FOSS in Schools

I'm interested to hear people's views on FOSS in schools.

Check out this article on how a state in India (Kerela) is blazing the trail ....

Also would like to share this article by the father of the GNU project - Richard M. Stallman (or simply 'rms') on Why schools should exclusively use free software...A must-read!

Tags: FOSS, FOSS-in-schools, GNU, free-software

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Permalink Reply by Miguel Guhlin on April 27, 2008 at 7:46pm

Shuchi:
Howdy! I whole-heartedly agree that school districts should be using Free, Open Source Software (FOSS) rather than locking themselves into proprietary programs and formats, not to mention, locking in whole generations of children.

Thanks for sharing! A few thoughts here:
http://tinyurl.com/3p7m4j

Best wishes,
Miguel Guhlin
Around the Corner-MGuhlin.net
http://mguhlin.net

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Permalink Reply by Shuchi Grover on April 27, 2008 at 8:29pm

Wonderful read, Miguel! Thanks for sharing...

I'm headed to Delhi for a consultation (among about 20 people - educationists mostly - from around the country) on drafting a National Policy on ICT in School Education. The timing of the Kerala story couldn't be better. It makes way too much sense for any country, but more certainly one like India!

If you need some more ammo to shore up your piece, here's a great story from Brazil about a mammoth deployment of FOSS by Brazil's Ministry of Education :)

Best,
Shuchi Grover
Education Musings
educatorslog.in

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Permalink Reply by Shuchi Grover on April 27, 2008 at 9:10pm

True, the devil is always in the detail.

I posted a link to the Brazil story as well in my previous comment. It would be interesting to hear from some of our Brazilian friends here, if they have some insights to share...

I just came across a very relevant blog post of Alex Inman here on CR2.0. (There's too much going on here to keep track of it all!). Here's the link..

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Permalink Reply by Alex Inman on April 28, 2008 at 8:58am

Thanks for the cross-post of my blog entry. We've been using Linux for our laptops program for 3 years now. We just finished our roll out to grades 6-8. Now, every student, grades 6-12 has a laptop running Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop. I feel like a kid in a candy store! We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg. I am so excited to see what is going on. The potential is incredible! I've run a laptop program program at another school before, using Windows. Though Linux introduces a whole new set of problems, I see greater potential to use the Linux machines as a tool for 21st Century Learning to a much higher degree than I was able to achieve with Windows machines.

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Permalink Reply by Shuchi Grover on April 28, 2008 at 10:10am

Your blog post did a great job of explicating how Linux and its use fostered 21st century learning - it was a great mapping exercise...

Care to expand on the "whole new set of problems" with the introduction to Linux? What about the kids? How do they take to the new OS and apps?

Thanks for sharing,
Shuchi

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Permalink Reply by Alex Inman on April 28, 2008 at 10:40am

Linux is an OS with which our students and teachers had little to no experience before our Linux Laptop program. In Linux, you install programs differently. You quickly need to learn about dependencies and repositories and versioning. This brings a new learning curve to the environment.

Also, open source developers don't get booths at education conferences (unless you are Moodle Rooms). Thus, teachers hear of proprietary software first and sometimes assume the open source versions are free because they are bad.

Also, in that respect, though many open source applications are spectacular, some lag behind their commercial counterpart. For example, though I love GIMP, it is not as easy to use as Photoshop elements nor as powerful as Photoshop CS3.

That being said, we offer people access to their local Linux OS, bundled with the standard SLED packages and a few others we have added and also a full windows environment via Citrix. We find that students spend about 50-60% of their time in the Linux environment their first year with Linux, about 75% their second year and about 85% in Linux after that. Our teachers took two years to cross the 50% mark but now spend a slight majority of their time in the Linux environment.

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Permalink Reply by Alex Inman on April 28, 2008 at 11:37am

A lot of it is similar to what your daughter discovered. You can make most open source do more of what you want. Customization is built into the DNA of open source. Also, kids can learn more by doing and access is greater in open source, as discussed in my post.