Oct
21
A good meeting today up in London as part of the advisory group for the opensourceschools project that alphaplus consultancy are running for Becta. Given we had people with us from a couple of the teams that had failed to win the contract for this project, I was not alone in wondering whether it was any accident that the Institute of Arbitrators were hosting the event (Is this the right room for an argument?…), but in fact the gathering was a very amicable one, as most such occasions are: open source folk are a friendly bunch.
We started off discussing the ‘selling points’ of open source – a few creative tensions emerged here:
- Open source is about low cost and reliability;
- It’s about being able to adapt things to fit particular purposes and see how code work;
- It’s about the social construction of a knowledge artefact.
Well, I guess all the above, but where should the emphasis lie in informing those not so familiar with the concept?
Some interesting tensions in thinking about low hanging fruit too: portable apps, webserver appliances or the infrastructure stuff – I suspect Windows and Office will be with us a while yet.
The wonderful Josie Fraser led a good workshop on community building, getting us to explore some of the dimensions along which communities place themselves, and thinking where we would see ourselves. It seems to me that what matters is a sense of purpose here – the open source projects which have been most successful in capturing a community around them (Moodle, Elgg, Wordpress etc) have a good sense of how the community can contribute to the project – through features, forums, documentation, bug reports and the like, as well as hacking mods, themes, plugins and the rest; part of this is down to leadership I know, but as with open source in general, things get done because they need doing. I think the same is probably true of the more vibrant communities around the net – TES Forums, Edugeek and, I think, the informal Personal Learning Networks that seem to be flourishing on Twitter; much in common here with the traditional notion of a community of practice.
A good lunch round the corner, chatting about SIF, learning platforms and open source killer apps – ie where the best in breed is open source – not such a long list as one would hope, but it has to include Moodle, Elgg, Wordpress, Apache, Bind and Firefox. I wonder what else?
The afternoon started with conversations about who the target audience for the project website would be, and what sort of thing they might want from it – our focus here was very much on the needs of those in schools – SLT, teachers, technicians etc. Given the make-up of the group, or the terms of the project specification, it was perhaps not surprising that we didn’t really get to grips with how schools could contribute to open source development, either of content or code:
“Ask not what open source can do for you, but what you can do for open source”
The sense of empowerment that comes with suggesting features, writing documentation, spotting bugs or contributing fixes is a unique ’selling’ point here.
As a group we spent a while being perhaps a bit too critical of the site’s present beta release – watch that space, but a few more case studies to come, I think, perhaps repurposing creative commons content from elsewhere. Looking forward, I hope there’ll be a few more face to face gatherings, perhaps along the unconference/teachmeet model – “How do you use open source” would be a good starting point for gaterhing the case studies.
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8 Responses to “OpenSourceSchools – the inaugural meeting”
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Recently played- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Concerto No. 5 in A, K. 219: III. Rondeau. Tempo di Menuetto
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Concerto No. 5 in A, K. 219: II. Adagio
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Concerto No. 5 in A, K. 219: I. Allegro aperto - Adagio - Allegro aperto
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat, K. 207: III. Presto
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat, K. 207: II. Adagio
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- Why do people ask questions at public events? Tyler Cowen
- Conceptual fraction test (inverting standards and understandings) Jason Dyer
- Open Source, Why or Why Not? ckeller
- General Impressions of ICT in Singapore Terry Freedman
- Multiple equilibria Potemkin village economic stimulus of the day Tyler Cowen
- Building a Better Teacher by Design (author unknown)
On the ‘best of breed’ list: would Audacity and TrueCrypt get a look in?
I like audacity very much – not sure that it’s out in front of Garage Band or Logic Studio, but then it’s not really in the same category, I guess.
TrueCrypt is new to me, but looks very interesting.
MediaWiki certainly belongs on the list, and I was tempted to add freemind to the list too.
“but it has to include Moodle, Elgg, Wordpress, Apache, Bind and Firefox. I wonder what else?”
OpenOffice, Drupal, Inkscape, GIMP, Audacity for sure. OOo 3.0 has already had 10s of millions of downloads and many schools are starting to use it so despite the fact the MS Office will be dominant for some time to come it is already less so than last year or the year before. I should think some will also start using the excellent Google on-line spreadsheet in order to share and publish models on line simply using a browser.
The school I was in today training teachers from Turkey, UK, Germany, and Portugal to use Drupal to construct e-portfolios. Appears that this school’s entire (LA managed) web filtering assumes the use and is dependent on IE. Install Firefox and you can access any site. This seems incredibly bad practice but it will probably result in that LA simply banning Firefox as a “security risk”. If the SOSP is to have any effect it has to challenge these things or no-one will be able to use Open Source simply because the LA won’t allow it. Arguably this is illegal in terms of the 1998 competition act. Will SOSP work to unlock these situations?
Open Office, Inkscape and the GIMP are great programs, but, purely in terms of functionality, can one say, hand on heart, that they’re better than MS Office, Illustrator and Photoshop?
The cloud based apps are interesting – and I’d expect googe docs etc to catch up with OOo and MS Office before very long. There are some interesting data protection issues here though – I suspect it’s contrary to the DPA to use google docs for report writing or an online markbook.
“The sense of empowerment that comes with suggesting features, writing documentation, spotting bugs or contributing fixes is a unique ’selling’ point here.”
Lets not kid ourselves here – all those points are not unique to open source.
What *may* be a selling point is that the development community is responsive to those suggestions. However, that is a selling point for a specific product not for a licence or a development methodology.
“As a group we spent a while being perhaps a bit too critical of the site’s present beta release ”
Then why is this conversation happening here and not on the projects website? There was indeed lots of criticism, but it was all constructive I think. To build a community you have to provide what the community demands. Currently the beta site does not do that (but the team *did* listen and I agree we should “watch this space”).
Ross
[...] Doulg Belshaw and Miles Berry, who were in attendance, have written wonderfully about this project and/or this meeting on their [...]
It was great to meet people in the flesh who I’d only previously met online, and to make new acquaintances! Some very good ideas buzzed around the room, but I sensed a bit of a ‘wait and see’ policy from most involved. I have to say, I’m guilty of that too.
The trouble is that there’s a lot of already-busy people involved in this project who haven’t got time to plough into something that either might not work or may not be there in a couple of years’ time. I really want the project to succeed, but I feel that AlphaPlus may have to go down the road to pay some people for their time, just to get things up-and-running!
[...] does it take to build a community? at dougbelshaw.com OpenSourceSchools – the inaugural meeting | milesberry.net Some extra links for a few minutes [...]