Re: [seul-edu] SEUL Licensing

[Tom Hoffman <tom_hoffman@mac.com>]

As a teacher in under-resourced/poor high schools and middle schools, in
rural Connecticut and Providence, RI, I've picked up this licensing thread
with interest.  

I've been working in schools that have been struggling to put computers into
their classrooms at all, suffering from inadequate or nonexistent technical
support.  Microsoft's regular product updates cause predictable chaos, and
security is nonexistent.  These schools are making commitments to putting
boxes in the building, but have almost no money left over to buy software.
While this may seem absurd, we're in an environment where we are struggling
just to give the kids books, which are more important than all but the most
fundamental software packages.  Moveover, in our district, I have yet to
meet anyone who knows what software we are actually licensed to use, for
example, I was just told by the lead technology teacher in our school to try
to keep the word processors on donated computers from being deleted before
we get them, as if there is some problem with our installing a word
processor.  So you can see that the "free as in beer" aspect of free
software is not trivial.

For me, porting "educational software" is a non-issue.  Other than
administrative software, I haven't seen anyone use anything other than
office-productivity software, graphics and web-design tools.  In the schools
I've been in, the choice will become between Windows-only and no specialized
commercial educational software and including Linux and access to
open-source educational software.

The "free as in speech" aspect of free software is important to teachers,
although they may not be able to articulate it.  In our field, the paid
consultants and proprietary packages that are periodically thrust upon us
are generally scorned (this mistrust would apply to Linux evangelists, as
well, btw).  Teachers improve by borrowing and stealing from each other.
Much of this is just plain old sharing ideas, some of it is considered "fair
use" by copyright law, but a lot is considered violation of copyright.  In
short, good teachers think like open source programmers.  A school with a
great staff is a gift economy, sharing and collaborating.  I think that once
teachers experence the advantages of open source, they will embrace the
freedom.

This is getting a bit long, but let me say a few more things:

This does not have to be an either or decision for schools.  Most new hard
drives will easily hold two OS's unless you're doing intensive
sound/graphics/video.  Mac OS X will rather easily adapted to run X Windows
applications.  Ports of Linux software to the Darwin/Mac OS X kernel don't
appear to be very complex.  Ready or not, the UNIX command line will be seen
in on Macs in schools all over the country in the next few years.

I think Guido van Rossum's plan for a Computer Programming for Everyone
curriculum using Python is a good model (http://www.python.org/cp4e/).
Start with a successful and stable open source project (Python and the IDLE
development environment), secure some funding if you can (a DARPA grant) get
some partners at the university and secondary levels, and begin making the
software more appropriate for kids (folding in 3-d graphics from the Alice
project (www.alice.org), making it themable, more user friendly in other
ways), then collaborate with experienced teachers to form a complete
curriculum using the tool.

While it may be hard to get hackers to write new ed. software from scratch,
I think the developers and maintainers of open source packages can be
inspired to modify their code by the idea that thousands of kids will be
using their tool.  For example, I have been thinking that for all it's
oddness, it wouldn't be very difficult (probably) to make a version of Lyx
that would be advantageous to use in schools.  I think the Lyx people could
probably get excited about that idea.

Oh, and as a "digital divide" issue, I think there is a real chance for
federal grant money for open source ed. projects in the next few years.
Perhaps VA Linux can donate several hundred thousand dollars to the
appropriate political parties...

--Tom