August 2007 — Features
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Opening a New Door
"This program has changed the way we approach computing in our state, fundamentally," Huffman says. "But the teachers don't talk about Linux or open source; the subject never even comes up. I asked a student once what he thought of the Linux operating system. He said, ‘Who cares?' I think that attitude is a reflection of the fact that this program is not about technology, but curriculum."
Huffman says that several Indiana schools participating in the InACCESS program have been particularly successful with the Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution, which has become something of a darling of the open source crowd. The project is sponsored by Canonical, a company founded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth. The name is a Zulu word that translates roughly to mean "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity." Ubuntu's tagline is "Linux for Human Beings."
The distro got a big marketing bump when Dell disclosed plans recently to provide selected desktops and laptops pre-installed with Ubuntu 7.04 (code-named "Feisty Fawn"). Company founder and Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell has even said that he is running Ubuntu on his personal laptop.
One version of the system, called Edubuntu, is aimed specifically at K-12 school environments. It comes bundled with an office suite, a web browser, 16 programs for K-12 learning, and about 20 games. The list of educational apps includes KStars, a desktop planetarium; Kalzium, for discovering and researching information about the periodic table and the elements; TuxMath, an educational arcade game starring Tux, the Linux mascot; the KEduca educational testing package for teachers; and GCompris, a suite of more than 80 educational games and activities for kids ages 4 through 10.
The force that may ultimately push K-12 to a tipping point in its slowly evolving relationship with open source software is peer pressure.
Canonical maintains an application repository, accessible online for all Ubuntu users. "Mark's goal was to provide an Ubuntu distribution that a teacher could install quickly and easily, without much technical knowledge, and end up with a desktop ready for teaching," explains Richard Weideman, Canonical's education program manager. "Not just an operating system, but something that would be immediately useful in a classroom setting—something that would allow the teacher to spend more time teaching and less time managing the equipment."
The system is also highly portable; students can take an Edubuntu CD home and run exactly the same applications they use at school. Of course, this isn't a unique Ubuntu capability, but an inherent quality of open source applications. Students can take home copies of most open source desktop apps, then install them on their home machines at no cost and with no concerns about violating software copyrights. This quality was enormously appealing to the Indiana school system, Huffman says. "It's a big problem when you've got one thing at school and another thing at home," he says. "Because open source software is, well, open, teachers are able to send the programs home with the kids, extending the school day to the home, the library, or community centers."
