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Why schools should exclusively use free software |
by Richard Stallman
There are general reasons why all computer users should insist on free software. It gives users the freedom to control their own computers—with proprietary software, the computer does what the software owner wants it to do, not what the software user wants it to do. Free software also gives users the freedom to cooperate with each other, to lead an upright life. These reasons apply to schools as they do to everyone.
But there are special reasons that apply to schools. They are the subject of this article.
First, free software can save the schools money. Even in the richest countries, schools are short of money. Free software gives schools, like other users, the freedom to copy and redistribute the software, so the school system can make copies for all the computers they have. In poor countries, this can help close the digital divide.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 12 January 2009 )
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Are We Educating Or Training? |
by Mark Shuttleworth
Are we educating or training?
It is appropriate for a business to standardize on a hardware or software platform, but multi-platform computing is ideal in an educational environment. If we want children to learn concepts and not products, we should teach them using diverse platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and diverse software (MS Office, Open Office, Abiword, Apple Works(?)). Teaching concepts is education; teaching products is training.
What's current is passé.
We need to look beyond the currently dominant business practices to determine which products we should have and teach in our schools, and we need to educate our children instead of training them. The very first version of MS Office was released in 1989, and now millions of professionals -- who were already out of school then -- use it every day. There is no reason not to teach using up-and-coming technologies such as Open Office, which may well dominate the professional world of the future. (The state government of Massachusetts, for example, is committed to migrating by January, 2007 to the document format used by Open Office.) Such a shift in focus from MS Office to Open Office, which is free, can save the district thousands of dollars which can then be put toward obtaining more computers and equipment or personnel. Even if the district doesn't want to incorporate Open Office in the curriculum at this point, at least computers without MS Office should be supplied with Open Office (fast computers) or the Abi office tools (Abiword and others) to increase access to productivity applications. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 03 December 2008 )
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This week I made a new Web 2.0 friend.
Mrs. W. is a first and second grade looping teacher in Onoro, ME. Using Linux and Open Source Software has brought excitement back to her classroom (after the No Child Left Behind program ushered in an "Is it on the test?" mentality). Recently she blogged about Linus Torvalds' story "Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary" by David Diamond, which basically humanizes a technogeek.
Her blog is exciting as it gives a non-techie view of Open Source Software and how it can be used in education. My own posts usually tend to be geeky and terse so I enjoy both her style and perspective.
Her blog entry about "Just For Fun" is found here:
-- http://learningwithlinux.blogspot.com/2007/01/linus-torvalds.html --
Check it out and be sure to leave an encouraging comment for Mrs. W! |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 24 January 2007 )
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