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Teachers Need an Open Source Education
palegray.net writes "Teachers are sorely in need of an education in what open source software is, what it isn't, and how it can benefit their students. A recent news story at the Reg discussed the case of a Texas teacher who accused those distributing Linux to students of committing criminal acts. A HeliOS blog entry exposes a 'higher education' culture of apathy, lies, and fear of open source software. Things have got to improve, and that improvement needs to start with misguided teachers getting their facts straight."
... where nothing of value was said.
Seriously, are the editors addicted to putting up new articles that they would just let anything get through? There is no new insight from this article, just a rehash of an age old topic...
"A recent news story at the Reg discussed the case of a Texas teacher"
Citations please, does 'Karen' really exist, is this even true or just someone looking for hits to his blog.
davecb5620@gmail.com
It is a serious problem when teachers, regardless of the subject, use their position to 'teach' about things they have no or insufficient knowledge of.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Things have got to improve, and that improvement needs to start with misguided teachers getting their facts straight."
Getting their facts straight?
The first improvement must be raising the bar for the teaching community.
This includes, among other things:
- Raising salaries: It won't work to appeal only to the rejects.
- Firing for gross incompetence. As works with just about everyone else.
- Requiring a higher level of knowledge and teaching abilities.
Also, it would be nice to raise the public awareness about the importance of the teaching profession. One of the main pillars of the future of a country is currently seen as just a simple job anyone can do.
Just my humble opinion, and I'm sorry if I offended you.
I read the blog entry and could not believe the garbage.
Linux on the server side is fantastic, and it works very very well. However, on the desktop things are not so clean cut.
When I read:
>Open Office documents send and receive .doc and exel spread sheets just fine.
What a load of garbage! Open Office can send and receive those documents so long as they are not that complicated. And therein lies the issue. You are nervous to use OpenOffice because an translation error could hit you at the wrong moment.
>Why are you denying computer users simply because they choose to use a more secure operating system?
Be very very careful of what you write! If Linux on the desktop were to get the kind of attraction that Windows or more recently OSX does we would be seeing very different pictures.
Remember OSX, based UNIX, said that they had no virii. Ooops, not that OSX is becoming popular it seems that there are a few security loopholes. The same thing would happen to Linux since hackers are a determined lot.
Linux needs to stop the smug attitude because users don't care about smugness. They just want things to work!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I agree totally.
The use of F/OSS software in education at ALL levels would be a total boon for IT education across the board. Interest in alternative licensing, for example GNU Public and Creative Commons would be tremendously beneficial in this age of free information sharing and distribution.
I distinctly remember a question on a sample IT GCSE paper from when I was at school, related to anti-virus software:
Q. Your friend tells you that his computer has a virus, and wants help. What do you do?
A. Tell him to purchase an anti-virus product.
B. Tell him to send you the virus so you can scan it with your anti-virus software.
C. Give your friend a copy of your anti-virus software.
D. Tell your friend to download a "cracked" anti-virus program from the internet.
I selected C and got it wrong. I spent 25 minutes arguing with my IT teacher about AVG and free software. He agreed, and told me that the paper was wrong. However, the mark scheme said A. and that's how it was marked.
No idea if they used that question, or similar, at any point.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Distributing Linux is criminal! It's a threat to our native industries and to the people who work in them!!! It must be true, since I read it here - look 'Linux servers crash once a week'...
http://www.microsoft.com/canada/getthefacts/default.mspx
>A HeliOS blog entry exposes a "higher education" culture of apathy, lies, and fear of open source software.
HeliOS is far from what I would call a 'reputable source' you know...
Here in Germany, I never experienced any hostility towards open source software in the educational system.
The universities are quite supportive of open source and lend their infrastructure to host mirrors for various distributions.
The whole HeliOS story about the teacher was fake. Sorry, try again.
Do they ever! I know far to many teachers & profs in Canada that spout non-sense every time i even suggest OpenOffice" ...
If I suggest gnu/linux (even ubuntu) ... I get some crap like "well at least I use a Mac" ... to which I can only respond "Good for you! You make too much money!"
The ignorance of teachers on basic technology as boarding idiocy ... and half the ones I know (even close friends) are mindless technological drones!
Open source has reached a tipping point ... and whether people want to admit it or not ... it is totally ready for prime time ... as a matter of fact IT IS PRIME TIME!
You could write a list several pages long about what teachers 'need' to know or the teach, each of them is a huge deal to someone somewhere. Schools teach HTML using tags that would make the W3C tear their hair out, few schools teach proper web safty or how to more effectively use search engines, there's only ever a narrow range of programs taught etc.
Each of these things is a big issue but all these things can never be resolved. You only have so many school hours in a day to teach people. Yes learning CSS alongside HTML would be good, but that takes time and is harder to teach. Yes teaching OO alongside Office would be beneficial but again that takes more time.
There's only so much you can teach classes before students either get overloaded with too much info in too little time or you have to push something out.
It's why so many places force teachings of things like slavery or the holocaust. You can't cover all of world history in a history class so you have to prioritise some things at the expense of others.
Why do we expect this to be different than everything else? New things are initially feared and only approached slowly. It's the way we've done it since the dawn of time.
Techies are on the bleeding edge of everything and keep themselves informed constantly. But just like I don't follow car news, most people don't follow computer news. They don't have any clue what 'open source' really means and they don't care!
The solution isn't to call them names, the solution is to just keep educating people about it... Slowly.
Open Source has been gaining momentum lately. It used to be it was 'free and able to be modified, but poor quality'.
Recently, I've seen a change. It's now 'free and able to be modified, and almost as good as commercial software'.
I believe it will soon be 'free and better than commercial software'. I certainly like Kubuntu better than Windows and OS X, and I used to really hate Linux because it was such a pain in the ass all the time. I just wanted to do things, I didn't want to constantly reconfigure the system and deal with all the broken bits from the latest update. Kubuntu still has a lot of that, but it only happens every 6 months, instead of every few days like it used to. (Debian Stable was -not- stable. And Slackware was much worse.)
Open source has definitely taken over for anyone who 'gets it'. At this moment, I've got Firefox, OpenOffice.org, Aptana (based on Eclipse), VLC, and Kate running on OS X. The only commercial apps I run now are ones that don't really have a replacement, like Pages (company requirement for internal docs), and a few that are just plain better than the alternatives, like VMWare. (I've fought and fought with VirtualBox, and I'm done.)
But to expect non-techies to know all of this all the time is absurd. Most of the advancements that make my system possible came in the last couple years. That is a -short- timespan for learning about new things that aren't in your realm of knowledge.
In fact, I see posts on /. all the time talking about how someone put OO.o on a family member's computer and just didn't tell them it wasn't Office because they couldn't explain the difference. If techies can't explain it to their family, why do we expect teachers to know automatically?
And 'sorely in need' of an education in open source? That a personal agenda and not something that is necessary at all. Kids will learn about open source on their own, no matter whether a teacher says it is bad or not.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Looks like the teacher has been taking anti-Linux parodies a little too seriously.
As an IT Manager for a school, I was able to roll out several open source solutions - Edubuntu (for a low cost scalable lab with low end equipment), open source groupware, firewall, proxy, content filter, Thunderbird,Firefox, linux kiosks and more. Teachers and administrators don't care if there is proper training and the bottom line is low. Children don't know the difference between closed and open source either.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
This seems to be alarmingly biased. It's more about bashing teachers than anything else. Are teachers, as a whole, any less informed about Open Source than the general public? I don't think so.
This is just taking a couple of alleged incidents, with no real proof that they happened, and turning it into a political screed. So why is it that the teachers bear all the responsibility, when it is not even part of their curriculum?
... and then they built the supercollider.
If $150 breaks the bank, then you need to reconsider how you are going to college. Especially if you are going to be spending all of that money on a degree like an English degree. Too many people are going to college when they can't afford it or shouldn't be going there, and $150 is chump change compared to what even in-state tuition costs. Especially when you consider the fact that these Microsoft licenses are one-time deals for the entire duration of college.
I don't see why people are letting teachers like "Karen" remain anonymous. These people are paid for by tax dollars and are responsible to the public. If they promote commercial software to students and write nasty letters to non-profits, the public has a right to know.
Rather than getting into a pissing contest with her, he should just have said thank you, posted the letter on his blog, and sent a copy to the pta.
http://moodle.org/
I should know .. I used to be one :)
An example of this scenario: Earlier this year, the principal of my school got on the intercom in order to make a very important announcement: that Firefox was "some sort of proxy" and that any students caught using it or installing it on any school computer would be immediately suspended for a one-week period. That had to have been the most WTF thing I've heard from the administration on opensource software.
You make some good points but I am a bit frightened about your hypothesis that paying people a good salary to do a job they love is risky, and if you only pay people a poor salary then you'll gte higher quality staff as only the highly passionate will apply to do it.
My personal opinion as a university researcher who works alongside teachers in a local secondary school is whatever they get paid, it isn't enough! :-)
And seriously, pay high, then lots of people will compete for jobs, then the school gets to choose a high quality teacher. I'm afraid I don't buy the line that if you want really high quality staff, pay really low wages.
Children are the future of society, the people we'll depend on when we're old and need to rely on others. Surely we want to spend as much as possible on their education, it's what they do for most of their waking life for ten years...
That story on the Register is terrible. Talk about burying the lead.
It does say "Updated" but the related stories don't have any others.
The way they phrased it, it's obscure until you get deep into the story why she was getting attacked and exactly how much she deserved it. If anything, she should have been sued for slander if she made any of those comments about it being "illegal" to her students or otherwise publicly.
I found her pleas for mercy highly entertaining. Reminds me of the guy that taunted Maddox: "Maddox, I am sincerely apologetic... Please please take it down. If you any shred of decency please. This is all wrong. Please take it off."
As they get more popular, especially with non-expert users, more vulnerabilities will be found and exploited.
No, they won't. The difference of security between Linux and Windows isn't due to open source or due to popularity, it's due to software distribution: people get all their Linux software from the distributor; almost nobody needs to install third party applications. That eliminates most sources of viruses and malware.
I hate a lot of teachers as much as the next person. Having done a few years of IT support in education I know all too well how dire some of them can be especially when it comes to computers.
But there has to be a realisation that not all teachers need to use IT to teach their subject and more importantly, to them, knowledge of open source software is completely and utterly irrelevant knowledge for what they need to do their job. There's a lot of things that different people suggest teachers need an education in but at the end of the day, they're only human and only have so much time and capacity for knowledge. After all, the RIAA wanted teachers to have an education in how bad copyright infringement is to pass onto the kids too but I'm sure many will agree here that's a waste of teacher's time.
An attitude whereby people in the OSS community demand teachers be given an education doesn't really sound much different from the idea of political re-education forced upon people by repressive regimes around the world through the years. It's also like the idea of Jehova's witnesses visiting my door every Sunday peaching their ways because apparently I need an education in religious rubbish too according to them. I know the people making these claims that OSS is superior believe this is true and it's an opinion I share at least in some product areas but it is just opinion and you can't "educate" people with opinion if they don't share it or simply aren't interested in it.
If OSS wants to break further into education it has to provide products that fill a niche or do a better job of existing proprietary solutions focussed on teachers needs. I have witnessed this as being successful in that when a few teachers I've dealt with encountered products such as Audacity, MIT's Scratch and so on they were then led to enquire a little more about this open source thing and stumbled across more products in the process. We were fortunate enough that one of these people was an IT coordinator and so the school now, 5 years on since first discovering OSS still afaik runs Linux which they switched to around 3 years ago, but this is still unfortunately only one school in the 153 we supported.
OSS isn't going to win the battle for hearts and minds as it were by thrusting knowledge onto people in such an agressive sounding manner, many of whom it's irrelevant to. It needs to do it by simply beating the competition, and if it can't, then well, that's tough- at the end of the day there's no god given right that OSS should be chosen if better properietary solutions exist and educational institutes are willing to pay.
Where pushing the OSS agenda could come in useful is at PTA/school board meetings and the like, if the advantages are spelt out well there then that's where real progress can be made. There is no room for zealotry when doing this, it requires people with a level head who can address concerns and accept valid criticisms but also offer where possible, solutions to those criticisms. One things for sure though, pushing the agenda on to teachers forefully will only increase resentment against the community, they need to find it for themselves which they will do if it's there and most importantly- if it's relevant to them.
What teachers really need is :
- Basic computer training. You would be amazed as to how many still can't figure out basic things like email, powerpoint or other similar 'basic' applications
- Updated material. I was talking with a friend who is still in high-school, and his civics book still has no mention of the 42nd or 43rd President. Oh, yeah, and his European Culture class still has a chapter about the Berlin Wall -- an object that hasn't been apart of European culture since before he was born.
- More salary. Many of the bankers went before congress defending their massive bonuses and payouts to employees using bailout money in order to retain the best talent. How are we ever going to get the best talent into teaching if we pay them slightly above minimum wage?! Show me a teacher that hasn't reached tenure who isn't struggling, and I'll show you a person who must have married rich.
- Better Student/Parent relationships. If teachers wouldn't be spending all their time baby-sitting, they could actually teach relevant stuff. School isn't a place where kids learn, it's a place kids > age of 5 go for the day while mommy and daddy are at work.
Once these issues are fixed, then maybe teachers could spend some time learning about the latest FOSS craze.
My daughter's school is the pilot for our county in the adoption of Open Office -- we are in Stafford county, the 12th richest per-capita in the US!
However, when we still get "do a powerpoint" as a requirement and when math teachers have not heard about open source projects like octave, gnuplot, etc., we have a problem....
Also, the school board rules still prohibit "altering computer date or programs" or "removing computer data or programs", so I guess they can't even log in or save a file without violating the rules....
http://2038bug.com/free-software.html
It is hence of very little benefit to have
kids running around telling people to install
Linux where it just won't work.
... or maybe speed metal. He sure knows how to bang it. His rants remind me of Queen Kat (Katherine Thomas).
I don't disagree with all his arguments, but he manages to come off as so histrionic that even people like me already in the choir don't want to listen to him. How can this guy ever come across as rational to people who aren't already in complete agreement?
...when we still have science teachers denying evolution and the occasional history teacher downplaying the Holocaust? Let's get those educational issues straightened out first, and then we can worry about Linux which, let's be honest, is far less essential to the average high school diploma.
In my current work, I actually train school IT staff and administrators on the use of an automated phone calling system and batch database synching tool. Some are competant and professional. Some are clearly the office secretary in a little school who has sadly had this thrust upon her. Many fall into the following category:
This profile, while a stereotype, is a significant portion of the "IT Professionals" in primary and secondary ed field today. They're adequate for performing the basic day-to-day tasks in front of them, but when you get outside of their comfort zone they're lost. They get hassled and/or blamed for any surprises that come along, and as such are extremely gunshy about anything unfamilliar.
Their approach is calcified and overly cautious, as any changes, even beneficial ones, tax their time to the limit. It may well be that major inroads of F/OSS into education will either have to be mandated from the top down, or wait until most of these people retire and are placed by people who have a modern IT background.
One solution would be for universities to offer a CIS degree track that carries teacher certification. Right now, I don't know of any schools where you can get an education degree in computer science or information systems. As a result, you get people teaching IT/CIS who have their primary training in another field. Like the coaches who get stuck teaching social studies because they need to fill time, some IT teachers are the English teachers or Librarians who get thrown into the computer classroom because they are really good with Google or know how to change themes in PowerPoint.
The thing I love about free products is that I can easily recommend them to my students. I can't do that with commercial software. This is because a) software vendors do their own advertising, and b) it's very easy for me to sit there and spend kids' money that they may or may not have. The ability to recommend software to students would be a big plus for any teacher I know. I think it should be presented that way to teachers. Now of course this applies to the higher level applications, not so much to OS, but it's a start. Once all the high level applications are platform agnostic, it becomes a simple transition (for the end user) to change the OS.
I've got a number of kids who are really into GIMP now, and a couple who are dual booting. It's a start.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
She called him on his cellphone. Cellphone records are public and can be purchased. I can purchase yours, you can purchase mine. So buy his cellphone records for the period of interest. Her phone number is the one originating in the Austin area.
I felt lazy and wanted some free credit, so I took an intro to Linux class. I thought it would be a breeze considering I've been using Linux for so long. I had no idea how many things [according to the school] I apparently do wrong. Rather than an obnoxiously long list, here's my absolute favorite:
"I want you to get into the habit of logging in as root"
):
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
Any commercial use of the software, and any resale or further distribution of the software, other than as expressly authorized by this agreement, constitutes a material breach of this agreement and may violate applicable copyright laws.
Looks like you were advocating copyright infringement. Clamwin is the only Free Software virus scanner I know of.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
Damn, where to start??&^%#@#@
Teachers need an education.
fixed that one too !
I think we should teach Open Source concepts in Kindergarden. Isn't that when they teach that it's good to share, work as a team, and care about others? How sad that we loose those values so soon in life and they are not usually reinforced.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
When he opens his pie hole, unless something about linguistics comes out of it then he has zero credibility beyond that of Joe Six-Pack.
As an aside, this Helios guy really has his panties in a wad. Of all the things to be outraged about... It doesn't help him present his cause to educators when his rants are full of butchered colloquialisms and terrible grammar. How about you take a Valium, Helios, and then focus your efforts on reaching kids with Open Source software instead of trying to browbeat some bureaucrat with concepts that are clearly beyond their grasp? Eventually said bureaucrats will retire/die and be replaced with all of the kids brought up to not fear OSS.
The meme is that if it were more common it would be more hacked.
NOTHING ELSE is given as a possible factor to change that.
Therefore, Apache is more common and it would be more hacked.
But it isn't.
So, instead of saying why this isn't the case, you just say "Yeah, but Apache is different". Well, what??
Linux has been around for about as long as Apache.
The UNIX underpinnings in security has been around for far, FAR longer than Apache. Hell, even the internet or even ethernet.
So why do you forget that Linux and its security model are different and, like Apache, have had to grow with the internet from its infancy unlike Microsoft's "One person, one computer, nobody touches it" security. And therefore, like apache, even if it DOES become more popular, it, like apache, won't become more virused than Windows.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Apache is a different situation. Apache has been around since the Internet and as such has fought the battles.
Therefore, becoming popular does not necessarily mean that security will be worse. Notice that the smug attitude of apache fans didn't prevent them from making a secure product. By your reasoning, apache should be chock full of security holes by now.
Teachers really don't need an open source education. It might be helpful for someone to define what FOSS is and why it isn't illegal to distribute copies of, say, Linux. But they don't need much more than that really.
The vast majority of teachers lack the ability to do most simple tasks on a computer. This is disappointing given the prevalence of computers in the classroom, computer labs, and overall technology deployment in schools (reinforced audio, interactive whiteboards, projectors, etc). Despite the widespread adoption of this technology most teachers remain technologically inept.
I don't have a bias against teachers - in fact I applaud anyone willing to deal with hundreds of screaming miscreants for low pay day in and day out - but I do find it astonishing that teachers in their 20's (who have grown up playing games on the computer, using Powerpoint for presentations, Word for reports, Excel for spreadsheets, and doing their research on the Net) have such trouble accomplishing simple tasks or learning new things.
No, I'm afraid what teachers really need is some basic technology training: this is how you operate the projector; this is how most programs function (minimize, restore, save, save as, menu items, etc); these are some of the basic functions of Windows. Once they pass basic training give them some intermediate training: this is what ports your computer has; some basic network connectivity troubleshooting; this is how to replace the batteries in your wireless keyboard/mouse. And follow it up with some advanced training.
Unfortunately the scenario above isn't likely to play out anytime soon. School administrators, from elementary schools to district-level administration, generally focus on the wrong-kind of technology training. For instance, instead of forcing kids to take a semester-long keyboarding class why not give them a class that teaches some basic hardware and software functionality, operation, and troubleshooting? What we need is a shift in *what* we're teaching in terms of technology, both to teachers and students.
I realize that we're mostly FOSS advocates here on /. but why don't we teach teachers the actual technology before trying to make them learn the details of FOSS.
I work with faculty (I'm an academic librarian), and one of the biggest problems is that faculty and administrations think they know it all already. You can tell them ANYTHING that they've never heard of, but because you don't have the designation "faculty", they don't believe that you know what you're talking about! Seriously - the computer people push open source, the BIS (Business and Information Science) people try to push it, the library pushes it, but the rest of the faculty and administrators say "oh, that's a thing for computer geeks - not for the rest of us. We have to use Microsponge because they're the proven brand" - HA
Sorry, just hit a nerve because I completely agree that education is the answer, but I've been there and tried that with the above results...
Hey, stop writing in perl and hacking the school grade server!
You said:
Paying enough that teaching appeals to people in it for the money is risky.
I'm sorry but at best this is silly. Its the logic that has been used for years to underpay teachers. I live with a 4th grade teacher, my mother was a special ed teacher, my sister was a music teacher and their salaries were/are all horrible. They all had/have Master's degree and I make 2x what they make/made. I personally would teach but the household can't afford the salary cut.
If we are going to apply the principle that you espouse - that people need to suffer to teach to the teaching profession we should do the same thing to others such as doctors, lawyers, and engineers of all kinds. Surely we want them to be passionate about their jobs just like teachers!
Teachers these days have enough problems teaching the 3 R's little lone any other subject. Have you ever seen the average kids spelling or grammer lately?
Back to the basics I say...
Oh yeah and get off my lawn you little whipper-snappers....
Talk about irony. It's an article about schools written by a guy that looks like a lunch lady. Where are the eyebrows?
"When you see a unixer brainwashed beyond saving, kick him out of the door." - Xah Lee
I teach high school, and I consider myself something of an OSS expert...I've been using OSS since the 90's (actually made some money from it working in the industry for several years), several consulting gigs related to OSS, currently a developer on a couple of active OSS projects. I don't believe I fit the mold of your typical "OSS-challenged" teacher. But the problem I have is finding like-minded teachers who have a clue about how to integrate OSS technology in the classroom. My school district has taken some baby steps in this regard (they have a Moodle installation I'm helping with, and I use OSS tools in every one of my CS classes without fear of reprisal).
So, where do the teachers hang out who not only know how to spell "OSS" but are also actively promoting OSS in the public school system?
Telling teachers that they know nothing about OSS/IT will accomplish nothing. They are teachers, not learners!
Don't push stuff at them, draw them in.
The appeal has to be to their politics (which are generally left-leaning):
- Get them involved by asking them how they could to help their disadvantaged students with computers.
- Ask them if they would like to assist in the fight against corporate monopolies.
- Explain the concept of world-wide co-operation - and how kids can learn from it - and benefit too.
- Let them know that it's both legal and OK to copy OSS.
- Explain that, rules-wise, it's completely OK (schools and school administrations are fraught with rules).
- Show them that virus-proof software is less work for them (teachers hate extra burdens of non-related work).
- Bring apples to your presentation!
*** Don't be dull.***
I think at first it would be useful to define what "higher education" is. If you're talking about University, you'll find that most have been traditional hot-beds for UNIX adoption and development. Most CIS classes these days are being done in Java which is directly portable to OSS platforms.
/. pick stuff up as we go along, but to go from no-knowledge to being able to teach others in a short period is unrealistic for most people whose college education was 70% teaching methods, 30% subject area and was probably 10-20 years ago.
If you're talking about day-time television advertised trade schools/certification mills; by using Windows they are teaching what the majority of entry level positions are going to encounter, which is being the jack-of-all-trades might manage some older XP boxes, a few laser printers, and maybe a high-end-pc-turned file server in a closet and maybe a switch or two. Using the MS Certification curiculum gives them some credibility with incoming students and makes their life a whole lot easier. I teach at one of these programs on the side, and the command line and scripting is avoided like the plauge in the 80% of the class that is Windows based, and then the Linux/OSS module is very short, and has a huge learning curve.
If you're talking about K-12 schools; the problem is that technology is a small subset of classes taught. It isn't overly important that the English teacher doesn't know that OO.org is "good enough" for them to type their term papers on. If you are refering to the CIS/IT instructors, often their "lab facilities" are dictated by the District central IT, who wants that lab to be standardized accross the board. Having Linux labs for Programming classes, Macs for multimedia, and Windows for Computer App (office, typing, computer literacy) classes makes administration much more difficult for a generally small, underfunded department who has facilities over a large geographic area. For that reason, most schools have Mac or Windows PCs on every teacher desk, and thats what the labs run. MS Office is "very compatible" and "very cheap" for academic institutions and has a greater userbase and most teachers are "good enough" to figure it out. I'm with everyone here when I say that OO.org 3.x is more like MS Office 97-2003 than MS Office 2007 is; but most of those Computer Apps classes are using off-the-shelf MS Office ciriculum that is scarce or doesn't exist for OO.org.
To address the problem that K-12 teachers don't know what they are doing, is that most are union (Disclaimer: Until I get this gig I was union), and unless they bitch slap a kid or show up drunk, or do something un-"PC", they aren't going to fire them. This is particularly true for IT/CIS teachers, because Administrators don't know how deficient they are, and there is no objective state-exam to prove his students are not being taught versus the rest of the state like in the core-subject areas like math or reading. There is next to no incentive for teachers to learn new skills more than enough to get students to be able to answer the questions out of the book (other than their own knowledge), and particularly at the 9-12 range, teachers are put into subject-areas rather than specific courses. I had a teacher who moon-lights as an Accounting prof, who was amazing at MS Office/Excel, but they dropped her into a multimedia class 2 weeks before the course started (against her will) and it was unreasonable that she'd be "stellar" teaching that course having had no experience.
Sometimes we falsely assume that teachers are mental heavyweights that can pick up new knowledge at the drop of the hat. Most of us here on
All that being said, I wish teachers would see the merit in improving their skills for the good of their students or their own knowledge, but many simply don't care because it doesn't effect them; and many are very set in their ways. (I am married to; and work with teachers).
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
i teach undergrads going into teaching. i stopped using Blackboard many years ago and only use open source solutions in my teaching. for example, i use phpbb for discussion forums; i use drupal for our class management (the book feature puts it over the top against Moodle); and, i even highly encourage my students to download Firefox during the first week of class. more importantly than using these tools, i also explain to my students the reasons i use these tools and what it means to use open source over commercial, etc. -- i should note, the vast majority of my students haven't heard of open source or just assumed that open source was a longer way of saying "free." i wish other teacher prep programs would emphasize these solutions. on a related note, think of the money that elementary schools could save by switching to Edubuntu or something similar along with Open Office . . . times every computer in the building. our tax dollars are going to MS Windows and Office and it's really just wasted at that level. i'd argue the same for high schools, but at least let's get elementary schools on board.
I think the problem is that most people have such painful memory at school, so much that the last thing they consider is to go back to school and teach for the rest of their lives. Besides the perceived bad work environment, many people also consider the salary too low to be a viable career option. But if you can't increase the salary, at least improve the work environment to make it better. This will attract more qualified candidates and cause a competition to increase the teachers' knowledge level.
Fortunately, making the work environment better for teachers is something you can do as a student. Try to build a good relationship with your teachers and make them feel appreciated for what they do. This increases your chance of getting better teachers. Maybe one day you will consider teaching as a career, making a change to education in order to address the things you criticize now.
I once had a signature.
We should do the same thing to Doctors, unfortunately the AMA makes sure it doesn't happen.
Even though we have fewer Doctors in the US than pretty much every other developed country, the AMA still limits the number significantly. If there was anything resembling a market for medical practice, Doctors would indeed be paid less. America is fairly unique in its incredibly high-pay doctors.
I know less about it, but I am willing to be the bar association does a similar thing to keep lawyers over-paid.
I'm willing to bet the balance on engineers is about right, it's not the type of thing broad ranges of people want to be.
In my area a teacher with a masters (first year) is right about at the median household income for the area (or the top third for the country, in what is actually not too expensive a place to live).
This is not great pay, but it is not bad, and comes to a pretty high daily pay.
I'm sure that if you truly want to teach you will end up there later in life, with more life experience, I know that many of my best teachers made that choice once their children were through college.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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You never know if the knowledge is completely and utterly irrelevant. Someone with that knowledge could invent creative uses.
For example, an English teacher could tell his/her students to use Google Documents. At the very least, nobody needs to buy word processor software, and the teacher can see the latest work of a student before the due date of assignment and identify problems early. If the teacher is willing, he/she could sign on to instant messenger and help the students out in the evenings when they do homework. They can collaborate directly on the paper the student is writing in almost real-time.
Also, revision history could help exposing plagiarism by showing abnormal editing pattern.
I once had a signature.
Back about 1985, I had a job training teachers at a school how to use a PC. It was supposed to be an intro class on DOS, how to format a floppy, copy files, list files. It was one hour, twice a week, and I don't remember how many weeks, but not a great number. There were a couple of people there that honestly wanted to learn about computers. But, there were some that came in with a closed mind and an attitude problem. One woman was determined to be as unpleasant as possible.
The program was run through a local Vo-Tech school, not the school system, as a pilot program. So, when the teachers wanted to learn DBase and whatever the word processor of the day was, instead of the intro stuff, the Vo-tech rolled over for them. It was a disaster. The ones that "knew" they were smarter than anyone else monopolized the computers, argued with everyone that tried to help them with problems, and made the class a living hell for all.
To their credit, the Vo-tech backed me when the cast-iron bitch complained, pointing out that she was the one that wanted the advanced material in an intro class, but when asked to teach again, I declined. I stuck my finger in the fan, I am not going to put my head in the meat grinder.
There are some good teachers in the system, but they are overshadowed by the egotistical head-cases. These people are on some kind of power trip, and they pick teaching because they can abuse the kids emotionally and the kids don't have the tools to fight back effectively. Most kids just know how to get mad, and when that happens the teacher has won. These same teachers pull this crap on IT people out of habit, because most IT people are younger than the teacher in question. I don't like having my buttons pushed, so I try to stay out of educational IT.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
As an ICT teacher (and open-source fanboy) in Northern Ireland, I have the following problems:
- All schools purchase through a central body called Classroom 2000 (C2k). C2k only do Microsoft, or very old Adobe products that don't run well when all students in the room try to use them (for reasons unknown).
- Software4students.co.uk will let students buy cheap versions of MS Office, etc. Their school gets a few pounds for every copy bought. I know teachers who have been reprimanded for advising students to download OO.org because they are acting "contrary to school policy".
- I am posting this from school using IE. I am not allowed to run any other browser. Even if I wanted to download FF, I'd find the Moz website is blocked.
- CCEA (CCEA.org.uk), the examining body, have specifications that are 'platform neutral'. At training days, however, it is assumed that all coursework is being done with MS products. 'Platform neutral' exam papers and mark schemes use MS screenshots and can disadvantage students who use anything else. Indeed, some mark schemes have marked 'wrong' anyone answering 'platform neutral' questions from a non-Windows/IE perspective.
So, I want to use open source in the classroom. The tools supplied for me (that I cannot change) are MS-centric. Even my seniors cannot properly experience software development as C2k won't let anything resembling a compiler near their hardware. Advising students to use open-source can bring about a reprimand (that is like water off a duck's back!).
It's all rather annoying.
I would say that 90% of teachers teach from The Text Book as if it was a Gospel. Now just about everybody here knows that Documentation can be
1 Flat Wrong
2 overly conservative
3 Outdated
4 Incomplete
But some teachers would argue C code with Kernighan and Ritchie while using isbn 0131103628 as a primary textbook!
(and they will think they are the ones that are "right")
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
You keep using that word "need". I do not think it means what you think it means.
Any generalization, such as the one stated in the above summary, is bad and goes against the very core of the argument it appears to be making. I teach at a University and FOSS/Libre concepts are weaved through every relevant aspect of every single lecture I give. Sure, I am a Linux/FOSS enthusiast but I also use just about every other relevant platform under the Sun. As such I don't see myself as a Linux/FOSS evangelist. Rather, I see this form of education as part of sustainable outlook on the future where generations upon whose shoulders this mess of a society remains will have to make hard decisions to ensure that they don't end-up cornered in an Orwellian nightmare or worse yet counting last days on a dying planet.
I offer my knowledge and expertise to teachers in training... I run labs... I volunteer my time to help train teachers.
BUT, for the most part they do not wish to learn IT stuff. Why, because they don't get marks for it.
They don't want to understand how PC's work, how the OS works, how networks work, how software works. They aren't interested in troubleshooting IT problems. They don't want to build their own smart boards or document cameras. So the real question is WHY not.
Because very few people truly want this knowledge. They know that it isn't expected of them. As long as they know how to use Facebook, a cell phone, turn on a computer, surf the web, load a mp3 player they are happy and think they are complete.
They are no different from the majority of the people out there. They are consumers not creators.
This leads us to the real problem, the root cause of our political and economic crisis.
We are happy to be simple consumers while off-shoring the real knowledge part of our lives. We are happy to return the new gadget instead of reading the manual to make it work. We are happy to be ignorant of how our toys, cars, houses, retirement, health, economies, politics, environment work. We have abdicated responsibility for being educated.
So when we see teachers in school who don't know try to bullshit their way... When we watch web videos of our kids doing stupid stunts or posing for porn... when we see CEO's of banks, car companies, insurance firms, energy traders behaving like fiscal morons and breaking the law to enrich themselves... When we permit our politicians to openly and blatantly lie to us, embroil us in ill conceived conflicts, drain our national wealth into the pockets of their friends... When we see any of this and don't speak up, then we deserve whatever our new masters give us.
So do you want to make a change? Get involved. Demand participation. Learn something real and teach it to other people. Volunteer in a school. Turn off the f**king TV. Be active in the education of your kids.
Sorry folks... I took a little leeway in my comments.
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Frankly educating teachers as to what Open Source is all about is only the edge of the battle. A better war to fight is to Open Source colleges completely right down to soup and sleeping bags. We need an educated population. The last thing we need is for any aspect of education to cost one red cent!
My wife is a teacher. She teaches 7th graders in northern Utah. She is fully aware with what Open Source is and the benefits it can provide. The issue isn't entirely about teachers, but instead about the administrators.
For instance, her computer is very strictly locked down, even to the teachers. She cannot get anything installed without going through red tape and having their IT staff get it installed. SHE cannot herself install it by their policies. If she does want a software package installed, it must get approval from the board and it has to be deemed 'Supportable' meaning their IT staff must have training on it and someone must be available for it. Who approves that training? The same board that determines if it's supportable.
Sadly, the economy means they're tightening their belts and they are more open to 'cheaper' overall solutions.
What we need is someone to teach us the basics about how it is useful and how it is compatible with our existing operating systems. We don't get a choice, ya know. Whatever the school buys, that's what we get. I'm planning on giving a talk at a future math conference on applications that are helpful (GIMP 2.0 for making graphs, etc.) You have to understand, too, that many teachers are aged, and can barely start up their own machine. Focus on the young teachers and you'll have your solution.
He's being a grammar nazi (admit v. emit). Just ignore him.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I need some help.
I teach high school and am interested in helping my school system transition to as much FOSS software as possible. Currently we have windows of different versions on the desktop PCs in classrooms, windows on administrator's computers, and I'm not sure what's running on our server backend. I do know that we use Novell Zenworks and MS Office pretty much systemwide.
So, assuming that jettisoning the MS products would save money (who knows, based on the deals and the cost of retraining?), does anyone have suggestions on how to broach the subject? I am acquainted with the county's IT director. I was thinking of trying to get a computer that was scheduled for discard (it happens here from time to time) and getting permission to try and get it set up to interact with the school network, but with FOSS products. This is interesting enough for me to want to try this on my own time.
I feel as though asking this in the wrong way the first time will make it near impossible to get approval if I ask again.
Has anyone had experience with this kind of endeavor that they could share?
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
I've heard a brief "explanation" of Open Source from my teachers that wrongfully equates it with a Wiki, where "everyone can edit it" and you therefore can't trust it. Though you can sort of freely edit Open Source, you can't normally have any of your contributions instantly in the main version, like a Wiki. And if anything, Open source should be trusted more than Proprietary software as you have the ability to thoroughly review it's functionality.
What did your mother and sister do over the summers, and during winter breaks? What did you do over the same time periods?
I'm not against paying teachers more, but if they're only going to work 3/4ths of the year, they should only make 3/4ths of a normal salary.
Don't forget the PERA retirement packages and such that your mother and sister have, either. They don't have to pay into those to get a pretty nice retirement, whereas you and I (who make more yearly) should budget a fairly large chunk of our own income for retirement.
Teaching is an important job. But they aren't the only ones who work long hours for no extra pay, and they have some pretty nice benefits when you take all of their compensation into consideration.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Pardon me, but where would you get the ridiculous idea teachers don't pay into their retirement package?
what country are you living in?
I'm not asking this to be rude or invasive, but for perspective on the issue.
In my province (Ontario) elementary teachers earn about $90,000/year.
if you consider a teachers salary to be so horrible a family can not survive on one, you must either be
1. living in an extremely expensive area,
2. be well-off and spending recklessly, or
3. the teachers in your area have a really, really bad contract.
-I only code in BASIC.-
This is one old dupe.
I'm not against paying teachers more, but if they're only going to work 3/4ths of the year, they should only make 3/4ths of a normal salary.
Let's say you were going to get up in front of your boss and talk for an hour about a particular topic relevant to your job. How much time would you need to prepare? A couple days? Even a week?
Now, let's assume that you've got five bosses and you have to give each boss an hour long presentation back-to-back on the same day. Five hours of presentation all in a single day. That would be a rough day, right? OK, now assume that you have to do these five hours of presentation every day for a week? And then assume that you have to do this week after week with only the occasional holiday thrown in.
All those presentations - day after day, week after week. When are you going to prepare? Might be nice if you had a month and a half each year to get ahead on the prep work - because once you start those back-to-back presentation you sure aren't going to have much prep time.
Or maybe you would just present the same material over and over again - year after year. But isn't that what everybody is always complaining about - that teachers don't learn new material. That teachers don't learn about "open source", for example.
Basically, teaching is a performance that requires preparation - like being a classical violist. The salary that a classical violinist receives isn't just for the actual time on stage. It's for all those long hours of practice. Teaching is the same. If you want mediocre teachers that basically just babysit and never update their material then, sure, just pay them for the time their standing up in from of the class.
But if you want great teachers who give great lectures and who update their material with the latest developments in the field then you're going to have to pay for quite a bit of prep time.
Most teachers are unable to deliver true education because the educational system is wrong. We must replace it with free schools.
This seems to be more of a problem in the US. I remember when I was in my last few years of school in the UK we had a crazy physics teacher who was building a beowulf cluster in the staff common room using old computers that had been replaced. His OS of choice? Gentoo Linux.
At the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, we have a strong commitment to open-source technologies and we use them heavily in our curriculum. Maybe it's time to have some teacher workshops in "Open Source in the Classroom"
The worst I've had to do is search for a computer where both of the plastic support stands on the keyboard are up...angled down keyboards suck.
I like my university's computer labs because the hardware & Internet connection is great (at least compared to my old consumer grade stuff), so even straightforward stuff zips along.
Also, the lab needs to be quite except for incidental necessary noise (like clacking keys, people collaborating on group work) Don't automute the sound...enforce a "use headphones" policy
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
"do a powerpoint"...couldn't you just use OO Impress to save as .ppt?
Does the teacher expect "Microsoft Office PowerPoint" to come up in the application's title bar when you are delivering the presentation or something?
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Hello! Good article! I am an educator. I teach at the Community College level. Mostly Network Security but also Linux and all kinds of Computer related courses. I have been a strong supporter of Open Source. Luckily the school I teach at right now is fairly open minded, even though they do not offer a Linux class (yet). In the past I have faced deans that have told me that Linux has no place in a college because businesses run on Windows. I tried to tell them that Google and Yahoo are run on Linux. I told them that most of their home routers run a form of Linux, and that their Tivo runs Linux. I was told that I am wrong. I have been set aside by other professors who thought I was pirating software when i distributed Open Source software to my students. Once or twice a year I get a student who comes to me with a problem. They are running Linux, and have a problem with their ISP, and their ISP tells them that Linux will not work with their ISP. I even have seen one student be threatened by the support person, who said that he would cancel the account because the student was obviously a "hacker" because Linux is a "Hacker's Operating system." Yet I have also seen the other side of the coin. I recently was fortunate enough to have the lead on a computer scholarship project. A local business donated 100 computers to us. I led a team of students who made sure the drives were securely wiped, Installed Ubuntu on them, set up OpenOffice so that it wouldn't conflict too much with the school's Windows centric focus (save things in .doc by default etc.), and trained students who didn't have computers in their use.
Every time I hear a horror story about a badly informed teacher, especially in IT I cringe. Here I am with two IT degrees, including a masters in Information Assurance, I am a good teacher (if I do say so myself!), and I can not get anything more than adjunct work. Yet these yahoos are out there teaching! Sure, I could make a lot more going into the private sector, but I WANT to teach! Sigh.
Open Source: Eroding the Digital Divide
When my boy was in fourth grade we had 'the discussion' - you know the one - "why Windows is evil and hastening mankind's demise". So, he became cognoscent of OS choices and the like fairly early on. He started telling me about his ID10T 'technology' teacher shortly thereafter. This woman had a computer lab for the students which was composed entirely of Mac's. So, what does she do? She paid someone to come in and wipe OSX and install Windows for Mac on all of them because "it is more secure." When my son downloaded Firfox she made him uninstall it because "Internet Explorer 7 is the only secure browser." When he started middle school I thought maybe his tech teacher would be a little bit better informed. No such luck, he got in a knock-down drag-out, the first week over - get this - "visiting Slashdot"! So when I sent this guy excerpts from the NSA's findings on Windows security flaws he ignored he suggested it was made up. When the huge security hole in IE made news a few weeks ago, I told my son to show the story to his teacher. His teacher says to my son,"That's great Brad, I'm glad you made up a website that says Windows isn't safe..." I simply give up...
I've bought clothes from a varity of places; Old Navy and Gap
Apparently the company that owns the Gap and Old Navy are the same, and it also owns the Banana Republic, Gap Inc.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
You did the opposite of Jaime Escalante?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Teachers should be taught
"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I DO and I UNDERSTAND." --Confucius
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
to make this easy to spot and repair, hopefully to prevent.
People might like to view this video I made of the recent Open Source Schools Seminar given at BETT in London in the UK recently. I tend not to get involved in debates any more I just do stuff that people can disseminate and be practical with - so please go here and have a look at the presentations and judge for yourselves: http://www.l4l.co.uk/?p=164