Draws up an interesting case for Open source in schools. Now that we are actually undertaking one such endeavour..we should think about it. i hope generates some good discussion around the same. cheers tripta _____________________________________________________________________ http://edge-op.org/grouch/schools.html Why should open source software be used in schools?
It is indeed a strange world when educators need to be convinced that sharing information, as opposed to concealing information, is a good thing. The advances in all of the arts and sciences, indeed the sum total of human knowledge, is the result of the open sharing of ideas, theories, studies and research. Yet throughout many school systems, the software in use on computers is closed and locked, making educators partners in the censorship of the foundational information of this new age. This software not only seeks to obscure how it works, but it also entraps the users' data within closed, proprietary formats which change on the whim of the vendor and which are protected by the bludgeon of the End User License Agreement. This entrapment of data is a strong, punitive incentive to purchase the latest version of the software, regardless of whether it suits the educational purposes better, thereby siphoning more of the school's limited resources away from the school's primary purpose. The use of such closed software in education may be justified only where no suitable open source solution exists. Educators have been called upon throughout history to combat censorship imposed by various powers over the flow of information. The censorship being applied today comes in the form of licenses that lock away the tools to build the information age and laws that limit fair use in ways that are unprecedented in the modern era. The powers imposing this censorship attempt to create an artificial scarcity of information and the tools to work with that information to feed their greed. Where would education be today if, for example, the mechanism and idea of the Gutenberg press were not only hidden, but protected by threat of dire punishment under the law if anyone dared to attempt to "reverse engineer" it? We are well into the beginnings of the Information Age. It stands to affect the people of the world at least as profoundly as the Industrial Age. It is time for the opening of the tools that will be needed to build this new age. Teaching our children to be passive purchasers of closed, proprietary solutions to problems is not enough. Constraining students to move the mouse within the confines of the instruction set of a few closed, proprietary programs merely cages those students and constrains our future. Students should, at least, be given the opportunity to see how their new tools work. They should be given the opportunity to examine the inner workings of software. They should be given the opportunity to extend the functions of their tools, where they see or imagine possibilities. They should not be held back by locking the toolbox of the Information Age and told they must not peer inside, must not try to discover how it works, must not share their tools with others, must not use their tools without paying proper tribute to the software overlords, under penalty and punishment of law. Conversations with high school students who complain of broken networks, unrepaired computers, too few computers, too few choices in programming languages, overworked and (so far as computers are concerned) undertrained teachers are the inspiration leading to this document. The main intent is to provide the following links so that those who wish to bring open source to their schools will have some 'ammunition' with which to persuade those in charge. Perhaps some money can be diverted from its current outflow to be used inside schools. Documents supporting the case for open source software usage: http://bob.nap.edu/html/beingfluent/es.html "Being Fluent With Information Technology: Executive Summary" A report by The Committee On Information Technology Literacy, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications, and the National Research Council. http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,34807,00.html Open Source Opens Education Wired News article by Katie Dean http://www.beaconschool.org/~clehmann/opensource.html Open Source and Education by Chris Lehmann, Technology Coordinator, The Beacon School http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5071 Linux in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Minds, Social Justice by Prof. Bryan Pfaffenberger, Univ. of Virginia http://www.riverdale.k12.or.us/linux/ K12Linux in Schools Project - Home Page Instructions and assistance from a school using Linux http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-08-20-008-20-NW "Wired: Penguin Enrolls in U.S. Schools" "Tux the penguin may become the preferred mascot of America's financially strained public education system - for Linux represents a way to avoid paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for software." http://www.linuxnews.com/stories.php?story=37 "Command Line Interface Accessible to Visually Impaired with trplayer" http://www.linuxnews.com/stories.php?story=246 "Ocularis: Leading the Way for Blind Linux Users" http://sourceforge.net/projects/emacspeak EmacSpeak -- Complete Audio Desktop http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-08-17-017-20-PS-DT-SW PC World: Suite Freedom With StarOffice "Why spend $400 for an office suite when you can get virtually the same applications, and more, for free?" http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_business.html OpenSource - "The Business Case for Open Source" and from the document above, http://www.netaction.org/articles/freesoft.html NetAction - "Information Wants to be Valuable" "...a grim scenario of a world without free software ..." (You may be surprised at just _how_ grim it would be!) http://www2.linuxjournal.com/enterprise/oscomp.html for reasonable and typical mixed platform business solutions and a "Platform Comparison Chart". http://dsl.org/cookbook/ The Linux Cookbook: Tips and Techniques for Everyday Use by Michael Stutz http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/08/10/1441239 Newsforge "Secretaries use Linux, taxpayers save millions by Robin "Roblimo" Miller "Walk into the Largo, Florida, city hall and look at the two computer screens behind the reception desk. Instead of the typical Windows "Start" button in the lower left-hand corner, they have a KDE "Gear" logo, as do almost all of the 400-plus monitors on Largo employees' desks. Receptionists, administrative assistants, and division fire chiefs here all use Linux instead of Windows, and most of them don't really notice one way or the other. But the elected officials who are responsible for Largo's IT budget certainly know about and notice Linux, because using Linux instead of Windows is saving the city a lot of money." http://eltoday.com/article.php3?ltsn=2001-08-27-001-14-PS "City of Progress Chooses Bynari Groupware" Enterprise Linux Today "The day will come when political candidates will face budgetary questions about using Windows instead of Linux," Adelstein observed. "Largo provides the proof needed to create such a political agenda. When you project their open source solutions to other municipal, state, and Federal agencies throughout the United States, the potential savings run into hundreds of billions of dollars." http://www.consultingtimes.com/Largo.html "City of Largo Completes Desktop Transition" by Stephen E. Harris, Publisher, ConsultingTimes "Despite the prevailing wisdom that the Linux desktop is not ready for prime time, Largo has already happily migrated 800 city workers onto the KDE graphical desktop, deployed over an inexpensive thin client network running Red Hat 7.2. ----- "Within budget" is perhaps an understatement. When Largo looked into the conventional solution employing Microsoft's Exchange server and Outlook clients, total hardware and software costs were "going to be somewhere between 400 and 500 thousand dollars." By comparison, Schomaker explained, "the total cost to implement the Bynari solution we calculated to be about 95 thousand dollars." http://www.linuxstart.com/newbietour The Linux Newbie Tour http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/stories/main/0,10228,2795549,00.html "Seventeen years old and state of the art" (open source software doesn't turn your computer into a doorstop with every software upgrade) http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2792860,00.html "Apache avoids most security woes" http://eltoday.com/article.php3?ltsn=2001-01-31-002-01-PS IBM Wholeheartedly Embracing Linux Sam Palmisano, president and chief operating officer of IBM, on Linux's ability to drive standards, "This thing is accepted all over the world. The value proposition is the ability to write an application without having to worry about the plumbing." http://stonesoup.esd.ornl.gov/ the Stone Soupercomputer, $0, Linux http://www.seul.org/ Simple End User Linux "The end goal of SEUL is to have a comprehensive suite of high-quality applications (productivity applications as well as leisure/programming applications) available under the GPL for the Linux platform, as well as a broader base of educated users around the world who understand why free software is better. SEUL is a volunteer project currently focusing on Linux in education, Linux in science, advocacy documents, managing and coordinating communications between projects, and hosting related development projects." http://www.lfsp.org Linux For Schools Project "The goals of this project are to help schools do the following on their internal networks: Manage Linux user accounts in bulk Set up PHP and MySQL enabled personal webspace Encourage pupils to write their own home pages Help pupils learn the multi-user Linux environment." http://it.mycareer.com.au/news/2001/06/05/FFX9ZT7UENC.html "Trinity drinks deeply at learning's open source" "Trinity College, at Melbourne University, threw open the doors to open source in December last year when it discarded its Windows NT network. Educators and technical staff wanted a better, cheaper way to teach the 750 overseas students in its Foundation Studies tertiary bridging course, which introduces Western concepts and computing skills." http://www.informationweek.com/833/opensource.htm "IT Managers Become More 'Open'-Minded" http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1507000/1507326.stm BBC News -- Happy Birthday Linux "Linux is starting to find a place in many businesses who are tired of endless price hikes, upgrades, bug fixes and managing the many problems that Microsoft's software can bring. --- "The use of Linux is likely to spread because many universities use it to teach computer programming largely as the source code of it is readily available for them to play with. As those students get jobs, they will take that familiarity with them." http://www.infoworld.com/articles/tc/xml/01/08/27/010827tcintro.xml InfoWorld: Open source takes hold by Tom Yager "So it's no surprise that the majority of the CTOs we surveyed cite cost as the primary reason they're turning to open-source software. Linux, BSD, Apache, and Perl are solidly entrenched solutions in their categories; purveyors of commercial wares -- or software services, you might say -- are forced to sell against them. With these technologies addressed by a plethora of well-written books and a common part of most university curricula, selling against the open-source leaders is an increasingly difficult task. IT workers are now tuned in to open source before they even hit the job market, a fact that our survey respondents find appealing." http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-08-29-001-20-PR-DP-HE "Colorado State University, IBM in $21.6M National Technology Hub Partnership" "With the demand for enterprise systems managers rising more than 62 percent in the past year, Colorado State's students will learn skills that will give them a sizable advantage in their field while filling a valuable industry need," said John Plotnicki, chairman of the Department of Computer Information Systems at Colorado State. http://ofset.sourceforge.net/freeduc "Organization for Free Software in Education and Teaching" (thanks to Bruno Coudoin for this link) http://www.opensourceschools.org OpenSourceSchools.org (thanks to Karl Pinc for this link) http://linuxforkids.org Linux For Kids "LinuxForKids was created in the Summer of 1999 to promote the use of Linux as an educational and entertainment platform for children." http://openlearningcommunity.org/ Open Learning Community -- "open source & open content internetworked education resources" (thanks to Michael Stutz for this link) http://openlearningcommunity.org/ednet/ ASLUG Education Network (Alice Springs Linux Users Group) http://www.iteachnet.com/ ITeachNet http://www.iteachnet.com/mar2000/linuxineducation_doug_loss_pete_st_onge_mar2 000.html Linux In Education by Doug Loss and Pete St Onge http://www.schoolforge.net/ "Working together to unleash the power of open source tools in education." "Schoolforge's mission is to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for primary and secondary education." Copyright 2001 Terry Vessels. All rights reserved. Permission to reproduce this document is hereby given for all non-commercial use so long as this document, including this notice, remains intact. Commercial use requires prior written consent. http://edge-op.org/grouch/schools.html ------------------------------------------------------- ================================================ To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe in subject header. Check archives at http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd%40wpaa.org
