Although they may not yet be linked in the public consciousness, open source practices have the potential (possibly the inevitable potential) to dramatically improve what we refer to today as "education". I add that "what we refer to as" qualifier because I believe that after education has undergone the open source transformation, we will need another term to distinguish it from what passes for education today.
Educators in the current system are quite familiar with the breathless claims that seem to accompany every new technology, touting it as the savior and re-inventor of education. Somewhere on the web, I'm sure, you can find a copy of a particular glowing description of a new technology that will transform education as we know it, etc. etc. The modern listener will think (or at least, I did when I heard it) that the author is talking about having computers in the classroom or linking the schools to the world wide web--in reality, it was about the 8mm projector. Was the 8mm projector an indispensable part of your education? I thought not. Likewise, although a few remarkable projects have shown that computers and access to the Internet can make a significant positive impact on education, we're quite a long way from the glowing future that many would have assumed would be standard fare in schools by now.
Part of the reason that the technology never seems to "get there"--to actually achieve what proponents claimed could and would be done with it--might be because the people making the claims are really just selling (in the case of computer technology) silicon snake oil. Part of it is unquestionably because of the deeply embedded politics of education. And part of it is because of fiscal realities (and perceived fiscal realities--but in the business world, as it has often been observed, the line between what is and what is perceived is spectacularly blurred).
To say that these obstacles are formidable is gross understatement. Many hopeful projects, efforts, and movements have sought to attack them, and yet it is hard (but not impossible) to see their impact. If you have ever tried to implement a technological project in a school system, you have probably had to deal with the snake oil claims, the politics, and fiscal realities all at once. The is particularly frustrating because the projects are almost always conceived with the best of intentions by people who could potentially get a lot more money and respect by doing something else. It is tremendously disillusioning to see a wonderful idea killed by a single political maneuver or budget adjustment, or to see the crippled parody of the original vision that actually gets implemented.
Maybe it's because I'm a Perl programmer, or maybe I've just read too many documents from the GNU project, but I have come to view all of these problems as nails that we have the hammer for. The purpose of this document is to outline how open source principles and practices can seep into the cracks of this seemingly impenetrable wall of opposition and crumble it.
As has been extensively pointed out, the cost of making one more copy of an existing computer program or document is vanishingly small. As communication advances, the cost of distributing such resources vanishes as well. As replication and distribution costs go to zero, all that prevents these materials from being infinitely available are social forces--hopelessly outdated social forces, perhaps, but very powerful (and, likely, enduring) ones (e.g., quick--what function does a necktie serve?).
Open source communities, however, have already established the critical framework necessary to defeat a tremendous number of the artificial social barriers to distribution. And, just as importantly, they have solved (dramatically) the problem of production in the same stroke. The incredible success of open source software projects is something that hardly anyone would have predicted. The paradigm has shifted, though, and there is unmistakable and pervasive evidence that something fundamental has been introduced to the world.
How will this change education? Dramatically. Why? Because the same principles and practices that fostered the creation of an incredibly full featured operating system, the world's most popular web server, and a tremendous number of other, similarly world-class applications. are going to lead us to the educational utopia that so far has only been the subject of unfulfilled prophecy. Consider the following facts:
A few years later, nearly every one of these projects will be all but abandoned. Researchers need funding, and when an idea is no longer new, it is often no longer fundable. Students graduate. Faculty move on to other projects or other schools. Eventually, the links break and the project disappears. Now, had these projects been the next killer business app, or a potential million-seller game title, other forces would be more likely to keep them alive. And, on occasion, the same model is applied to educational resources, with modest success. However, the amount that a school would have to come up with to have the best-in-class commercial education solutions is probably not even in the most optimistic budget.
Never fear. We have seen these kinds of problems before, and we have seen their solution. The principles of permanently available and reusable source is exactly what is needed to overcome these issues. Consider the following possible world:
These are simple changes to the status quo, and hence reasonably possible. The second, since it would not require as much mindset revision, may be more likely than the first. But the first is certainly a possibility, and once a body of work exists to demonstrate the value of high-availability licensing, it will be natural, for example, for funding agencies (who are very interested in the longevity of project impact) to develop a preference toward grant applications that include such licensing schemes.
These changes may be small, but it will take considerable effort to effect them. Changing a large number of people's minds a little is still a big job. To do this we will need many of the same ingredients that make for good educational materials:
One of the first things to do is to create one or several reference solutions. A few software projects, for example, licensed under the GPL and having clear educational value and obvious directions for extension would be an excellent first step. Licensing accompanying lesson plans, etc under similar terms would allow people to "scratch the explainer's itch", adding a clarification here or there, an alternate means of explanation, or a rework of the explanation at another level or in another language. The critical goal here is to show people what is possible--once that has been done, no other force will be able to prevent them from contributing.
Open source is a perfect match for the particular challenges of educational technology. GPL'd code is as legendary for the hardware it gets ported to as schools are for the age of the hardware they are still using. Schools may, in fact, need features removed from software in order to make it useful in their hardware environments. When the source is under the GPL, this becomes both possible and probable.
But we're not only talking about technology. There are licenses for content which are analogous to the GPL, and the same technologies and mindsets that have led to large scale collaboration on software can and are being applied to content. If there were, say, five canonical introductions to the basic principles of calculus, each available for modification and reuse, then the next 500 people that decide something like that is needed would have a massive head start, and could simply improve or derive from what exists.
Similarly, a small charter school with limited hardware will have access to best-of-breed scientific simulation software, running there or accessed on a remote server. One person, in or out of school will be able to learn calculus from start to finish simply out of curiosity. Communities of learners will form support groups where individualized instruction will become a reality. Are these ideas new? No. Have they been tried before? Yes, with varying degrees of success. What is missing? Open source principles, practices, and resources applied to education.
There is a lot of talk about not reinventing the wheel in education technology circles. Everyone knows that they don't want to do this, but how to avoid it in the current climate is a very difficult question. What the open source community has to contribute is tried-and-true techniques for wheel reinvention avoidance--central repositories, concurrent version systems, recognized distributions, licensing that encourages sharing rather than hoarding, and a culture of contribution.
Even though many people in the field are 90% in agreement with these ideas and practices, there is still a small but infinitely significant pull toward closed-source culture. Perhaps with the notion of some possible future publication/sale, or in response to an institutional desire to encourage future commercialization, many potentially groundbreaking research efforts remain closed source and/or modification-restricted. Then, as described above, the funding agencies shift focus, an administration changes, or someone graduates and moves on, and the project simply dies. If it was a good idea, it will have to be reinvented later. All it would take would be a few prominent GPL'd successes and a well-respected distribution of these successes to convince many, perhaps most of these projects that their goals are really much more in line with the open source community than they ever realized. The fact is that very few people think about the possibility of GPLing their projects, mostly because they have never heard of the idea. A culture of sharing already exists--all we need is the right nucleation point to get it to start living up to its spectacular potential.
The rate at which children learn in the first few years of life, and the ease with which they learn it, is phenomenal. There is no reason that this phenomenon must stop. However, the current, highly politicized process by which educational materials are produced is not capable or producing materials conducive to this kind of learning. Young children are immersed in extremely rich environments with a variety of interesting challenges and highly skilled mentors and role models. They choose the tasks they wish to work on, how long to work on them, and who and when to ask for help. If they become frustrated with one puzzle, they leave it without penalty, or ask a parent for help. The "student to teacher" ratio is low. We have every reason to believe that, if we could duplicate these conditions for learners at any age. Open source practices could go a long way toward doing this, and once the ball is rolling, the remaining obstacles will crumble at the onslaught.