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How Open Source Is Changing Education
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Mar 06, 2007 05:29 AM
from the apple-for-the-penguin dept.
from the apple-for-the-penguin dept.
ftblguy writes "MIT's Open CourseWare program provides a great example of how the open source movement is impacting education. The Online Education Database also lists Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, Linux, Firefox, and Google (?) as some of the other open source in education success stories. Open source and open access resources have changed how colleges, organizations, instructors, and prospective students use software, operating systems, and online documents for educational purposes. Each success story has served as a springboard to create more open source successes."
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I would like to add my penis to the list. I've educated many girls with it, and it also has o
Not mentioning Moodle is a crime (Score:1, Redundant)
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I know it's configuration, not the software, and I've heard Moodle can be pretty good, but...
I know of quite a few people who want to pull their hair out because of Moodle's constant annoying email notifications. :P For them, using Moodle feels like puni
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Open Source? (Score:4, Insightful)
And Wikipedia's success is far from proven, nor is it entirely truly open either. If anything the area where it fails the most is in Education, since the information it contains is unreliable.
Re:Open Source? (Score:4, Informative)
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since the information it contains is unreliable. (Score:2)
Just look at something like chemistry or physics, when you leave one school to go to a higher one they practically tell you to forget everything you've learned up until that point as it was not accurate.
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Yes, I am puzzled too. TFA seems to use 'open source' in a way that I, at least, am not familiar with. Basically they call 'open source' something that includes the open access movement (mentioned recently
Re: Wikipedia's information is unreliable (Score:1)
Re:Open Source? (Score:5, Informative)
- The software it runs on (MediaWiki) was written specifically for Wikipedia. It's open source and GPL. I use it for my personal and professional (education) uses all the time.
- The other software on their web servers is Apache and MySQL. Both open source.
- All text which gets placed on Wikipedia is automatically released under the GFDL, so the text is "open source" (or "open text") too. This means anyone is free to copy the text and use it, but they must continue to release under the GFDL, similar to the GPL.
- Finally, it's open in the sense that anyone can edit it!
Therefore I am baffled at this statement that Wikipedia is "not entirely truly open".Re: (Score:2)
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The fact that Wikipedia can be unreliable is not necessarily a b
Re: Wikipeida's success (Score:5, Informative)
And the reliability studies show that Wikipedia is just about as reliable as Britannica: http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5997332.html [com.com]
Furthermore it puts light on the fact, that you always have to cross test your informations, no matter the source.
How can that not be success?
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The Encyclopedia Britannica should never be cited in real research; neither should Wikipedia.
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Interesting comment, considering that you posted it on a site called "slashdot.org".
Reply:Open Source? Who do you work for ...? (Score:2)
Over the past year alone there has been many postings of articles, comments, and URL/Links related to Wikipedia, Google, Novel, Edu content and resources, OSS develo
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Where's Moodle? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Where's Moodle? (Score:4, Interesting)
Moodle (moodle.org [moodle.org]) is great, but so is that other Free Software e-learning and course management web application Dokeos (dokeos.com [dokeos.com]). (A fork of ex-Claroline [claroline.net], by the original authors, who are no longer employed by the UCL who owns the trademark Claroline.)
Which one is the best, Moodle or Dokeos, ultimately comes down to personal preferences. In general Dokeos is more Blackboard-like, and I know several institutions who choose Dokeos because of the lower learning curve, having used Blackboard before.
Also worth noting is another free software package, a project funded by the (Mark) Shuttleworth Foundation: SchoolTool (schooltool.org [schooltool.org]), including SchoolBell. It's not an e-learning and course management web application, but rather a school infrastructure administration tool.
Re:Where's Moodle? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are many worthy Open Source tools and systems for education. Some of them probably technically better than Moodle (I work with Moodle daily), but in terms of success I don't know anything that can be mentioned in the same sentience. For example, the much heralded Sakai is used by some tens organizations ("over 70" according to the Sakai Wikipedia page).
Some of my favorites:
Elgg, http://www.elgg.org/ [elgg.org]
LAMS, http://www.lamsinternational.com/ [lamsinternational.com]
DSpace, http://www.dspace.org/ [dspace.org]
Btw, I fail to see how my original post merits a Flamebait, Score: 0. Its strongly worded, sure, but it is my honest assessment of the article linked to. The assessment is based on a single issue, I'll grant even that, but it is still correct. If you don't know enough about Open Source in education to know to include Moodle into your list of successes in that field then you don't know enough to write an article about Open Source in education.
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Blackboard was recently bought by WebCT. The license to use WebCt runs into the tens o
Moodle is GPL (Score:2)
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Actually, it was the other way around [wikipedia.org], though they officially refer to it as a merger [blackboard.com].
While Moodle is very feature-rich--we use it in
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partners list [moodle.com]
"What if development stops"? Well, if it's a commercial product you probably have support still, but n
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Thank You! (Score:1, Insightful)
I wasn't aware of the "Open Courseware Consortium" before this. My next few years will probably be spent exploring and learning/ relearning from this resource!
Not only will people in the workforce be able to even more easil
idk? (Score:1)
Sakai Project (Score:2, Interesting)
wikis (lower case) in education. (Score:2)
Savvy teachers in wired schools are finding a lot of success with smaller classroom wikis.
Globaltext Project (Score:1)
Slashvertising? (Score:1)
Open source education could be so much more! (Score:5, Interesting)
What I'm picturing is this: Some benefactor, perhaps a national government somewhere, pays a group of programmers, artists and professors to produce an open source college course on (say) mechanics. On the DVD is an interactive textbook with hyperlinks for people who need further explanation, but there's also video of a series of lectures and demonstrations. Then there is an interactive element that simulates (albeit abstractly) the common lab experiments that are embedded in a 3D virtual environment and really responds to students' input. Finally, there would be many pactice problems that the program could grade and explain immediately. Step by step. Bayesian algorithms could diagnose students' problems and try to correct them.
We have the technology and the brainpower to do all this now, and if we did it, the education one would get from a disk like this would be better than today's typical online course. The point of it would be, of course, that this would be a supplement in a real course where you have access to a professor to ask questions, and hopefully even get some experience in a real lab. But I have no doubt that a well-designed inteactive DVD like this would by itself do an excellent job in teaching you the material. And once it was made, it would only need occasional updates. After all, mechanics doesn't change that much. Of course, interactive applications constantly get better, so these could be improved on each year, and any physics professor in the world could submit exercises. There would even be a mechanism for profs to merge in their own exercises and make a custom DVD just for their students, so long as they abided by the open source license.
But most importantly, owning this DVD would cost students $0.20, the cost of the media. They wouldn't have to wait until college to start learning from it. They wouldn't need to be near a university. They could go at their own pace. They could localize the material to their native language. If they don't have internet at home, they could ask their library to burn the DVD for them and pay them $1 for the media and labor. If they did have the internet, they could discuss the problems together on a volunteer-moderated discussion forum. That sounds to me like a whole lot of education for the price of one well-designed DVD. It's absolutely crucial that this be open source. Sure these things would sell, but then they'd just be one textbook among others. Only if they were arbitrarily tradable, burnable and alterable would they become the gold standard, and then volunteers would make them awesome. That's not to say that whoever made them would have to be poor. There could be some sort of a foundation that might sell extra services, provide paid support ot universities, etc. This thing might not need public funding at all, just a big initial investment. (Of course it wouldn't be just one course...). And don't underestimate the willingness of competent volunteers to help with this. I can tell you I work my ass off to publish journal articles for the benefit of my fellow researchers, and I get paid nothing (except prestige). I've also reviewed articles for journals. Again, I got paid nothing for this. In academics, high-level volunteer work is par for the course. I think it would be a pretty desireable line on a vita that you were invited by the responsible foundation to serve as an editor and review contributions for the (say) interactive history of WWI DVD course. If this were as big as I'm sure it would be, top profs would be fighting to volunteer, including me (though I'm no top prof).
So because I can picture very easily this sort of thing, and I don't see it happening, I think that open source is failing in education. What's succeeding right now are agressive book publishers that keep pimping glossy
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Wikibooks [wikibooks.org]
Wikiversity [wikiversity.org]
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One Laptop Per Child (Score:3, Interesting)
What's needed is a slashdot or google style moderation system so that the best percolates to the top and replaces the not so good. Meta-wiki anyone?
books (Score:5, Interesting)
Citizendium a success ?? That is rich (Score:3, Interesting)
Given that Citizendium is not available for public viewing, it is inappropriate to list it as a relevant resource. When it gets its first public airing, there will be only some 1000 articles. This is hardly going to make an effect. There are many other public wikis that provide a resource that is certainly more relevant at this time for education; Wikieducator comes to mind.
The only thing that we have heard from Dr Sanger is his insistence that it is going to do better.
Thanks,
GerardM
MIT's program is NOT open source (Score:2, Informative)
OpenCourseWare (Score:1)
Having taken a few courses on philosophy, poitics and western literature, I have learnt as much (or more) than I have been in my concurrently enrolled university lectures.
Having chosen to do law and commerce
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This comment will come as a complete surprise to Redhat, Novell, IBM, MySQL and the other Open Source companies who are doing a nice turnover with support contracts.