7.1 Floss, oer, equality and digital inclusion

Floss, oer, equality and digital inclusion

This posting is intended to direct the discussion towards the rationale for software libre in education and the broader impact on sustainable development .

I start by revisiting the topic for the series, and share some experiences to re-emphasise a few of the points made in previous postings. I move on torecontextualise the discussion with respect to the big picture, pose some questions for discussion and invite participants to suggest additional questions which may arise

Topic revisited

Regarding the topic, “Impact of OSS on Education,” I suspect that both education and software development are subject to similar influences astechnology enables connections among people with common interests and learning needs.

For example, it is difficult to determine the impact of FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) on education - the context is enabling educators and learners to benefit from the connectednessFLOSS communities have enjoyed and made good use of for more than a decade. Knowledge sharing across FLOSS and OER communities seems to have streamlined (stimulated, facilitated and catalysed) FLOSS adoption and technology-assisted collaborative learning in the education space. SeveralFLOSS projects have been pedagogically inspired (e.g. Moodle , Fle3 , Kewl.NextGen , etc.), while others have been orientated (initially or primarily) towards administration (e.g. Sakai , SchoolTool , etc.).

FLOSS communities, and more recently Wikipedia communities, have been inspirational in demonstrating what can be achieved through commons-based peer production . We are rising to the challenge of realising this level of success in education through libre and open resources for education. Efforts in this direction include Connexions , Wikieducator and eXe , Le Mill , EduCommons , Wikiversity , 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 learningcomponents (variously called learning objects, iDevices, etc, …).

However, for reusability in education, “localisation/ recontextualisation is always required.” The educational and learning needs varyacross 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 DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork ).