Learning

Learning

CSTD Fredericton

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I’m at the CSTD Innovations in Learning Symposium in Fredericton. We gave two presentations today, so I missed most of the others. Stephen has posted some of what he saw and has given a quick overview of Clark Aldrich’s keynote. I agree with Stephen’s comment on the lightness of this talk, but then it was a pretty mixed audience. The statement that stuck with me was a sidebar where Clark described the "tragedy of Gutenberg"; the fact that the printed word has pushed us into a linear educational model. It’s an interesting concept, especially in light of the fact that the printed word is already being pushed aside by the likes of IM shorthand and hierarchy-subverting hyperlinks.

Since I missed most of today’s sessions, I’m looking forward to attending one of the longer presentations tomorrow.

CEOS Halifax

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I just came back from the Conference on Engaging Open Source in Halifax. Good to see some fellow bloggers, like Steve and Iain, but probably the most informative session was from Robert Charpentier of Defence R&D in Valcartier QC. Robert and his colleagues have recently released a report entitled Free and Open Source Software Overview and Preliminary Guidelines for the Government of Canada. This is a must-read report if you work in or with the federal government. Robert told me that Ontario and Quebec are moving in the same direction as the federal government; to include FOSS in all procurement considerations. This is a big deal and I encourage the open source communities to examine the report and ensure a seat at the procurement tables. There will be many opportunities for the training & education sector here as well, if you understand the requirements and know the subject area (hint).

The best piece of information during this conference came from Robert. He said that the OS collaborative development process is very effective, and their analysis of 287 technical reports showed that bug fixes for proprietary software take an average of 10 days while bug fixes for open source software take an average of only one day. The OS community is much more effective and efficient than any proprietary counterpart.

There were a lot more data in all of the presentations but my clear understanding after the day is that open source is not a fringe movement when it is accepted by Sun Microsystems, IBM, Novell, the Government of Canada and the EU. If these behemoths get it, then I really don’t see any more of a need to make the case for open source. The OS cluetrain has left the station.

Learning the Laws of Media

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There has been much discussion of Thomas Friedman’s recent book The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century. Will Richardson connects this flatness to education:

Like him or not, I have to say that I’ve been getting a bit of an education from Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, and I’m finding more and more connections between the global leveling he describes and the classroom.

…We edubloggers talk and write about this a lot, this idea that the tools of the Read/Write Web necessarily change the relationships and construction of the classroom. When audience moves from one teacher to many readers, when assessment moves measuring correctness to measuring usefulness, when we ask for long lasting contribution of ideas instead of short-lived answers to narrow questions, it requires us to rethink our roles as teachers and to redefine our curricula. Remember, we don’t own the content any longer. Our students teach us the tools. They are already connecting and collaborating. To hold on to the vertical classroom is to risk irrelevance…soon.

A common adage amongst learning professionals is that, “it’s not about the technology, it’s about learning”. While we may hope that this is true, we live in societies based on technologies, and Marshall McLuhan is consistently proven correct with his Laws of Media:

every new medium:

1. extends a human property (the car extends the foot);

2. obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or an form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports);

3. retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the chevalier);

4. flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams, that is total paralysis)

Every new technology has these four effects on all of us, including learning technologies. This means that much of our work is about technology. If you don’t understand the effects of the technologies that we use, how can you understand their pedagogical implications? Take the learning management system, which has been with us for about a decade. The LMS:

  1. extends the instructor’s voice beyond the walls of the institution;
  2. obsolesces the classroom (but small, face-to-face executive classes are on the rise);
  3. the LMS retrieves the correspondence model;
  4. it has flipped into a costly administrative tool that does not meet the needs of inter-connected learners using other more effective technologies to communicate.

In looking at the newer social networking technologies (blogs, wikis, eportfolios) we could say that they:

  1. extend the learner’s voice;
  2. obsolesce the course as the unit of education;
  3. retrieve the Oxford-Cambridge collegial education model ;
  4. could reverse into a meaningless “echo-chamber” (Wikepedia definition of “echo chamber: Metaphorically, the term echo chamber can refer to any situation in which information or ideas are amplified by transmission inside an enclosed space.)
    Like it or not, technology is changing the learning landscape. We cannot adopt one technology and ignore another, or we risk becoming irrelevant. Learning professionals have to understand the technologies that drive our media. The best way to understand these technologies is to use them and watch how others use them. For instance, don’t discount the use of Instant Messaging for education just because all the kids are using it for non-educational purposes. Try to tap into it instead.

    We live in a time when new information and communication technologies are constantly being developed. My advice is to get used to it, and remember that “The medium is the message”.

UK Tries to Keep Learning Open

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From Silicon.com we get news of this pending report from the British education sector:

The UK government’s ICT agency, the British Educational Communications and Technology Association (BECTA), is poised to publish a study that found primary schools could halve computer costs if they stopped buying, operating and supporting products from companies such as Microsoft, according to the Times Educational Supplement.

I noted this report a few days ago and bookmarked BECTA, anxiously awaiting its release. If you read the Silicon.com article a bit more you see that the counterattack has begun:

Stephen Uden, group manager of education relations for Microsoft, wrote: "Competition in the software market is good for customers because it ensures that they get a good deal as it drives choice and innovation.

"There are some 5,000 third party applications available to run on Microsoft Windows operating system but only a handful of applications supported by the open source community. We offer free support and training materials to help teachers and students make the most of their technology."

Of course MS does not discuss the cost of upgrading your applications, the operating system or the database – all at the whim of the proprietary software vendor. The fact is that open source software for all learning applications is cheaper. I say all, because these applications are not mission critical, so even if the open source application only does 80% of what the costly software does, then it’s still good enough. However, in many cases the open source version is even better than its proprietary counterpart. Take for instance OpenOffice, which can save a slide presentation as a PDF or even a Flash file (with no extra software), making it a great tool for school projects. You can install as many versions of OOo as you want on all of your school computers and students’ home computers for free. Beat that.

Update: The report, "Open Source Software in Schools: A study of the spectrum of use and related ICT infrastructure costs" is now available as a PDF. The conclusions are favourable towards open source, but not overly enthusiastic.

A Discretionary Digital Divide?

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Seth Godin takes on the over-hyped Digital Divide – that invisible wall separating the Internet connected and the disconnected – stating that the new digital divide is more a matter of choice. Those who choose to engage in the social web, the "Digerati", subscribe to RSS feeds, read meta-blogs, write their own blogs and avoid the mainstream press. So what does this mean, other than the fact that we have a new label? According to Seth:

As a result, your most-connected, most influential customers are part of the digerati. They can make or break your product, your service or even your religion’s new policies. Because the Net is now a broadcast (and a narrowcast) medium, the digerati can spread ideas.

The second thing to keep in mind is that the digerati are using the learning tools built into the Net to get smarter, faster. A new Net tool can propogate to millions in just a week or two. Unlike the old digital divide, this means that the divide between the digerati and the rest of the world is accelerating.

Using the Law of the Few as described in Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, it seems that the Digerati are simultaneously playing the key roles of Mavens, Connectors and Salespeople.

The Rules

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Albert Ip has some positive words to say about Bill Gates, especially his views on education, and provides these rules, attributed to Bill:


RULE 1
Life is not fair – get used to it.

RULE 2
The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

RULE 3
You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice president with car phone, until you earn both.

RULE 4
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.

RULE 5
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping they called it Opportunity.

RULE 6
If you mess up,it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

RULE 7
Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

RULE 8

Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

RULE 9
Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

RULE 10
Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.


RULE 11
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Not bad advice.

Higher Ed Social Software Project

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Brian Lamb at UBC has just received some funding for the development of weblogs for higher education. The project includes UVic and BCIT as partners, and Brian states;

What did we propose to do? Nothing less than creating and sharing a framework for social software applications for BC’s higher education institutions. In less grandiose terms, we have proposed to create a set of policy recommendations, tutorials, templates, and multimedia resources that can be reused by a school that wants to support weblogging and wiki use (and possibly other social software tools) for its own community. We also hope to foster a community-centered model for sharing expertise amongst practitioners attempting to develop their own projects.
We intend the project to be platform-agnostic: we will definitely be using Movable Type and Drupal, but do our best to ensure that resources we create are not tied in with any one system.

This is very refreshing to see such an initiative that includes the use of open source software, connects various systems and does not tie these academic institutions into a long-term relationship with a given technology vendor. The group now has the choice of private sector partners, without being handcuffed to any particular system. It’s about time, and it’s wonderful to see this happening in Canada :-)

Open Source: More than a Commodity

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I’ve been a bystander following the GRICS controversy in Québec and learning as I go. The latest installment is an open letter written to Le Devior newspaper by Louis Desjardins, past-president of the Board of a secondary school on Montréal’s south shore. Michel Dumais has reprinted the entire letter, and there is much of interest.

For instance, I now discover that GRICS may be a non-profit but it is governed by all the school districts in la Belle Province – what some might call a monopoly. GRICS is also committed to the Microsoft platform for all of its application development, forcing schools to upgrade to newer and costlier MS systems instead of opting for cheaper, open standard systems like Linux. As Desjardins puts it, GRICS has created its own cage of MS products from which it cannot escape. The main thrust of Desjardins’ letter is in addressing GRICS’ recent press release stating that GRICS would use open source applications when deemed suitable.

La première erreur que comment la GRICS est de considérer les logiciels libres comme un simple produit. C’est inexact. Aucun logiciel propriétaire ne peut etre redistribué, modifié, étudié, évolonté, amélioré ou partagé. Les logiciels libres n’encourent aucuns frais de licence. Ils sont bien plus que tout simplement économiques : quoi de plus simple que d’utiliser un logiciel libre dans toute une classe, toute une école, toute une commission scolaire, en toute égalité? Sans avoir faire approuver un budget au préalable et identifier le petit nombre de postes sur lesquels on l’installera. On peut installer les logiciels libres partout, sans mot de passe ni numéro de série, sans contrainte lire la peur de la copie, à la perte de revenus de licences, au piratage.

Une autre erreur est d’envisager qu’on puisse se servir des logiciels libres comme d’un simple objet de consommation. Il n’y a pas de consommateur ici. Il y a des partenaires, des membres d’une communauté, des utilisateurs et des développeurs. Concrètement, cela veut dire qu’à partir du moment ou la GRICS croit que les logiciels libres ont une place dans les écoles, elle doit aussi assumer sa responsabilité à  l’égard de la communauté du libre et l’aider à  progresser. Cela s’appelle partager et c’est une valeur qui est au coeur de l’approche libre. Il se trouve que le partage est aussi une valeur chère au monde de l’éducation, comme il a si bien exprimé M. Jacques Daigneault, président de l’Association des utilisateurs de l’ordinateur au primaire-secondaire (AQUOPS) dans sa récente et remarquable lettre ouverte, toujours disponible sur le site web de l’organisme : www.aquops.qc.ca. my translation:

The first error that GRICS makes is in considering open source as a simple product. This is not correct. No proprietary software can be redistributed, modified, studied at your leisure, improved nor shared. There are no licensing costs with open source software. Open source software is more than just cheap: what is simpler than using open source software in a class, an entire school, or a school district, which is completely legal? Without having to go through any budgeting processes, and identifying each machine, we can just go ahead and install it. We can install open source software everywhere, without passwords and serial numbers, without fear of copying, loss of license revenue or of pirating.The other error is to view open source as a simple consumable product. There is no consumer here. There are partners, members of the community, users and developers. Concretely, from the moment that GRICS believes that open source has a place in schools, it must take reponsibility within the open source community and help it to progress. This is called sharing, and it is the value at the heart of the open source movement. We find that sharing is a value dear to the world of education as was well-explained by Mr Jacques Daigneault, president of the Association of Computer Users for Primary and Secondary School, available [in French] on www.aquops.qc.ca.

I watch these happenings in Quebec and wonder about the situation in other provinces, including New Brunswick. As Desjardins says, open source is a value system, not just cheaper products. Learning and education are about sharing. Unfortunately, I see our own province continuing to pay significant licensing fees for proprietary software, even though there are open source alternatives. Embracing open source creates a commons for sharing and innovation. I have already suggested this to our government, but to no avail :-(

Learning Quote of the Day

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From Will at Weblogg-ed:

And that’s sad, isn’t it, because kids see teachers as the people who deliver content, not as the people who teach them how to learn. That’s what kids need teachers for. To show them what learning looks like, how messy and reflective and individualized it really is. To show them what a wonderful gift failure is.

A real comparison of costs – OS vs Proprietary

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I had recently referred to an article on a cost comparison of portals for education, specifically open source versus proprietary, but could not find the entire report. Yesterday, Jacques Cool told me about this article in Le Devoir (in French only), which summarizes the report. I will point out the highlights in English, but if you understand French then please read the entire article.

The cost comparison was of the free, open source MILLE system and a proprietary system, based on a Microsoft platform, called Edu-Groupe from GRICS. The evaluation was conducted by a reputable university scholar, Michael Wybo, and focused on the specific needs of the Québec public school system. The report evaluated similar costs for similar types of installations. Each system was put on its own server, as well as separate servers for e-mail, databases and user authentification. Consultant and staff costs were deemed to be the same for each installation, and the starting point was from a Microsoft IT infrastructure. This last point meant that the move to the Linux-based MILLE system required a system transition as well.

Prof Wybo concluded that the use of MILLE over Edu-Groupe GRICS resulted in savings of between 59% and 75% over a five year period. According to Wybo, these are the total savings when ALL costs are examined. Michel Dumais, in Le Devoir, goes on to tell us of Microsoft’s strategy to address this issue. Microsoft is presenting at the annual conference for the Quebec association of school superintendents in May, and will be giving its own version of “Microsoft and the MILLE project”. Dumais notes that the people in charge of the MILLE project are not getting equal billing or time to present their version to these public servants.

It seems that even when the case is exceptionally clear, vested corporate interests will win out over best practices, saving tax dollars and just building a better mousetrap. Dumais concludes:


D’un côté, nous avons une solution en libre, financée à  même les fonds publics, et qui répond entièrement aux besoins du monde de l’éducation. De l’autre, nous avons des solutions propriètaires, celles de la GRICS, financées elles aussi avec des fonds publics, mais qui reviennent beaucoup plus cher à   l’état québécois.

Et on repose la question : À  terme, comment la socièté GRICS peut-elle justifier le développement de ses offres de service en logiciel propriètaire, financées à  même les fonds publics, devant les conclusions du rapport Wybo ?

my translation:

On one side we have an open source solution financed with public funds, that responds to all of our educational needs. On the other side, we have proprietary solutions, those of GRICS, also financed by public funds, but these will be much more expensive to Québec.

And we resubmit the question: in the end, how can GRICS justify the development of its proprietary system, financed with public funds, in light of the conclusions of the Wybo Report?