Linux and Education (editorial)

Jay Bloodworth has written a nice editorial on Linux, and its use in primary education. He talks about pros, cons, and what needs to happen to make Linux and Education go together hand and glove. Follow the link below and learn more...

The following is an editorial by Slashdot Reader, Jay Bloodworth

From time to time in virtually every Linux forum I participate in, someone says "Gee, wouldn't it be great is more public schools knew about Linux? That be a great way to stretch school IT budgets!" The people who suggest this are almost always talking about Linux as a server. Linux on the school desktop is rarely mentioned; people just assume that whatever obstacles there are to Linux as desktop platform in the corporate world must apply in spades in realm of public K12 education. In this essay I will challenge this notion and give several reasons why I think that Linux can find a niche on the student desktop. I will also explore what is missing and suggest possibilities for novel free software projects that would benefit the K12 world; in many cases these are quite different from what is needed in the corporate world. With apologies to Richard Stallman, throughout the essay I will use the term 'Linux' to refer to the body of free software that might run on a Linux system.

First of all, the difficulty of use of Linux is overstated. Linux != CLI. Even sans KDE or Gnome, you can have a pretty functional and attractive desktop under Linux; RH5 out of the box is quite nice. What you have to remember is average users spend most of their time working with apps, not exploring the operating system or GUI features. In many schools, the administration is spending a great deal of time and money to 'lock down' the desktops of all the machines to limit students to performing a very few functions. This means it is not only acceptable but often desirable to present a stripped down desktop to the student. As long as the student can launch the needed applications (which it is easy to manage on a student by student basis since Linux is multiuser 'out of the box'), the need for a power desktop in a K12 setting is minimal.

So are there applications worth launching on a Linux platform? Yes! The simple fact that Linux runs Netscape means it could replace Windows 95 in hundreds of classrooms without any fuss; many classroom PC are used for nothing but web surfing. Netscape's recent attention to Linux and the release of the Mozilla source mean that Linux is likely to excel at this function for a long time. And if Netscape doesn't completely fulfill the intra- and inter-networking needs of the classroom, there is an abundance of other Internet applications: IRC clients, mail agents, MU* clients, even (*gasp*) other web browsers.

Bottom line: The Internet is Linux's number one killer app for schools. What's number two? The Gimp, of course. In the schools I work with, most every art class has been outfitted with a PC with a scanner and a copy of Photoshop. What a waste! While Photoshop may still have a leg up on the Gimp for professional print media applications, schools rarely need those features. If you just want software to teach the basic of image manipulation, the Gimp can't be beat. The Gimp has also distinguished itself as a great tool for producing web graphics, and establishing a web presence is another hot topic in schools these days. I'm working with some gifted students on designing a web site, and every week I impress them with something else this mysterious 'Gimp' will do. Hopefully I'll be able to make a play for outfitting a couple of classroom workstations with Linux/Gimp in the near future.

Beyond the razzle dazzle of the Web and The Gimp, there are a number of applications available for Linux that would be of great value to students and teachers but are simply not available on other platforms (or are prohibitively expensive). The obvious example is programming languages; many intro programming courses for high school students focus on simple text based programs; there are free implementations available for most every language that is likely to be taught. There is also a wide variety of science and math 'laboratory' software for Linux for everything from designing and testing circuits to exploring the properties of matrices.

What's missing? The 'Holy Grail' of almost every quest to get Linux on the business desktop is the office suite. To a certain extent this true in schools as well, as lots of schools are pushing these as a major component of vocational education. But few classes do more than load and save files and change fonts, and there are Linux apps that already handle these functions. A simple desktop publishing application for creating newsletters, greeting cards, banners, etc. would see more use than a general purpose word processor. We also need programming languages for younger kids. A good Logo implementation with an attractive interface would be a big win in elementary schools. Actually, any simple interpreted language that gave immediate visual feedback could serve the same purpose - Python might be a good choice if it could be augmented with turtle graphics. The move towards scriptability in GUI applications opens some doors for teaching programming to slightly older kids; I have hopes of teaching Script-Fu to my middle school web team.

The biggest gap in the application line up for Linux in K12 is the absence of lots of multimedia applications. This is, unfortunately, the most difficult hole to fill because the limiting factor is not the time and effort to generate the underlying code but the work involved in creating or collecting the media, especially if you consider something like a CDROM encyclopedia. The up side is that the Internet has (and I think will continue to) dampened the market for these massive multimedia tomes. In any event, the best the free software community can do here is to develop better multimedia authoring tools, both simple ones like Hypercard and more sophisticated ones like Macromedia Director. These would be good classroom tools in and of themselves and would facilitate the production of other instructional software, especially the "Let's point and click our way through an animated world while we learn about dinosaurs/fractions/whatever" variety.

The biggest obstacle for getting Linux in schools is that in public K12 education, often even more than in business, there is an ethos of 'do what everybody else is doing and you won't get fired'. There is nonetheless an opportunity here, as despite this public education still has a fair share of idealists who are yearning for better ways to do things. It would be nice if the public education idealists and the free software idealists could put their heads together.