Regarding the topic, “Impact of OSS on Education,” I suspect that both education and software development are subject to similar influences as technology enables connections among people with common interests and learning needs.
For example, it is difficult to determine the impact of FLOSS 1 (Free Libre Open Source Software) on education - the context is enabling educators and learners to benefit from the connectedness FLOSS communities have enjoyed and made good use of for more than a decade. Knowledge sharing across FLOSS and OER 2 communities seems to have streamlined (stimulated, facilitated and catalysed) FLOSS adoption and technology-assisted collaborative learning in the education space. Several FLOSS projects have been pedagogically inspired (e.g. Moodle 3 , Fle3 4 , Kewl.NextGen 5 , etc.), while others have been orientated (initially or primarily) towards administration (e.g. Sakai 6 , SchoolTool 7 , etc.).
FLOSS communities, and more recently Wikipedia communities, have been inspirational in demonstrating what can be achieved through commons-based peer production 8. We are rising to the challenge of realizing this level of success in education through libre and open resources for education. Efforts in this direction include Connexions 9, Wikieducator 10 and eXe 11 , Le Mill 12 , EduCommons 13 , Wikiversity 14 , and many more.
All of these run on FLOSS platforms, all have followed open (transparent) development processes, and all carefully consider open standards and reusability of learning components (variously called learning objects, iDevices, etc, . . . ).
However, for reusability in education, “localisation/ recontextualisation is always required.” The educational and learning needs vary across contexts. Interestingly, agile software development teams seldom code for re-use unless development of re-usable components is core to their business (Alistair Cockburn, late 1990s, Cape Town; see for example Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work 15 ).
Note that this type of peer production activity has been most evident in the “developed” world. Yochai Benkler 16 emphasizes that most of his research on peer production has focused on the more powerful economies.
1. Is the learning from and between FLOSS, OER and other peer production case studies applicable in “developing” economies?
2. What are the priorities for education, and how could FLOSS have
an impact? 3. What are the motivators and barriers to FLOSS
adoption? 4. If we were to overcome those barriers and provide
physical access to the world's knowledge resources (via FLOSS), would we achieve “equality”?
- 926 reads
