Nov

26

Open Source and Web 2.0

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The following was written for the new edition of Terry Freedman’s “Coming of Age: an introduction to the new World Wide Web“.

“The bottom up organization, where distributed, self-motivated individuals creatively collaborate and work together on shared problems, has relevance both in terms of the creation of digital technologies we use for education and as an approach that could be adopted as part of the teaching and learning process” (Bacon & Dillon 2006)

Open source software has its origins back in academic computer science in the 1960s, where writing code was more about intellectual creativity and contributing something to the common good than about commercial gain, and where the respect of ones peers was often reward enough. I hope that the parallels with web 2.0 already start to become apparent, as these are amongst the reasons why folks are only too happy to spend time blogging, adding to wikipedia or posting photos up onto flickr. Although much of the Internet is underpinned by open source code such as Apache, BIND and SendMail, and the Linux operating system has a high reputation for reliability and efficiency, open source has until quite recently been at the educational margins, with its principal appeal being free licensing, and thus savings in total cost of ownership (Becta 2005).

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