OSS

My student Debbie Lee sent me this list of 50 OSS alternatives to proprietary programs entitled The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy — and Their Open Source Alternatives.

The Challenge

We in the field of educational technology need to pay more attention to finding ways to provide students in teachers with the tools that they need to increase identifiable learning outcomes. Too often we can be pulled in by the sirens of cool toys or be convinced that if only we could train teachers to understand how to use them, students would learn better. I posit that teachers and students now know quite well how to use computers to increase learning, but that the computers they have do not provide even the simplest supports that they need to do so.

Couros linked to Forty Foundations for the future of Open Source.

The International Herald Tribune has a story about MIT's so-called $100 Laptop initiative. It's looking pretty cool, and I believe that there's not much that kids (or most adults, really) need to do that such a machine won't be able to do.

David at OpenContent.org made a post about a course at Berkeley called InfoSys 296A-2 / Law276.8 Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information: Technical, Economic, Social, and Legal Perspectives.

A couple places have stories about Indiana moving not only to OSS applications, but even to Linux. That's crazy. See School CIO and this piece. I mostly added this because some time ago I posted something about Linux in Indian schools and when I saw it just now I thought it was a typo.

This Yahoo News story talks about India's communist-run Kerala state and how the education minister said "ideologically I support Linux and Free and Open Operating Systems for IT enabled-education in schools." I know I'm a zealot and all, but I don't understand how someone wouldn't ideologically support Open Source Software (OSS). If you could have software that was as good or better than its competitors, wouldn't that be better than subsidizing any company, especially one that has repeatedly been found guilty of using non-competitive practices? Isn't it better ideologically to use software that promotes learning (by allowing its source code to be studied) and is available to all students, regardless of their ability to pay for it?

The education minister didn't say that he would support banning Microsoft's products as a zealot might, just that he'd support the idea of people using Linux too. So I don't quite get what the big deal is.

The other thing about this story that I find bizarre is that the author somehow sees a link between this story, which boils down to "Indian Commie says schools can use OSS if they want to," to a story two weeks before when the same commies banned sales of Coke and Pepsi because some (ostensibly whacko) environmental group found high levels of pesticide in locally bottled Coke and Pepsi products. I think then, that the headline might read: "Foreign Investors Beware: Communist Indian State refuses to force its people to drink poison and use Microsoft products."

It is just a random Yahoo! News story, but it does strike me as odd.

Webliographer is, to the best of my knowledge, the first web-based application for managing and sharing bookmarks. The first usable version was in use in October of 1998. It replaced my home page, which consisted primarily as a set of categorized links. I was especially proud of the fact that it tracked the use of URLs, so when you clicked on a link a counter was updated in the database and links that got more hits were promoted to the front page of Webliographer's display. Though I used, and still use, Webliographer primarily for my own purposes an individual, my target audience for Webliographer was primarily teachers who wanted kids to use the web in their classrooms.

Wow. This post over at Weblogged mentioned Writely in passing. I hadn't heard of it, but now I have and it's pretty cool. The post said "Who needs Word?" which is something that I've been saying for about 10 years now, but for entirely different reasons.

According to Forbes Magazine Peru's congress unanimously passed a law that "would prohibit any public institution from purchasing computer equipment that ties users to a particular type of software or 'in any manner limits information autonomy.' " It hasn't yet been signed into law.

Note that this doesn't require that the government use Open Source Software (OSS), but just requires that it be considered.

Thanks to my student Rebecca Payne for bringing this article to my attention.