Open source question for schools (BBC)

The odds of there being any hidden costs that are real rather than artificial are minimal. I've worked in programming Computer Aided Learning apps and I've worked as a teacher, and frankly I can think of very little that Microsoft offers that I'd ever use for such a purpose. It's hard enough to think of ANY closed-source package that is truly effective in education.

Flash-based "edutainment", trivial games, some of the most obnoxious music on the planet... It's no wonder kids need to be drugged to their eyeballs! When I was a kid, my father wrote some trivial educational software on a Commodore PET. That was 1978. I still remember the flashcard format - any type of question (maths, english, geography) on a flashcard on any part of the screen in any size for a random 1-3 seconds. It then required an answer in another 5 seconds. I can't tell you if it helped, but it probably didn't hurt.

Since then, I've seen software with dumber interfaces, nauseating music, really horrible cartoon graphics, and point-and-click multiple-choice (which is always bad as you can invariably reduce such questions to two possible answers even if you know nothing about the subject). This is the best the closed-source world can do, apparently. Thirty years of software research and they can't manage a better product than a chemistry lecturer on a braindead computer in, oh, I think it was about an hour. Maybe less.

Open Source alternatives might not impress me much either, but there is a difference. I can add to an Open Source alternative. If I think my experience can result in an improvement, I can make it. I can't do that with a closed-source package.

When working as a CAL Officer for a university, I looked into remote teaching methods. There was no commercial software out there that would do the trick for under $10,000 a seat and had almost no educational software that would work with it, but in the open-source world, I had the ability to do low-cost audio/videoconferencing, whiteboarding, shared text editing, question delivery, answer gathering, sharing of computer screens and sharing of web browsers, where the only significant cost was a quickcam for under $100. The idea of a teleconferencing kit for remote teaching and correspondence courses, where greater student/teacher interaction was both needed and now actually possible, was under serious discussion. The chancellor was extremely interested in the idea. Eventually, a very respectable subset of the original whitepaper actually got deployed.

Now compare this virtual lecture theatre/seminar with a Shockwave or Flash application where you point and click until something happens. Or perhaps you would care to compare it with a powerpoint presentation. Interaction is minimal, intelligence required is non-existent, learning is indistinguishable from zero. The only way you can stretch your mind in such mind-numbing environments is by first reducing it to near absolute zero when your brain will collapse into the size of a Bose-Einstein Condensate superatom.

This is not to say that a game element is bad. Game elements can be very good, but to function as educational game elements, it must not be possible for someone who has not learned the material (but has learned how to take tests) to score higher than someone who does know the material but isn't necessarily an expert at exam technique. Ideally, it should never be possible to pass on exam technique alone, even if that technique is perfect, and it should never be possible to fail completely if you know the expected amount of material but are poor at tests.

Nobody is going to take this seriously, because I'm not a multi-billionaire and am not a significant voice, but for what it may be worth, I throw open this challenge. Prove me wrong. Show me closed-source CAL material that meets or exceeds the standards I've outlined, that demonstrably teaches the material and not the work-arounds. Show me how this software would work for group learning as well as individual learning. Show me how it handles the wide range in intellectual abilities and intellectual types.

I don't think you can. I'm willing to let you try, I'm willing to be shown to be wrong, but I'm not going to hold my breath in anticipation. It's not an impossible task, you don't have to even match the Open Source solution I had developed in the mid-90s, you only have to show me you've anything at all. Either that, or admit that that's beyond what the commercial vendors can do.

They are doing exactly what anyone experienced in the industry and familiar with the issue would expect. This is a "dog bites a man" story --- there's no angle, no twist, no "news."

Naturally Microsoft will continue to characterize their market dominance as a "training" advantage. "(Practically) Everyone using PCs has had MS Windows on them and they all used it (at least a little) so there's no further "training" costs hidden in sticking with us." That's their claim.

Of course it's fallacious in at least two ways: one it assumes that the primary applications in a given environment (in this case some educational settings) are the same as those that the users have been exposed to before. Also it assumes that there haven't been, and won't be, significant changes to those applications that will require re-training.

Now I like to point out that anyone who learned the basics of using UNIX (shell commands, using vi and the concepts of text editing) can still use those same skills and command with almost no required changes, over thirty years later. Sure you can also use all sorts of new stuff. Under Linux most of the basic GNU shell commands and utilities have a multitude of additional options (colorized 'ls' and syntax highlighting in 'vim' for example). However, the basics have remained compatible.

I was a user of MS-DOS (from circa 3.1) and MS Windows before their version 3 (when it was MS Windows/286 and MS Windows/386 as distinctly separate products). I've used '95 and '98, NT, W2K, XP and even fiddled with Vista briefly in a store. Yes you can still start a "dos prompt" (at least CMD.EXE) ... but you can't effectively use that with MS Windows. (Pity the poor fool who saves at attachment in MS Outlook and tries to separately open it using the command line or find that file from an already open copy of Excel, Word, Powerpoint or heaven forbid any other application. It's amazing how complicated that can make that --- what's wrong with a simple home directory and drop my all of my stuff ... somewhere under there?).

The dirty little secret of using Microsoft TCO is that you'll have to play for upgrades and re-training every couple of years. It's their equivalent of "planned obsolescence" ... a strategy which is purely for their benefit.

That's how we, as a community, can counter this particular strategem of theirs. Educate their customers and sensitize them to the hidden costs they've already been paying for years.

We also need to teach managers and decision makers of the fundamental property of "sunk costs." You don't let the money you spent yesterday dictate your spending decisions today. Yesterday's investment isn't going to return more or less value after your costs are "sunk" into it. Too many decision makers choose to throw good money after bad based on the intangible political downsides ("if I change my mind now then it proves to other managers I was an idiot in my earlier choices"). I suspect that far too much of Microsoft's current revenues are justified by key customers on these irrational terms.

Why using a lot of space to discuss MS software? Well, they have themselves made the "re-training" argument moot....

(Using Linux voluntarily, not using MS unless I get paid for it...)

M.