It is a joy to participate in candid exchanges that address the issues faced with an expansion of Open Source use in british schools. My sense is that the OS community does not share a common vision for the use of Open Source and has made assumptions that schools will want to adopt the ego centric approach of the lone artesan. Schools are a co-operative community centered on teaching and learning (or should be!).
Managed services are not going away, and Open Source must work within them or die. This means going beyond Moodle and adhering to regimes based on availability and performance not a regime that promotes maverick individualism. I have great hopes, but the anti-establshment stance has constantly come to the fore and constant claims that the deck is stacked against the OS community fragment the creation of momentum. If your target market is the geek teacher or technician in a trust or independent school OS may remain niche.
Not sure I agree with the tone of your last post. Our school is not anti establishment, but is pro choice and a lot of LA's restrict choice by their 'value added' frameworks and services. So we chose to work outside of that to promote greater freedom and choice.
We work with several schools spread across the whole country to further develop open source tools that are used in our school. Using a geographical area as small as a LA just does not scale to the sort of work we are doing. But sharing information across schools under a 'Federation' (rather than managed service, who says managed services are here to stay. Federation seems to be the latest term being bandied around) based on shared interest is working very well for us and the other schools involved.
I had hoped that this site would help promote these types of services more than it has, but Edugeek seems to be a more viable forum for sharing this type of idea.
Open source tools virtually run the entire internet and scale very well? Why must the work with managed services or die? Personally I would prefer to federate services rather than hand them over to a managed service. Indeed we are plan to opt out our BSF managed service. is this anti establishment or pro choice ?
In many countries using OS tools in the only viable option they have for delivering education, they are starting from a clean sheet in many cases so do not have a legacy of application running on an existing OS etc.
At our school I think we have a great balance of propetiary and OSS solutions, that are based on the needs of our business. I would not be in favour of going totally OSS as I think a balance between the two is the correct stance to take at this point in time. Indeed prior to joining the education community I was a TDA in a Microsoft Expert Team for a large telecoms provider. I started my IT career using Unix so I have always had a foot in both camps so to speak.
Indeed our own LA started using proxmox virtual machines, after I told them about that project. So they are loads of roles for Open Source Software at a LA level for all sorts of projects. Maybe you should go and see how some schoolscolleges/universities/LAs are using these tools to deliver services ?
Firstly, I apologise if the tone of my post caused offence ... not my intention; my points however remain. I want to respond to your comments.
Open source tools virtually run the entire internet and scale very well? Why must the work with managed services or die?
I agree and most commercial users that use it operate with service level agreements, managed hosting etc. It’s nothing new, and sets out what you can expect for your money in terms of availability and performance … a managed service. Why should schools expect less?
Personally I would prefer to federate services rather than hand them over to a managed service.
I agree that the right approach is a federated access management system where schools are Identity providers and or Service Providers. Indeed this is the system adopted in my LA. Schools can run their own services and act as IdP / SP either individually or as a consortium. Indeed our BSF and LA data-centres operate on this basis and use Shibboleth, an Open Source project. We also value Services / Systems / Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF), another open source concept.
Indeed we are plan to opt out our BSF managed service.
The only route open if you want BSF investment is what is called an Alternative procurement Business Case (APBC). This allows a school to put a business case forward for running their own procurement, i.e. they can get better value. There’s a snag though, you have to compete from the Becta framework contractors, can’t run your own ICT Service and must procure a managed service that sets out availability and performance. Guidance issued last week outlines a new concession from partnerships for schools where Academies grouped across several LA’s can procure a separate managed service to that provided by their LA. It must have at least 5 schools that cross LA borders though I believe, and it must be based on availability and performance.
One school nationally to my knowledge has managed to avoid a managed ICT service, but they lost the capital investment in ICT, and my understanding is that they were only granted this because they took it to the eleventh hour past which withdrawing them from the BSF programme would have wasted months of planning applications and architects time.
So they are loads of roles for Open Source Software at a LA level for all sorts of projects.
I agree
Well the lone artisan is pretty much the exact opposite of a community. Open Source software is all about community. Open Source won't die, it has no concept of going bust. As a taxpayer and parent I would rather have my money spent efficiently with a focus on teaching, not training. I believe Free and Open Source Software is the best way to achieve that. If we take for example a school looking to teach graphic design, they could use Gimp and Inkscape, they could use various proprietary equivalents. The proprietary software producers see that as a sale and will send sales reps and glossy brochures, there might even be a "free lunch". The Gimp and Inkscape communities would simply like you to use their software and maybe contribute something back at some point. If you don't use the Free software it doesn't bother the producers in any way. Bothers me as a tax payer.
"the OS community does not share a common vision for the use of Open Source"
yup, spot on. There is no common vision. Why would you expect or want one? With a community there is no party line or official corporate stance. It is hard to talk coherently with a community and sometimes hard to buy things from it. It is quite simple to join the community and share stuff though.
Excellent points, but if there is to be an organisation to support and promote Open Source, shouldn't it be clear what messages it wants to convey to whom?
Is OS schools a cosy server room community or a campaign?
We are not a campaign, although there are some of our participants who are themselves excellent advocates for open source use. Nor are we a cosy server room community, indeed I see it as a real strength of the group that teachers, technicians and those with a strategic role can share their perspectives and insights here.
Open Source Schools is, I believe, a developing community of practice made up of those using or interested in open source in school level education; what we do is more about supporting than promoting open source use. At times, this might seem a too subtle distinction, but I think it's an important one. Using and contributing to open source is something teachers/schools/authorities should decide for themselves - we're happy to provide information.
Ah ... the dark arts of waving your chicken and knowing which knife to use when sacrificing the goat are alive and well and live on in the OS evangelist who often *makes* themselves the lone artisan in the school rather than the person who introduces the school into the wider OS community.
The trick often missed in any managed service or procurement, whether as an LA, a federation of schools or a single school, is that there is no stipulation to support *both* proprietary *and* open source software. When you finally get down to what needs to be delivered the group who has drawn up the requirements can then just ignore the proprietary side of things. No-one is excluded and you get a company / provider who is adaptable and likely to be more flexible.
Or am I talking too much common sense at this point?
-- In general, my opinions, based on my experience and not a reflection on my employer or any other groups I am associated with *unless explicitly mentioned*.
Who has an interest in maintaining the status quo? Generally those who have committed their knowledge and expert power to the established structures, methods and relationships. If something disrupts this then power and control is threatened and that really is the essence of politics. In that sense any support of something that does not fit immediately into the box is anti-establishment by definition. It's unavoidable.
What happens in a democracy is that the disruptive elements force readjustment. One of the things about FOSS that the establishment can't get its head round is that it is born from the same grass roots power that has made Web 2.0 such a success. There is no single voice just a lot of people doing things in loosely coupled communities. They use centralised services but with decentralised autonomy. (hence the issues of e-safety) They can flit from web site to web site, make arbitrary links between pages hosted on many different servers by many different providers. The mentality that wants to control everything eg into a single VLE that does all a school needs and conforms to some arbitrary framework put out by a globally insignificant government agency is at complete odds with the way the globalised technology and social systems are heading. "Managed services are not going away, and Open Source must work within them or die. " This is a really naive statement. Open Source is inherently connected to managed services since services rather than licensing software are the business model associated with FOSS. Moodle got attention in education because it is independent of Windows and rapidly became a global de facto standard in FE. Thus BECTA's frameworks looked more than a bit stupid when it wasn't included for schools. That was easily predictable 4 years ago to anyone who studied what was going on. Bureaucratic frameworks do not sit well with technological change.
Those that control and manage the services and their vested interests are the key factor. The constant assertion that anyone who knows anything is then only capable of marketing to geeks is demonstrably false. The guys that set up Google were geeks they seem to have managed to market to the masses. OpenOffice, full of geeks and 100 million downloads worldwide. The truth is that without pressure from activists FOSS would not even be on the radar in schools. In any case, it's not the geeks that are the problem, after all, it is not their job to lead the e-strategy. If it's not happening that lies squarely at the feet of those that get paid to manage and lead the system on behalf of the tax payer not some technician who risked his reputation to save his school a few quid and feels a bit passionate about it .
As Miles says, this is just a forum for sharing ideas. One of many that have been on-going well before a few crumbs fell from the E-learning credit table. The fact that SOSP is the sum total of the strategy for FOSS in British Education tells us something pretty profound about the technological knowledge, capability and will of the so called leaders :-)
What do you mean by "going beyond Moodle"?
I presume he means using desktop apps? Perhaps infrastructure? Well, Audacity gets used quite a bit in schools, there is more OOo about but Inkscape certainly is under-used considering its potential. One of our constant hassles is schools insisting on using older copies of IE that break W3C compliant web pages so maybe its getting more people using FOSS browsers? Then again it could be using Drupal to provide the school web site and e-portfolios or server side stuff like Linux, Apache and Squid. The reason why a lot of schools are happy to use Moodle is that its web based and they have no experience of a proprietary equivalent so no worries about change and easy to get at. We are actually moving stuff out of Moodle into Drupal because it can be made even more easily accessible. Still all the content is open licensed so really anyone is free to move it whereever they want to.
Sun Microsystems view on open source. Seems like only yesterday that Sun was a proprietary vendor :)
https://www.sun.com/offers/docs/opensource_enterprise.pdf
An interesting article, but surely Sun have been primarily associated with open source for many years now?
The average person, if they have heard of Sun at all, will probably think of OpenOffice or Java, and might be hard pressed to name a Sun proprietary product.
I believe Sun has open-sourced all its software products - Solaris and Java more recently. Sun's transition to FOSS certainly dates back at least to before 2000 with the acquisition of Star Division and birth of OpenOffice.org.
Sun's CTO onOpen Source 3 years ago. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7g-XS5Q3mc
I became aware of Sun when I worked as a Unix Sys Admin. Their flagship product still is Solaris, of which there is now openSolaris. I still hope for an open version of Aix :)
Java was not always open either? I think the average person in the IT world would of heard of Sun at the very least :) Great to see a large company offering vendor led support though, which shows that OSS is not about to die any time soon :)
Tim