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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."
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 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/
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!
Please, don't use the word "virii" anymore.
And, as you said, Apache is very popular as a web server, and still isn't as vulnerable as Microsofts IIS.
So no, vulnerability does not always rise with popularity.
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
Linux needs to stop the smug attitude because users don't care about smugness. They just want things to work!
I agree. Most teachers simply do not have time to learn about Linux, FOSS, etc. they're too busy trying to keep up with all the paperwork, requirements, and BTW teach to worry about that stuff; and they're not about to spend money on a continuing ed class that doesn't get them either con-ed credits or a higher qualification
In addition, most districts are very restrictive about what can be loaded on district machines, so most teachers won't even try FOSS for fear of getting in trouble over IT rules. It simply isn't worth the hassle.
OTOH, you can make it easy to show teachers how FOSS can benefit student. If a teacher want's students to do presentations, providing a clear set of directions on how to install OpenOffice and set it up to save in an Office compatible format, so they can offer that as an alternative to parents buying Office, helps them at minimal effort on their part and generates awareness for FOSS.
Instead of assuming teachers are the enemy look at things from their perspective and see what you can do to make things easier for them.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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...
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.
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.
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!
You having a black sheep is one thing. You saying you have a black sheep is another. And you saying that someone else (that I've never met or heard of) has a black sheep is yet another.
At the bottom of the
Uh, why? Some of the best known hoaxes have been elaborate, detailed lies similar to this (some on much broader scales). So the whole argument that it was elaborate, so it must not be a hoax is just nonsense, based on actual real-world hoaxes as well as simple logic.