Innovation in Software

OK, so I’m having some fun with the title. This is Part III (the final part, you’ll be pleased to hear) of my write-up about the Open Schools Alliance even last week. Part I and Part II are worth a look if you just got here.

First up straight after the break was Liberal Democrat MP for Southport, John Pugh. This particular Honourable Member is well-known to those of us on the open source side of the digital divide: he has a habit of asking what must be for the mandarins on the receiving end really annoying questions of the government about their IT procurement policies. He has a particular interest in IT in schools as he himself started out as a teacher, but in recent years has found an ally in Private Eye for his questioning in the House around the tax credits fiasco and other IT blunders.

He made the argument that the government is progressively getting worse at procurement in that it’s not learning from its mistakes. He argued that many within government departments are unaware of what open source is, are unaware of what it can do, or what it can save. The quote for me from this session was “whilst the government have a road building programme, they don’t argue roads must be built so that they may only accomodate Fords”.

It seemed to me though, that his real bugbear was open standards more than open source – it is the fact we’re producing systems that lock us into a vendor for a lifetime that is causing us problems.

We then moved into a panel discussion featuring John, Ian Lynch, Mark Taylor, Mike Partridge and our strawman for the day, Dr. Stephen Lucy of BECTA.

This discussion ultimately came down to panellists and the audience expressing dismay at BECTA’s attitude towards OSS, and how they were allowing for the propping up of what can be described as state aid of Microsoft. I was quite impressed by how Dr Lucy handled the situation, but was informed by another attendee later that this was characteristic of how he worked – he would attend these events and “play a dead bat” to the air of hostility. I can’t blame him, but BECTA are going to have to realise that it’s going to get worse unless they start looking at how to bring open source into the mix.

There are huge issues around OSS and IT procurement in general – probably more urgent in education than anywhere else – and it’ll be interesting to see the direction the Open Schools Alliance.

There needs to be a shift from centralised procurement to bottom-up organisation, but even with centralised projects like CLEO it has been shown OSS can provide amazing value for money. If BECTA were willing to play ball a little, who knows how much more great software we could see in classrooms over the next few years? As it is, it feels to me like a few senior players in BECTA are positioning themselves for consultancy positions in Microsoft and WebCT.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be interesting to watch, and I only hope that eventually parents and teachers see sense, and give the OSA all the support they need.

This is the second part of my write-up from the Open Schools Alliance event last Friday. Part I is here

The second session was Deborah Murrell from CLEO who talked about trying to deploy Moodle to every school in Cumbria & Lancashire. Some schools have used Moodle as their primary web-site CMS, particularly primary schools. It’s an unintended consequence of giving them something to work with, I think.

In terms of success, whilst the pedagogical case for VLEs has yet to be proved (i.e., nobody knows if they really do help learning), this experiment looks as though it’s helping kids get access to resources even when at home. The areas they need help with are mostly around MIS integration, but part of that problem is that the most dominant provider of school management software is a commercial developer who considers open source a bizarre anachronism.

CLEO is planning on working around e-Portfolios and identity management in the future, so it looks like it could be an interesting experiment for a whole range of VLE-related areas, all possible thanks to the very open nature of Moodle.

Ian Lynch of INGOTs was up next, trying to get us all interested in his new qualifications. One of my bugbears around ECDL and similar qualifications right now is that they think the World revolves around Microsoft. Ian’s work is quite intriguing, but there is still a way to go before he can really underpin the notion of “lifelong learning” around open source in my opinion – the material he has available is still aimed very much at the schools market. Still, every journey starts with a step and I’m sure this is going to go places in time.

Mike Partridge of Stockport LEA stepped up to the plate next and made us ask questions about the nature of technology in the education system. He talked about how since the 1980s technology has led and education has had to play catch-up – he’s now interested in looking at ways that pedagogical frameworks can be embodied in the technology. He talked about social learning, individual learning styles, and independent discovery of skills.

In fact, if he wasn’t from the LEA, I could have easily assumed he was basically advocating Democratic Schooling. He is from the LEA though, so I think it’s more a case of trying to find a way to let teachers and students better understand each other.

GeekUp-regular Richard Smedley from M6-IT then talked about deploying open source systems into schools to the level of one per two children.

Some of the techniques he’s using are pretty innovative, such as recycling old hardware into thin clients to reduce financial needs. The figures he cited were pretty amazing as well – a fit-out that might have needed £100,000 using commercial software and brand new hardware, he was able to complete for £6,000 leaving enough cash lying in the school’s coffers for a building extension and a new part-time teacher.

It’s figures like that which are going to have a real political impact on open source in schools, and it was the politics of the situation we turned to after lunch, which we’ll get to in Part III.

I’m still catching up, but as promised, here are my notes from the Open Schools Alliance event last Friday. Due to the length of my notes, I’m splitting this up into several parts to be posted over the next couple of days.

The Open Schools Alliance have a tricky balancing act to pull off. There appears to be a natural inclination towards giving what is effectively a monopoly to Microsoft in the education market, they have to lobby hard and loud. By doing so, they risk being labelled “religious zealots”, as indeed some have labelled them in the past. This event though was positioned as a way of making educationalists aware of the landscape of open source in schools and aimed to educate and inform rather than proselytise.

Well, that was until some people got stuck in during the afternoon panel session, but we’ll get to that in Part III.

Martin Douglamas, the founder of Moodle – the most developed and widely deployed of the open-source VLEs – was present and gave a run-down on the history and possible future of Moodle and its partners. The open-source business model they’ve adopted is pretty interesting: the code is owned by a trust that is sustained by donations and contract services, but partner organisations can get official recognition as long as they drop 10% of their profit around projects back into the trust. It’s like an open-source, anarchist (in the political sense) multi-national that works. It’s possible this is one future of open source economics.

Martin talked about the scalability of an open source model: 200+ developers which even commercial VLE providers would struggle to match with their exorbitant pricing models, and the relatively flat structure.

What really interested me though was the plans to introduce “community hubs” into Moodle. Teachers in schools in a given geography are likely to be teaching the same curriculum material in a similar style, yet they are all independently creating the same content. How best could you organise it so that once a module was in the system, it could be shared by all teachers teaching that module? The answer will be a hub where courses can be shared (or charged for) amongst a group of people with the ability to connect to that hub. Bottom-up hierarchies: you’ve got to love it.