Figuring out FOSS in schools
Submitted by doc on Sun, 10/01/2006 - 14:03.
Steve Hargadon is a smart, interesting and modest guy who's exploring out loud the utility (and futility) of free and open source software in schools. And, for that matter, in home schooling too.
So far he's interviewed John "maddog" Hall, John Selmys, Eric S. Raymond and three of the OpenOffice guys, and myself. The others are already up, at those links. Mine should be up soon too.
We talked for at least two hours. In places both of us got personal, because in our own different ways, we've both struggled with school — both for ourselves and for our kids.
There are no easy answers. But there are lots of good questions, and I'm glad Scott is tackling them. Give his podcasts a listen, and his blogged comments on them as well.
You'll hear education being reformed, not from the bottom up, but from the inside out — becoming more human and less of a manufacturing system.
Can FOSS help? Of course. But how? As part of school curricula? Or as something students and teachers use to teach themselves and each other?
I lean toward the latter.
This is a somewhat
This is a somewhat complicated issue. It does, in a way, interfere with business. But providing the best tools for quality education, I think, is of more importance. In this case, helping out schools provide better means for students to learn and train themselves is a way also to invest for the future - and that includes the world of commerce. With free software in schools, we are also teaching students the importance of sharing knowldege and focusing more on the progress of the industry as a while, rather than for self-gain.
Interview Posted
You can listen to or download this interview with Doc at http://edtechlive.wikispaces.com/Recordings+List. Great interview for me. Thanks, Steve (sometimes known as "Scott") :)
speaking of education
Hi, Doc,
I could use some publicity for my learn-to-program project atlearnprogramming.tv . It's somewhat like the programming books you'll find on wikibooks, but the idea is that it's more of a software-like colaboration than it is a wiki.
There are a number of reasons why I think the free text-books idea hasn't really taken off. For instance, the problems with wikibooks are that they are 1) restricted to the medium of text and pictures 2) too shallow and/or too careless in laying out and presenting the material 3) don't accomodate (at least by official policy) authorial voice, which is important in long-form content.
My project tries to rectify these problems. Basically, it uses a wiki to serve and develop the content, but it doesn't use the no-one-leads model of Wikipedia, for Wikipedia is a large aggregation of discrete information, but conceptual content requires much more care and authorial coherence to convey effectively--imperfections in one part of the material can make other parts of the material difficult if not impossible to understand.
One very important feature of my project is that it attempts to be a definitive "first resource" for learners of programming--especially independant learners--by being wholistic rather than just something that teaches one language/framework/etc. The current focus of my effort is developing what I call the "core courses" for initiating non-programmers. It covers a lot of very important information I myself had to synthesize from dozens of sources when learning. The aim is to present such material in a centralized and highly digested form. (For instance, an important hardware/OS concept is how multi-processing is acheived on modern systems, but you won't find a good explanation of this anywhere except the thick OS text books, like Andrew Tannenbaum's /Modern Operating Systems/, which most independant learners won't come across).
Then there's the non-core content. The idea here is that the non-core content assumes knowledge of the core content, so it allows authors to assume a broad baseline of knowledge. The non-core content could therefore be useful for experienced programmers. For instance, if you already know Java, C, and Python (all taught in the core courses), it would be nice to learn a new language with materials that take advantage of your pre-existing knowledge and don't bore you with retreads. (With the many programming books I've read, one of the most frustrating things is having to read multiple 1000-page books on the same subject rather than just one because each one only tells %70 of the story; it often happens that one book has a few key points burried in among a swath of material you've already learned elsewhere.)
I'm hesitant to seek too much attention for the project as of yet for it's not ready at all for learners to use, and most of the material already up is of old, erroroneous revisions and so should probably be taken down. I'm so busy finishing the content, which I've been working on for almost 2 years now, that I've been putting off both posting my latest revisions and making preperations to accomodate a community effort. Also, I'm not sure if my $5/month hosting will handle much traffic.
Anyway, if you could give it a look and maybe spread the word. I'm particularly interested in attracting some knowledgeable FOSS programmers early-on to make at least casual contributions, at least in the form of critiques (though I'm probably a few months away from having a solid set of starting materials up, so there's not much to critique yet).
--Brian