The other side of the moon

I'm supposed to speak at Foss.in on why FOSS makes sense in education. I chose the topic because it's something I'd worked on while I was still at NCST. The effective use of computers in children's education was very close to me.

This could well be the least technical post on this blog, but I've been having trouble getting coherency in my thoughts and I have to put it down for clarity. As has been the case in the past, this blog becomes a sounding board for me to dribble my thoughts. I'm not looking for comments, just trying to clear stuff in my head.

At Vidyakash 2002, it had been suggested that I get a hold of Seymour Papert's The children's machine. Papert worked under Piaget to study how children learn, and the results of these studies were the Logo programming language, and two successful books - Mindstorms, and The Children's Machine - the former being the inspiration behind Lego Mindstorms. I managed to get my hands on this book, and reviewed it for the Vidyakash Newsletter.

It had also started me thinking on how computers were being used in education. What follows are my thoughts.

The role of computers in education

I think before we proceed to decide on the tools to use, we need to know why we need computers in a school. What would we do with them, where would they be used, and who would use them?

I see three basic uses for a computer in a school.

• Instruction Delivery
• Instruction Enabling
• Administration

The first two are those that I'm primarily concerned with, and the remainder of this post will be about those.

Both instruction delivery, and instruction enabling are interactions between a student and a teacher, where the latter may or may not exist. A teacher has traditionally been one who delivers instructional content to a student, and enables learning to take place. This generally means that the entire class will follow at the teacher's pace, and according to the teacher's will.

How does a computer fit in here?

Computers are excellent at instruction delivery. Primarily replacing the text book, however, rather than just throwing static text and pictures onto a computer screen, instructional content may be made far richer through the use of animations, sound, video and simulations. An instruction designer is required to effectively build this content.

Instruction enabling - in my terminology - has more to do with the computer being the target of learning. For example, one cannot teach C programming without a computer (although people have tried). The computer in this case is the laboratory within which students learn to apply the knowledge they've gained in the classroom.

If we concentrate only on computer education for a short part of this post, we could see that it is possible to merge the classroom and the laboratory into a single entity. Instruction delivery and experimentation can take place within a very real environment that is the computer, and in fact, the history of computer education is filled with examples of CBTs and web based courses.

Note: I haven't mentioned FOSS yet.

Now, let's drop the restrictions on our thoughts above and apply this to all forms of education.

Computers have been used in the past to teach Math, English, the sciences and various other subjects, but what has been the model followed?

Do we want the computer to program the child or the child to program the computer?

Too often, we've seen that CBTs flood the child with information that he has to memorise, and then throw tests at him to test his knowledge. He goes further once he's cleared all tests. This looks a lot like the way I program a computer. I throw a whole bunch of data at it, and then I write and constantly refine my code until it processes the data correctly, to give me my expected output.

Do we really want to create a generation of automatons? (automata?)

Instead, Papert shows a different model, and he takes the simple example of learning a language.

A child in Surat learns Gujarati with equal ease as a child in Toulouse learns French. In fact, several children in Surat learn both Gujarati and Hindi with that same ease. My grandma learnt Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi and Bengali. At the same time, it's terribly hard for an adult to do the same. Most adults can never pick up a foreign language.

I've been in foreign language classes for adults for three languages, and in all cases, there have been people who pick it up really quickly, and there are those that never do. Invariably, it's the folks who would otherwise be considered childish, who pick up the language quicker. IAC, adult education is not the point here.

Learning is genetic

Papert suggests that the child in Toulouse and the child in Surat inherit learning from their respective environments. Learning through living as it were.(and I had a document to link to about this, but it no longer exists online). As we proceed through life, we pick up experiences through our various sensors - eyes, ears, nose, mouth, touch - and translate them into learning elements stored in our brains. Language learning is no different.

Can we somehow teach Math and Physics in the same way? Can we create a natural environment in which the rules of speech are not grammar and spellings, but mathematical identities or Newton's laws of motion?

Umm, yeah, Logo does that. It creates a Mathland and a Physicsland where children can learn math and physics by playing. The results are amazing, and terribly scary for teachers. Teachers need to accept that for once, a child may learn in an unplanned way. A child may come to an innovative solution that the teacher hadn't envisioned, in much the same way that Gauss summed the integers from one to a hundred when he was five.

Teachers need to be prepared to sit down and figure out a problem and its solution along with the student, and not by themselves, only to proclaim the solution hours later. It's the process of figuring it out that creates learning, not the process of listening to a clean room solution.

Debugging one's mistakes

Some experiences excite us and accelerate learning, while others scare us and slow it down, sometimes stopping it permanently. All too often, our teaching systems are designed to make children afraid of learning. We punish them when they make mistakes rather than showing them how to debug their errors and move towards a solution.

Enter FOSS.

FOSS is great for learning because the source code is available. Not just for reading, but for modification, and experimentation.

Those last two points are what makes pure foss projects different from source visible projects.

It's important to note, that price is not an issue here. Good software costs money, and can well cost a lot of money. One must be prepared to pay for the quality that one expects. The important gain that comes along with foss is the free laboratory that you get along with it.

We move back to computer education, because it's the easiest example to start with when talking about software.

For every topic within the computer science and engineering umbrella, we have several foss project that may act as the virtual 'lands' that we require. Each project can be a land in which the natural spoken language is the topic to be learnt. Operating Systems, Databases, Networks, Graphics, Communication, Multimedia, the list goes on. We have hundreds of lands, often overlapping, and the overlap can be a learning experience in itself. Much like a bunch of my cousin's kids from the UK who learnt Konkani after a month in Goa.

This is already happening in colleges, but at lower levels, mistakes are being made. Rather than giving them the ability to learn anything computer related, students are taught specific tools which leaves them vulnerable to change.

It's like teaching English poetry by covering only works by Yeats. The outcome is that students cannot recognise the works of Ogden Nash, or even CSNY as poetry.

Things must change.

Popularity begets obsolescence

When asked to switch from teaching tools like Microsoft Office in favour of generic topics like office automation applications, a common retort is, Should we not teach the current popular tools?.

The answer is a resounding no. Teaching specific tools, popular or not, leads to obsolescence when those tools cease to be in use, and who's to say that they won't. No one uses Wordstar, Lotus 123 or DBase today, yet these were the tools that we were taught to use in school. What should be the purpose of computer education?

• Teach students to learn any tool
• Let students learn through hands on experience
• Throw responsibility into the hands of students

The idea should be to teach students concepts, and any tool that helps achieve this is good. Students should be exposed to a variety of tools, and the choice of specific tool should be theirs. A student may well choose the tool that gives him the edge when searching for a job.

Students can be put in charge of running the IT systems of a school. This will cut costs in a large way, and these student graduate from school/college with invaluable work experience that others only pick up after a year or two working in industry.

Why FOSS?

The big boys of FOSS all have their basis in education. Linux was started by Linus Torvalds to learn about the 386 architecture, and later to learn more about operating systems. LyX was written as a college project. The Gimp was written because its creators wanted to learn how to do graphical programming, and Gtk+ was born out of it because they wanted to learn how to write a good toolkit.

FOSS fosters education. For the persons contributing to it, and for the persons consuming it. The threshold for a user of Foss to become a contributor is extremely low - if we consider the different forms of contribution possible. Given the right language, it isn't hard for a domain expert to become a contributing developer.

Which brings us to other subjects.

Educational software already exists for non-computer related topics, and there is much FOSS to choose from. Software may be taken up and customised by a school. Specifically, students of higher classes could build or modify software for lower classes. These really do not have to be comp. sci. students. The emphasis here is not on getting the greatest algorithm implemented in code, or to squeeze out the last ounce of power from a low end machine. The emphasis is on applying domain knowledge to create a virtual world, on translating, for example, Newton's laws of motion to a set of rules by which a computer can build a simulation.

In Papert's experience, a child learns by teaching the turtle how to do stuff. The turtle here is a creature in the computer, and the child needs to teach this turtle how to first draw lines, then to use those lines to draw simple shapes, then to use those shapes to draw complex shapes, and further. In order to teach the turtle, the child must first figure out the steps herself, and that's where learning occurs.

As I write this, the same question keeps resounding in my head, "Ok, so this tells us how computers can be used effectively in education, but why Foss?".

The answer stems from the ability of foss to build on anothers ideas. Two students from different schools and different batches even may collaborate on the same idea. One may use libraries published by the other. The user of the library can gain insight into the ideas that went into building it, and can even suggest alternate approaches based on his or her usage of the library. Vinod Khosla seems to have similar ideas.

Academia is want to publish findings, results and papers. Foss is merely a solid implementation of that which is already published. Publishing one's learning as a Foss implementation spreads the knowledge and the discussion.

Much like Wikipedia allows users to collaborate on building information, so also, students should be able to collaborate in their learning. The output needn't be completely correct, but it must be debuggable, and therefore free and open.

So who is using Foss in education?

It depends on what we mean by using.

• All of Mexico uses Foss in schools.
• Several regions in France do too.
• Schools in Virginia, Portland, Oregon, and several other states in the US.
• Italian elementary schools regularly use Free Software.
• Students in Melbourne run the IT systems of the school entirely.

However, none of the above are actual contributors to domain based foss. That's what we need primarily.

Learning is fostered more by doing, teaching and collaborating. Foss is based on all three of these, and is why Foss makes sense for education.

I'm not going to link to locations where one can find free software for education. This discussion has been less about that. It's more about learners contributing their learning as foss to improve the learning of others, and there aren't many links for that.

Other discussions

There have been discussions over the years about foss and linux in education, and stories of successful implementations. These are just a few of the links that I've collected. Most of these talk about implementing linux in a school's IT department.

• A discussion on educational software for linux
• The french project
• Cost analysis of linux in education
• Linux in higher education
• Linux in Education - Linux Journal
• The Riverdale Project
• The open science blog

Citations

This post was cited by the following papers:

• S. Chopra and S. Dexter. 2009. Free software, economic 'realities', and information justice. SIGCAS Comput. Soc. 39, 3 (December 2009), 12-26.