Open-Source Platforms for Education and Equalization

Posted on | July 6, 2007 | 3 Comments

When I spoke to the KSA Task Force in Liberia a few weeks ago, a colleague asked the assembled group (a mixture of teachers, principals, ministry officials, academics and students) how many had used a computer before. Of the 30+ people in the group, six had seen a computer before they saw them being used for presentations in the group meetings, and only 3 had actually used one. So, less than 10% of this group of education professionals had used a computer, and less than 20% had even seen one previously. Similarly, the children I saw in Kakata had seen the assembled rows of computers in their new computer lab – but without power and without connectivity the desktops there are as yet no more than ornaments.

That is why the impetus behind OLPC is such a virtuous one. The drive for equalization of opportunity in education, as well as across wider social and economic contexts, is a powerful force for positive change worldwide. Technology has to be a key driver – I would say the key driver – in that process.

A particular flavour of this drive can be seen in the push being made right now in many countries across the world to realize a 1:1 ratio of computing devices to students. Again the motivation behind 1/1 (as some have abbreviated it) is a creditable one, although often the real driving force can be a crudely political one: ICT means computers, so the politician or party that wants to be viewed as technologically progressive comes up with the ’solution’ of buying thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands, of laptops or desktops. This simplistic policy will always cause serious problems in the medium term unless careful thought is given to the context in which the devices will be deployed.

In terms of educational value, there are at least two critical issues to be addressed in thinking through these policies, issues that raise powerful barriers to the long-term effectiveness of any kind of 1/1 or similar strategy. And the issues in question are not just the responsibility of those who are leading the way with such policies and projects.

OLPC

The first issue is an obvious one: there is little point – I would say no point – in distributing millions of computing devices to millions of learners across the world without viable and sufficient connectivity to tie all those devices together and to facilitate full access to the Web for all those learners lucky enough to obtain one. To date, I have seen projects in various parts of the world where those leading the 1/1 projects absolutely recognize this simple fact and are taking the necessary steps to ensure web access is enabled. I have also seen projects where this is most definitely not the case. We cannot get away from the fact that connectivity is a massive, global, costly – and absolute! – requirement.

If connectivity is of prime importance, what comes second? That place, I believe, goes to the need to provide a learning platform of some kind – at least as a ‘kick-start’ initiative. In many parts of the world, of course, money is scarce. Given this fact, I believe that we should be looking to the burgeoning Web 2.0 stockpile and to open-source for the solution. Indeed, if we do look to these territories for the answer, we immediately put ourselves in the happy position of being able to specify, not just one solution, but a whole family of solutions that can be topped and tailed to suit different circumstances, different priorities and the huge sweep of educational cultures that exist out there in the real world of the emerging nations.

Some have speculated around the concept of the Personal Learning Environment. Most of those working on this concept tend to position the PLE as, well, personal – strung together by the individual for his or her own personal educational needs. I wonder if that tentative concept could somehow be expanded and strengthened into something that starts to ‘play in the Enterprise space’ (as I hope I have learned not to say in the Corporate world). In other words, can we stretch the concept of the PLE into an industrial-strength learning platform, costing precisely nothing to construct, offering a genuine depth and breadth of modularity and flexibility, and dependent for successful implementation only on the provision of the underlying connectivity, the wide distribution of access devices, and the level of engagement required to train teachers and learners in the use of the tools (not an aspect that should be underestimated, of course).

Thanks to Leigh Blackall for the perfect pic.

Could we therefore take some semblance of the personal learning environment and use it as a base upon which to build a mesh of social networking tools, free productivity tools covering text creation, calculation, graphics and video, search tools, communication and collaboration tools, virtual whiteboarding or similar, file sharing and tagging, and an open-source VLE perhaps. It would not be enough simply to draw up the wishlist however – that would still be just a PLE, basically. Some thought would need to be given to the special conditions, the project requirements, and the scaleabiity of the concept – Web 2.0 has scaled to the whole world already, so it should not be beyond reason to suppose that an open-source learning environment comprising such services could be scaled across a whole country or a whole region. Issues around identity management would have to be addressed – some may choose to address the issue by ignoring it and leaving it to individuals or classes or schools, say, to set up their own authenticated access to the tools – that, again, is in the nature of Web 2.0 anyway.

In the special conditions that apply across the emerging nations, the power and sophistication of an SSDN/Glow-like model – with its national ID Management underpinning – is unattainable in the short-to-medium term (I know there are those, and I respect them, who would wish to argue with me on this point), and simply cannot be afforded anyway – but real learning opportunities could without doubt be derived from the range of Web 2.0 and open-source applications out there right now.

Before objections arise from those who dislike the very idea of national platforms – and perhaps have a philosophical aversion to the concept of a national platform cobbled together from Web 2.0 and open-source tools – such a platform could only ever be a starting point. Once learners get used to a pre-determined set of tools such as this, they would soon begin to explore the Web for themselves, for better tools, for more productive applications, and for the services that they want to use for their own good reasons. It would be a platform that would be ‘bio-degradable’ as its users acquired the sophistication to go off on their own to create their own personal learning environments. Perhaps therefore we are looking to create a learning un-platform!

I know that the education professionals I spoke to in Liberia are desperate to explore the potential of ICT and of the Web for teaching and learning, and I know the young people I spoke to in the school in Kakata are hungry for access too. Web 2.0 and open source might be the way to make that possible beyond handing out computers and enabling connectivity.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, open-source, learning platform, 1/1, liberia, kakata, PLE, glow, ssdn

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