a 4-foot wide line printer in the terminal room was about all I had access to.)
The girl working the counter flipped open the binder to the very first page, and saw a copyright notification, and promptly told me that she could not copy the manual because it would be illegal to do so. I told her to simply READ what she was looking at. In about thirty seconds, she was copying the manual.
I understand that people want to respect copyright law. I do too. But any sort of ignorance to the fact that it's actually copyright law that MAKES open source work ought to be able to be remedied quickly by just reading the copyright license to the software. Any questions about the situation could then be resolved within about 5 minutes of Googling.
And, just to threadjack my own post, I just-as-quickly forgot about emacs, and allowed myself to be beat about the head and shoulders by vi until now, to the point that I won't go anywhere near emacs. ;-)
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
The fact that a teacher would confiscate Linux CDs from a student isn't half as shocking to me that the teacher would take the time to write a letter to the creator of the software bashing him for it. It sounds like the teacher has to much free time on her hands.
Dude honestly, privately owned schools would just hire the SAME teachers, the only difference between a privately owned school and public one is the pay is worse, but there is absolutely no oversight of the program (meaning there is no legal requirement unless they take public funds to PROVE their program works). Technology is NOT a requirement of almost any states core curriculum requirements beyond like a computer class or a industrial arts class. It is certainly not a requirement of subject curriculums.
Im sorry but the idea that private education is somehow better REALLY needs to be dispelled. There is no way anyone can PROVE its better, as there are no studies that have been done to show it. The only real benefits private education ultimately has over public is unlike public who is required by law to teach everyone, private education can kick people out. THAT more than anything is what improves private education over public, since teachers no longer have to act like parents and can do their job, but that could be EASILY rectified for public school if people could accept the fact that there are students in this country who just SHOULDN'T be educated, and should NOT be near any students who want it.
We love to compare how poorly our schools do against schools in Japan or Europe, yet they DO NOT TEACH dirtbags when we "mainstream" them due to political pressure. Hell with No Child Left BEhind we are forced to test learning disabled students (which could total to 30-40 students depending on the district) as if they where NOT learning disabled, and have their scores count as proof the school is failing because they drop the schools average! And that was government MANDATED basically in a effort to make the schools look like they where failing because then it allowed them to divert funds to private education who did not have to participate in NCLB
But seriously better teachers? Not on your life. I KNOW private school teachers. Some of the worse people in my department went on to teach private school while many of the brightest went on to teach inner-city because they made deals with the school that paid their education in return for them teaching in inner-city schools for 3 years. Why private school for them? Because they BARELY made it out of school with degrees, and private schools can hire people who do not have teaching degrees depending on your states rules. I know a girl who is on her 10th year in college shes has flunked out of so many classes and so you know what her day job is? She teaches at a private school.
Lets call a spade a spade here, this teacher was a idiot to technology. We get them EVERYWHERE in education. And as sad as it is to say easily 3/4ths of them I know are just out of college. Some of the best teachers with tech? The older ones who are sadly close to retirement right now. They are comfortable enough with what their teaching to know EXACTLY how to fit computers and tech into their classes
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
My wife is a teacher and routinely refuses to use the Windows XP boxes in her classroom for anything other than what is required for the students use. In fact, she's pushing to get Linux in the classrooms since they are less susceptible to viruses and spyware and can be monitored and maintained with much less pain.
Pax Vobiscum
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." - Jeremy S. Anderson
Why not expand your vocabularies a bit and use "gratis" when speaking about free as in beer to avoid misconceptions? It's a valid word.
Then again, when a teacher cannot use "either/neither" correctly... (re: the teacher's letter)
I had this conversation when i tried to explain this to my dad. (Whos not too far off 70) What eventually convinced him was the fact that the authors do *not* do this for free. they do it so they get the reputation, the bug fixes, and the enhancements from others.
I once had two managers asking me what is this Linux company and if it is as big as Microsoft...
In the end, the year of Linux on the desktop will come not when technology matures, but when it is advertised appropriately...it seems Linux has a marketing problem!
Unless you are applying for a job as a unix/linux admin.....
I have NEVER used Microsoft office. Well ok, I guess I should say that I have never used most of microsoft office. I used outlook in the past, I've used access in the past. But I have not used Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc. Never had a class on them, never used them in my job.
What I was brought up on was wordperfect. We didn't have classes in high school that covered spreadsheets. I did learn dbase in high school. What my computer teachers taught me was how to use a graphical interface, how to research information, and how to understand technical writing.
So when I got my first personal computer with windows 98 on it and finally had a need for something other then the blue goodness of wordperfect I found star office. I didn't need any training to use it. I just figured it out.
This year my job required us all to receive a IC3 certification (http://info.certiport.com/yourpersonalpath/ic3Certification/). It consists of three exams. One covered basic windows/computer knowledge, one covered basic internet knowledge, and the last covered microsoft office 2003. I did not even have microsoft office installed on my work computer. I walked into the testing center, took my test, got 100% and walked out.
Why? Am I a computer genius? Hell no! I was taught how to use computers, and not how to use a piece of software.
This is a mindset I'm fixing where I work. I'm in the works of switching the campus to Open Office 3. I dream of a day where we stop teaching how to use Word, and start teaching how to use a computer as a tool to get your job done.
Humanity has two basic options for government:
Cooperation and control.
In cooperation, we support each other and do not require institutions and Nanny State/Authoritarian governments to tell us what not to do. It's obvious murder is wrong, if you get something give something, etc. PROBLEM: cooperation requires the ability to kick out or kill non-cooperators, and it requires a strong innate culture, an "organic state."
In control, enough people are reckless with their desires that a strong institutional state emerges, mainly to tell them what not to do. Don't kill, don't steal, no nonconsensual sodomy, etc. They're ideal for unifying a whole bunch of people of unknown values. PROBLEM: control requires increasing amounts of control, because people learn to expect society to wipe their asses and so they stop thinking critically about their own actions, making them more not less reckless.
I know which one I'd prefer. (Portions of this message are paraphrases of the text of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, approximately page 112 in the new edition.)
Futurist Traditionalism
The problem is thinking of software as a physical good rather than as information...
Information can be passed around freely and often is, it can also be bought, sold and hoarded. Giving someone a free piece of software is no different from giving them a free piece of advise or just having a general conversation with them.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Anything cooperative is hurting society and clearly illegal. Individuals producing for free are breaking the law; only corporations are legitimate suppliers/producers, and only those who pay should have access to society's production.
I had the experience in high school way back in the late '80s and early '90s before "OSS" was a term.
I was suspended for writing software and sharing it with my friends. My own source code. The administration of my school told myself and my parents in no uncertain terms that I was breaking the law by writing software and giving it to others, and they were having none of it on school property.
They suggested that to be "constructive," my dad could help me to "start a company" and sell the software to my friends in the computer club, which would be legal, and, they suggested, if priced properly ($5-10 was what they suggested), still affordable to other students and not in violation of the "law," which forbids giving away goods for free. They mixed up anti-socialism/communitarianism in their heads with some kind of Sherman anti-trustiness and applied it to a 13-year-old kid.
My parents allowed me to leave school immediately and I finished my education as a home schooled student, went to a university CS department at 15 and eventually to the University of Chicago for grad school.
Those same administrators still run the local high school, which has 5,000 students and is an inner city campus.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
"The problem is thinking of software as a physical good rather than as information"
Interesting. I think of my e-mails as not just information but as property. They have value to me, they do actually exist as represented by the data bits on some media somewhere (I know of the precise location of only 2 or 3 copies of my readily accessible emails, my archives are on 2 CDs or DVDs, and my phone may or may not have a copy at any given time), and are indeed property in that were I to give the disk to someone, they would physically possess the data.
I think the problem is thinking that information cannot be a physical good. Perhaps you should use the term 'idea(s)' instead of 'information'.
Then you've come to the crux of FOSS. The idea is given away, as software. It need not be a new idea, but the expression of it may be something new and different from other expressions. And while you can pay for some of those expressions, you can get some for 'free', that is for no cost other than making it physically available to your use - downloading onto a disk, for instance, or even using it remotely via a web site...
We do have to think of how property and ideas are different. And how many people can keep an idea secret. And the futility of a secret idea.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
... what can be explained by stupidity. I've been in and around universities for decades. Not schools, admittedly, but they're not that much smarter just because they have Ph.D.s. :/
a) Most people in education barely know linux exists. I was running XP in virtualization under Ubuntu one day when a guy from IT came over to put Active Directory on everyone's computers. (Long story.) This guy in *IT* had never seen anything like it before. "That's so cool," he said.
b) For the faculty, using some other OS is inconceivable. Literally. Trying to explain some of this stuff to them feels just like going all the way back to teaching kids the alphabet.
c) They're so far away from having a clue, they don't know they don't have a clue. The teacher in the post probably felt about like you would if somebody removed all the books and computers from class and substituted comics. I mean, look at the ga-ga reaction: "How dare you try to feed these children drivel instead of Solid Practical Experience?"
In cooperation, we support each other and do not require institutions ... PROBLEM: cooperation requires the ability to kick out or kill non-cooperators, and it requires a strong innate culture, an "organic state."
Actually, in the primary example of social cooperation, raising children, this isn't true. There are hundreds of social species on this planet, and none of them expect their infants to contribute, or even "cooperate", for most of their childhood (however that's defined). Of course, part of the upbringing of species like ours is to teach the kids that cooperation and sharing are expected. Others (e.d., bees and ants) have builtin instincts that "force" them to cooperate when they become adults.
Of course, non-cooperating adults do tend to be evicted from social groups in most species. But "freeloaders" have been documented in many species. This may be a social inefficiency, but not necessarily. One could argue that, in software, it's advantageous to have freeloaders. They are regularly viewed by developers as testers. Software with lots of non-programmer users can be among the best, because such users can contribute bug reports ("complaints"), and this information can be used to improve the software. So the FOSS crowd doesn't kick out (or kill ;-) non-cooperators, they just relegate you to the status of guinea pig for software ideas.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Mark Williams, District 5, President, Austin Independent School District.
Dear Mr. Williams:
As you may or may not be aware, it appears that a teacher in your district recently disciplined her student for demonstrating open source software to his/her classmates.
IMPORTANT: The article http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/08/12/10/001236.shtml about this is going viral on the web.
I can assure you that educators need to understand that Open Source Software is, by it's very nature, free. Free to use, free to distribute and free to copy. Further to that, Open Source Software can save your school board 10's of thousands of dollars in licencing and royalty fees. Replacing Windows and/or Microsoft Office is now easy. Furthermore, going forward, upgrades are free too.
More and more schools and school boards are adopting Linux and Open Office http://www.openoffice.org/. Open Office is a mature, fully-featured, standards compliant Open Source office suite which adheres to fully open document standards and can open and create virtually any MS Office document, spreadsheet or presentation. Linux is virtually virus-free, stable and secure. Special versions of it are designed for schools. Here's one: http://k12ltsp.org/
The most important thing about Open Source Software is that it helps to level the playing field. Less advantaged students can take home legal copies of software and use and install them legally at home.
All I would ask is this:
- Please educate your teaching staff about the advantages of Open Source Software.
- Please have your IT department review its costs and look at the savings to be had.
- Please do what you can to help give all kids the same opportunities.
Thank you in advance for your time in looking into this matter.
*** Don't be dull.***