Open Source

What we see happening in school districts, educational institutions and companies all
over the world is the urge to adopt technology to manage and deliver better learning
experiences. As a result, these entities end up “investing” (sometimes) significant
amounts of money without considering free alternatives offered by the open source
community. “Free” meaning both free of charge and free in the sense of the user base
being able to see and add to the code, consequently improving it 1 .

The history of the opens source initiative can be a complicated one, this difficulty in
defining its exact beginning also reflects in the implications of the term. In 1969,
AT&T started developing and distributing an operating s ystem that would soon be
dubbed Unix. This operating system was distributed free of charge to government and
academic institutions but could not be modified, which did not qualify that initiative
as “free software”, the meaning that would later be appended to the term “open
source”. Nevertheless, many believe that the open source community has been growing
ever since its start around the 1970’s early 1980’s with MIT AI Labs’ Richard Stallman
resignation to initialize the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. Around
the same time the University of California at Berkeley’s had already started working
on their own version of the Unix system 2 , which had to be distributed to users that
held an AT&T license.

Open source and Education?

The open source community is known for working with a common goal: creating
useful, effective and free programs. The support offered by users and developers is of
considerable dedication and can be obtained through discussion forums and other Web
communication resources.

The investment directed toward proprietary software in schools is significant. This

sum could be redirected to other school initiatives and needs such as infrastructure,
sports, family aid, classroom supplies and many other areas of need.
Read/Write Web Through Open Source

The Web has evolved, not many specialists deny that. Some call this phase We 2.0, but
this term doesn’t completely reflect the nature of applications and websites that come
with new technologies and programming languages. Besides the term Web 2.0 puts the
focus on the Web, and that is clearly not the case of this new breed of technologies, it
is exactly the opposite. The focus now is on the user. User-generated content has more
value than ever. This exchanged by social networking communities that are now
stronger than ever. The Web that provides applications that shift content production to
the users are better identified as the “Read/Write Web” because it requires the users to
be active, to voice their opinions, to change content and share it with others.

Collaboration seems to be the new buzzword companies and educational institutions

are going after. That is exactly what the focus of Read/Write Web applications is:
collaboration, collective intelligence, sharing. Thus, my interest in the Read/Write
Web applied to learning experiences: it is through collaboration and social situations
that we really learn 3 .

Even though there are many useful client-based programs that are open source, free of
charge and could be adopted by schools nation and world-wide, like OpenOffice, an
alternative to Microsoft Office, this article focuses on server-based open source
software that mimic Read/Write Web services and could be installed on he school’s (or
school district’s) local server.

Wh y install a program similar to Youtube on a school district’s local server? There are
man y reasons why, two of them being the significant larger amount of control over
what content goes on he website as far as relevance an appropriateness are concerned,
and the protection of the students’ identity. Hosting such services on an institution’s
own servers gives them relatively more control than just, lets say, creating a
community on Youtube or Ning.

Wh y is open source better than proprietar y software? First of all, it is free of charge
with the exception of a few projects that have third party companies offer add-ons that
are not available in the project’s community. Second of all, the quality of the
applications is guaranteed by communities of developers that are always trying to add
innovative ideas to the projects. The development of such tools is also free in the
sense of freedom to improve the source code and redistribute the software, not simply
meaning free of cost. Open source software is normally developed by a passionate
community of developers that support one another. Moreover, open source projects are
in perpetual beta phase of development, which guarantees the continuous improvement
of the products in development.

Even though there are innumerous active open source initiatives on the Web, this
article will focus on some examples of exceptional open source software that could
offer great service in Education, yet, have not gotten much attention from technolog y
adoption decision makers in school s ystems.

PHPMotion 4 - So many schools and companies see the potential in video sharing
communities as far as education is concerned. Websites such as Teachertube have
become more popular amongst educators. PhpMotion lets you install a free Youtube-
like video sharing community on your own server.

Moodle 5 - Free LMS with several plugins to make it even more fun(ctional) and
relevant to your needs. Some interesting parallel projects add much more to Moodle.

Edusim 6 – Ever y teacher can have their own virtual worlds within the school’s
network and communicate with other classrooms that are running the simulation as
well. This 3D world works great especially with electronic whiteboards. Students can
easily populate environments with 3D objects and make learning more fun and
meaningful.

ELGG 7 – Allows for the creation of collaborative learning environments in the form of
social networks. Much like on other social networking websites, learners can interact,
tag, blog, exchange, pictures, videos, and information of all kinds. This tool creates so
man y possibilities for locally owned social networks for school faculty and students.
As a matter of fact, this suite was created having educational settings in mind.

Wordpress 8 - Create a blogging platform for your organization, let the learners be
active and post individually or edit/publish in groups. It is fun, instructive and helps
them stay creative.
PLIGG 9 - Add the power of the democratic Read/Write Web voting communities to
your learners’ environments. PLIGG was built by the open source community to be a
Digg “clone”. Digg is a well-known social news website to which users post news on
various areas of interest and other users vote to have them published or not. PLIGG’s
primary focus was also on social news. However, many people have used it to rank and
share other websites (social bookmarking), post videos, stories, pictures, etc.

eyeOS 10 – A Web Operational S ystem (Web OS), that is, an Operational System that
resides on the Web and can accessed from anywhere. This Web OS offers many tools
that can be found in traditional Operational S ystems like file management, Web
desktop, email client, RSS reader, word processing, spreadsheets, support for
OpenOffice and Micrososft Office. In addition, eyeOS also has networking and
personal information management such as calendar, contacts, bulleting board, internal
messaging system and more. Its intuitive interface would make student and teacher
content creation management much more intuitive than the usual drives system used by
most schools.

Additionally, it is important to divulge initiatives that aim at keeping educators

informed and connected with open source projects that are, for the most part,
developed for educational settings. Some of which include but not limited to:

SchoolForge’s 11 association whose “mission is to unify independent organizations that

advocate, use, and develop open resources for education. SchoolForge is intended to
empower member organizations to make open educational resources more effective,
efficient, and ubiquitous by enhancing communication, sharing resources, and
increasing the transparency of development. SchoolForge members advocate the use of
open source and free software, open texts and lessons, and open curricula for the
advancement of education and the betterment of humankind.”

The freedom of content creation and distribution that sprout from the open source community have been
adopted in other forms as well. For instance, MIT Open Courseware 12 is MIT’s approach to
open content for all. ”A free publication of course materialsused at MIT.”
Offering lecture notes, problem sets, labs, lecture videos and demonstrations.
According to MIT you can get access to a “wide variety of subjects” through this
initiative.
Man y other institutions, such as Stanford University 13 and University of California at
Berkeley 14 offer content on iTunesU 15 , using the open source approach to offer course
material to learners all over the world.

More information on how open source can projects can benefit learners and instructors
can be found here and all over the Internet, which is now created and updated b y
ordinar y people, in a participatory and democratic way.
Learning, being it blended or fully eLearning, has a lot to learn from the Read/Write
Web and the open source community. Having interaction, collaboration, clear standards
and ease of use in mind, much can be done for education one step at a time with the
adoption of technology that is relevant to the efforts of the learning community.

Conclusion
Open source initiatives can offer outstanding support to educational endeavors in the
realm of learning through Read/Write Web technologies. These are times of much
concern over cyber security threats, identity theft and sexual predators utilizing the
Internet to reach children, amongst other issues. Inadequacy of online content for
educational settings forces many educators to back away from utilizing services such
as Youtube and Facebook to leverage collaborative learning opportunities. Yet man y
researchers see the educational value in the shift of the World Wide Web technologies
to a focus on more user-generated content, folksnomies and collaboration through
various forms of social networking. Open source and free of charge solutions that
mimic well-known Read/Write Web services and can be locally or district widely
installed and controlled should be considered when trying to bring these principles
into rich collaborative learning experiences for students of all ages.

References:
1 1 Pavlicek, Russell C. Embracing Insanity. Indianapolis, IN: Sams, 2000.

2 2 http://eu.conecta.it/paper/brief_history_open_source.html

3 Wertsch, J.V. (1985). Cultural, Communication, and Cognition: Vygotskian Perspectives. Cambridge University Press.

4 http://www.phpmotion.com

5 5 http://www.moodle.org

6 6 http://www.edusim3d.com

7 7 http://www.elgg.org

8 8 http://www.wordpress.org

9 9 http://www.pligg.com

10 10 http://www.eyeos.org/en
11 11 http://www.schoolforge.net

12 12 http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

13 13 http://itunes.stanford.edu

14 14 http://itunes.berkeley.edu

15 15 http://www.apple.com/education/itunesu_mobilelearning/itunesu.html