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A few days ago I asked for your dreams for Linux in 2009. At the time I promised to invite you to share your ideas for implementing some of the dreams shared on the original post. I have already received a fantastic response to the original post, so I decided to go ahead and offer the first sub-dream opportunity.
Petros Koutoupis suggested this as part of his dream in response to the original post:
“As a good example, the foundation of the Microsoft Windows platform rests on three unstable pillars. If one were to fall, the rest will follow. These pillars are: (1) Education, (2) Productivity and (3) Multimedia related. The easiest and more influential to go after initially would be education. Not only would it be cheaper for a school to deploy and run the Linux Operating System but the students come out with familiarity in the platform. By the time they go into their respective careers, the seed would have been planted. It also would not stop a student from purchasing a Linux-based PC for their home computing seeing how they would be familiar with it at school.”
The question for you today, then, is how would you like to see Linux expand further in to education?
Just leave your idea for how Linux could succeed in education in a comment below.
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I understand that Canonical has a Ubuntu variant known as Edubuntu, but it is really not emphasized enough for the younger generation while the older middle-high school and college student will need more applications outside of the traditional productivity suites (i.e. Open Office, etc.).
For example, when I went to college I was studying in an Electronic Engineering course. Outside of Matlab, there was no known support of other electronic/engineering related applications for the Linux platform. There could be more applications to fill in this void.
Also, Microsoft pushed these “bundle software packages.” At that time it was Microsoft’s Windows 2000 with Office 2000, Visual Studio 6, Visio, etc. A student obtained this to be able to accompish school tasks from home. The catch was that it was all added to your tuition! Why did I have to pay for this?!?!? Why can’t a company like Canonical devise a method of deployment? First market and influence the school(s) to start converting to a Linux Operating System and then providing their own bundle packages.
Not too long ago, I wrote to our Secretary of Education in the U.S. and offered some friendly advice and suggestions to better our education system; saving costs that can be placed into something else more needed. The suggestions focused on open source alternatives. In their reply, it has been claimed that the concept of open source had started to be adopted (more in the private institutions) but it was not the national governments role to facilitate such a change. In the end it was up to the State and more on the school district that was made in charge of these decisions. Should commercialized Linux Operating System distributors start there?
racyanne – Sorry about your comments. The previous ones got marked as spam. They have now been published. Hopefully it will not happen again, but if it does, please contact me.
Linux in education sounds wonderful, but Apple and MS have played it in this way. Train a kid on a specific platform with specific applications and you will have a client and customer for life. Businesses have followed suit, they ask for MS Word experience, instead of asking for word processor experience.
Depending on the level of education, Linux does not offer enough grade targeted applications, but for general use applications, you can not beat Linux and free open source software (FOSS). Word processors, spreadsheets, graphic applications. Perhaps we shouldn’t look for apps that teach math concepts but for apps that aid in doing math like spreadsheets. Teaching kids to use spreadsheets along side of learning math might be a better path. The same with word processors and writing skills. Photoshop is a budget buster compared to GIMP and GIMP has the same tools yet is free. It is a good thing FOSS will run on Linux or MS platforms.
Free and open source software allows you to dismiss brand names and focus on the tools in common use. If you want more than that you just might have to develop that kind of software yourself.
For many years I have heard about the “digital divide”. Yet, Linux and free open source software have no creditability to low income consumers, nonprofit business or to education. Even recycled PCs, one laptop per child PCs wind up with MS XP loaded or the desire to get MS XP loaded. People on all levels do not identify with Linux or FOSS regardless of the benefits and cost savings. Folks on the top rungs need to be re-educated.
I’d post my dream, but after being totally ignored, and not getting my posts published on the previous Linux dream blog comments. I don’t see any point in doing so here.
GNU/Linux has a few barriers in the educational market like familiarity, training and ease of use but it has a huge advantage:cost/performance. Once a school realizes it can twice as many computer seats for the same hardware+software total cost, they can find a way to overcome a few small obstacles. I helped a school do that and they are overjoyed. To get the largest number of seats for a given total cost (what the top dogs think about), use GNU/Linux on terminal servers and thin clients. Performance is superior to whatever that other OS can do except for full-screen video. A few thick client GNU/Linux boxes can do the full-screen video stuff. The reduction in maintenance, noise, heat, electrical power consumption, etc. are bonuses.
I’ve got two kids currently being homeschooled, and two more that will be in the coming years. They mainly use Linux, and there are a lot of kid-oriented educational things, but the offerings are piecemeal and somewhat weak.
Now, granted we are talking about comparing freeware FOSS to commercial packages, so it’s not strictly a linux-as-a-platform vs. windows-as-a-platform discussion.
I think it would be great to see some kind of end-user oriented framework where you could generate learning tools. For example, you put in a video, slide show, or opendocument presentation, then you put in questions for the student afterward. So it’s “watch this presentation, then answer these questions”. Questions could be multiple choice, or essay. Then you can review the answers.
gcompris is good, but it could be a lot better. You look at commercial software aimed at that age group, and it usually has characters of some sort that are animated and speak to you. FOSS stuff usually has some static jpeg of Tux or Gnu and then a dialog box comes up. That’s pointless for kids who can’t read, or read only with great effort.
I think too much FOSS educational stuff suffers from the “it’s for kids, so it doesn’t have to be good” mentality that infects a lot of stuff aimed at kids. It’s too bad we don’t put the same kind of effort and quality into educating kids that we do into fragging aliens.
That said, there are some good things out there — tuxmath has improved immensely over the years. But things still feel like a hodge-podge. It would be great if something that was curriculum-oriented would come along.