I spent the day in London yesterday in the company of a very select group of educators at the invitation of AlphaPlus Consultancy, the winning bidder for the Becta Open Source for Schools project. We were invited to provide feedback on their new website, as well as to provide advice on the establishment of an online community.
By creating an online community of users, the project aims to inform schools and teachers about the benefits of using open source software (OSS) by providing case studies and other resources.
Promoting the use of free and open source software is a laudable cause which has my wholehearted support (read this post from Doug Belshaw), but it is not yet clear how the objective of converting from licensed software to OSS is going to happen.
Although the benefits of using OSS in schools are many and obvious, I actually feel the project has its work cut out selling (for lack of a better word… the stuff is free for goodness sake!) OSS to schools because of the monolithic, conservative culture prevalent in the vast majority of schools, where generally ridiculous amounts of effort are needed to effect relatively small changes.
Why do I think this? Well, teachers are creatures of habit. We don’t like change. We like to make do. We’re too busy to change to something new. In fact, we don’t like things new. New is BAD. Teachers are too busy being teachers.
A teacher will most certainly ask what’s in it for me? and an OSS advocate might answer OSS is free and the teacher will reply well, Microsoft Office is free, I don’t pay for it, School does! Anyway, I haven’t got time to learn something new… I don’t like new, remember?
So targeting teachers directly might not be a good idea. Perhaps a better idea is to seek out those in the profession who are already advocates of OSS and let them spread the word to fellow teachers, what’s often referred to as evangelising: transferring the early adopters’ enthusiasm to the wider community. The problem with this approach is that it take an excruciatingly long time and I am not sure Becta’s funding will last for as long as that.
On the other hand, Senior Management Teams (SMT) might be seduced by the financial benefits. On closer scrutiny, however, free does not mean free in this context, because the a) it would cost money to transition to OSS and b) you still need technical support and maintenance. So, to them, the benefits are medium to long term and hypothetical, whereas you can guarantee disruption and expenditure in the short term. Well, that’ll be enough to put me off if I were in the SMT!
The most important aspect of OSS for me, the main selling point if you like, is compatibility. Let me explain: currently the licensed programmes generally used by schools produce output that can only be read and edited by another licence holder. This means that if a student is working on a Photoshop project, he or she cannot work on it at home because ordinary people generally cannot afford the stupid prices Adobe charges.
Imagine then that instead of Photoshop, both student and school have GIMP installed, a open source paint and picture editing programme, in this scenario the student is able to work on his or her project both at school and at home. This illustration works for word documents, presentations, spreadsheets… you name it, it works.
So, it turns out that selling OSS is a tougher nut to crack than you would have thought, although if you ask me, it’s a no brainer… but who am I to say?
Both Doug Belshaw and Miles Berry, who were in attendance, have written wonderfully about this project and/or this meeting on their blogs. Do pop over and have a read.
As ever the best part of attending this sort of meetings was the meeting part. It was great to see Doug again, meet Ian Usher properly and meet Josie Fraser and Miles Berry in real life.
Where do you stand in this OSS business? Do you even know what it is?
