August 2007 — Features
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Opening a New Door
Open source applications like these also encourage self-directed learning, observes Canonical's Weideman. They move the paradigm, he suggests, from teacher-centric to student-centric, in which the emphasis shifts from teaching to learning.
"There's still more to be done behind the scenes, but the students and teachers are reporting back to us that there is little or no training required to ramp up on these programs," Huffman says. "And that's an important advantage."
"Indiana is paving the way in the United States," says David Thornburg, author, futurist, and educational technology advocate, "and there is little question that the InACCESS project is a driving force for bringing meaningful access to computers to the hands of every student, for the first time in history."
Good as these programs are, the best is yet to come, says Thornburg. Writing in his forthcoming book, When the Best Is Free: An Educator's Perspective on Open Source Software, he predicts that the growing popularity of Linux on the student desktop will stimulate the development of more quality programs for this market segment. And quality, he advises, should remain a top priority among district decision makers contemplating a move to open source.
Thornburg writes: "While cost is important, it can't be the deciding factor: quality is essential. If a free alternative is not as good or better than a commercial product, quality must win out over price. We must never treat schoolchildren as second-class citizens. We who care about education must always put children first."
Taking the Plunge
Why has it taken K-12 so long to embrace open technologies? It may simply be the nature of the beast, says Mark Driver, research vice president at IT industry analyst firm Gartner. "The issue for a lot of organizations is that open source software is essentially unsupported software," Driver says. "People love the quality of the open source code, but for the manager of a mission-critical system, it's less about the technology and more about who is going to be there. Most of us aren't Google; we're not going to have people on staff who are capable of fixing Linux bugs. We rely on someone else to do that."
The solution, Driver says, is for IT organizations of moderate size to adopt OSS with a commercial backer—Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu, for example, provide plenty of support for their Linux distributions. But, he hastens to add, IT managers should also keep in mind that a sufficiently mature open source project is never unsupported, with or without commercial vendor backing. "The community of a large open source project is better than the knowledge base of any commercial vendor," he says, "including the world's largest vendors like Microsoft and IBM. Because of the number of people who work on these projects, the sheer power of the knowledge base is unrivaled."
