ICTlogy

Conference by Stephen Downes at the First International Conference Free Knowledge, Free Technology – Education for a free information society in Barcelona (Spain), 17 July 2008, on the production and sharing of free educational and training materials about Free Software.

Stephen Downes, Institute for Information Technology‘s Internet Logic Research Group
The Future of Education

The Public in Public Education

Stephen Downes
(Photo: César Córcoles)

Public education, education for everyone, is an important concept not for the “education” part, but for the “public” part, as its impact goes far beyond the acquisition of knowledge, but the shaping of the whole society.

Stephen Downes presents gRSShopper. Besides the most evident uses of the tool as a resource harvester, the main purpose being connecting the different resources amongst them, to link one to each other different pieces of content scattered around the Internet. This is a personal learning environment, more than a social software intended to build community; an personal environment but headed to openly being a part of the network of people and content.

Freedom

Freedom as a state of being: putting the stress on the personal capability and will to do something, more than e.g. on the formal or legal permission to.

Freedom is an attitude, a perspective of self-determination, of self-government, to be what you want to be. Education means realizing the degree of freedom you’re in and finding out the way to get more of that freedom. But being educated does not suffice, as practical constrains (fear, etc.) also apply.

Freedom is also about being able to reach one’s own potential.

Freedom as access: access to knowledge and learning, where these are public goods, created in a nonprofit way that expects no revenue from their creation and distribution.

The Future of Education

The concept of the “class” is an administrative one, not related with pedagogy, not related with a course. But the question is that, for several (socialization) reasons, the idea of the “class” sticks. But could the network substitute the group? Communication is central to our being, so our connections do shape ourselves and our actions.

So there’s pressures towards using our natural connections to engage in collective learning, more than to move into an artificially built classroom that, even if it might have been an efficient tool in the past, it only seems now to be perpetuating relationships of power between teachers and learners.

Competences

Competences are a dynamic concept, based on growth. And they require a constantly changing path that can be filled with different (ad hoc) educational recourses.

Nevertheless, there is learning hardly identifiable with competences.

So, competences should be one more way to identify learning opportunities, and the selection of learning resources just an add-on to a whole system of learning activities (traditional and new ones).

The selection of learning options should depend on our background and framework (former learning, actual legislation, etc.) and should be driven also by context, by actual needs.

Delivery systems

We have, hence, to build topic delivery systems, systems that deliver learning resources.

Delivery systems today are, basically, content delivery systems. The Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is here to replace learning management/delivery systems. The PLE is more a concept than an application:

• Is based on the idea of personal access to resources from multiple sources
• Is based on a personal web presence
• Focuses on creation and communication rather than on content completion

Education should be no more as managing a system, but delivering in a network; no more something self-contained, closed, but something interacting with a larger environment. Thus, educational institutions have to reshape themselves to become entities that interact with the larger environment.

Connectivism and Freedom

Our ideas of concepts are created through “wholes” of information sets — the basis of Connectivism. So educational institutions have to make resources available to both contribute and be able to build these “wholes”. The resources have to be able to learn from the environment and the student, and communicate with their framework and environment. Among other things, this will make personalization more efficient.

Education should be a flat network, where both students and teachers are nodes communication one to each other. And the communications among these nodes should be free: if these communications are mediated (or just made possible) by digital resources, these resources need to be free to enable communication… and hence education.

Al Gore, The assault on reason: we’ve gone from a society that used to think by itself to a society that is being though for itself (e.g. media think for the society). We have to go back to the society that used to think for itself. And content needs to be free to be able to reach this state of freedom of communication and thought.

The market — and their firms — are putting barriers to these freedoms. And, indeed, non-commercial licenses (cc-sa, copyleft) allow bad practices against the free flow of content, as they do not prevent perverse uses of open resources.

The role of public education institutions should be, in the end, to promote this free flow of resources. To guarantee access to the public good that is digital content and media as the language of interaction today.

Update:
Audio of the conference (, 9.5 MB)

Conference by Richard M. Stallman at the First International Conference Free Knowledge, Free Technology – Education for a free information society in Barcelona (Spain), 15 July 2008, on the production and sharing of free educational and training materials about Free Software.

Richard M. Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation
Free Software and Beyond

Free Software is about giving freedom to the user and respecting the work done by the community of programmers.

The analogy with cooking recipes is clearly the best way to help people understand the four freedoms of Free Software.

Electronic book readers are evil

The key to promote Free Software is not software in itself, the possibility to be able to “cook”, but: as long as software is needed to do more and more things because of the pervasiveness of the Digital Economy, then we’re talking not about the freedom to run some software, but the freedom to perform a lot of activities.

For instance, e-Books, DRM, etc. attempt against the possibility to lend books, or give them to your sons and grandsons, because electronic book readers are not made on free software, hence they subjugate the user to the retailers’ will. Buying such devices is like stating you don’t want to share your books so you should advice your friends that, if they buy these devices, you won’t be friends anymore, because they don’t want to share books in a community of readers.

So, the problem is not software in itself, but changing (to worse) the model of society we’re living in to another one more closed, selfish, commoditized, etc.

Free content for a free life

Practical, useful, functional works should be free

• Software should be free
• Recipes should be free
• Reference works, like encyclopedias, should be free
• Educational works
• Font types

You have to control the tools you use to live, to shape your life. If you don’t, you’re not free.

There’s some content that can perfectly not be free. Opinion works are one of those, as it is important not to be misrepresented. But, sharing should be made possible for each and every kind of work. And this includes music sharing.

Copyright should only cover commercial use, modification of originals.

When a work embodies practical knowledge you’re going to use for your life, it should be free and it should be free to be modified. It’s not the case of art. Art should be shareable, but not modifiable.

Teaching free software vs. teaching gratis software

We should teach values, not some specific software: (a) because it’s values schools are expected to be teaching, (b) to avoid dependency from specific companies.

Thus, schools should only bring free software to classes. And free textbooks.

[now RMS transforms himself into Saint IGNUcius and things become really weird: he disguises himself, he auctions a book from the stage for 120€…]

Q&A

Q: What’s exactly the definition of “practical”? RMS: Well, it’s not easy to define, and we should be working on it, but it’s the concept that matters.

RMS: You shouldn’t use anyone else’s (web)server to compute with your data, because you’re losing control of your data and what is done with it.

Q: about free hardware. RMS: let’s not mix physical things with their designs. So, objects cannot be free because they cannot be copied, literally copied. It’s their designs that can be copied, but this is again a matter of intellectual property rights, not ownership of physical things.

RMS: it’s good that medicines are produced under a controlled environment (i.e. patents and proprietary labs) because people can die if there are errors in them. My comment: wasn’t free software supposed to be better than proprietary one because given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow? (see answer below).

RMS: What we know about proprietary software is that it is a good way to concentrate wealth. So, it’s not that jobs will be lost, but some rich people will end being it: the question is whether we want to swap some billionaires for more jobs.

Stephen Downes: should we make it compulsory to share our software at classrooms? does this apply or extrapolate to educational resources? RMS: sharing should be a fundamental value to be taught at schools, so yes, sharing software should be compulsory, and same applies to content.

Stephen Downes: the problem is that the boundaries of what a classroom is are blurring, so where’s the redline? should, then, sharing software (and content) be made compulsory to everyone and everywhere in society and the world? If not, if we’re to keep some freedom not to share, where’s the line that separates classroom from the rest? Can we sell free works? Can schools sell free works when there’s an unbalance of power between the school and the student? RMS: no, the schools have no excuse to sell copies, because the works are free.

RMS: (back on the issue about some processes being controlled at closed labs) have nothing to do, it’s orthogonal, with the free software issue. Security is not about being free or not — Stallman stresses here the difference between Free Software and Open Source Software, between the ethics and philosophy of the former and the technicalities of the latter. Security and Linus’s Law are related to Open Source Software, not about it being free or not.

iCities is a Conference about Blogs, e-Government and Digital Participation.
Here come my notes for session XI.

Round Table:
Chairs: Jacinto Lajas

Jose María Olmo

Free Software penetration in the Administration still low. This also means (cause or consequence?) that bidding processes don’t usually include free software in their requirements, either as a condition or as a possibility.

Consequences of this situation:

• Lack of cooperation and collaboration between administrations
• Interoperability made more difficult
• There is a lack of communities of free software for the Administration in which developers and users can meet and exchange impressions and design common strategies

Francisco Huertas

Free Software as a strategy to develop the Information Society.

Free Software avoids:

• A unique provider
• Insecurity
• Imposed adaptability
• Provider monopolies
• R+D outshored
• Lack of local support
• Functional submission
• License costs
• Lack of standards that threat the persistence of public information
• Impossibility to publicly share common goods

The cost per computer (12,000 PCs) of the operating system and main desktop applications is 1.8 euros.Updating these computers to the last version of MS Windows + Office would have cost 6 million euros. Besides the aggregates, a important aspect that matters at the margin: while with free software adding one more computer means reducing software costs per unit (while being constant at the aggregate level), with proprietary software one more computer means more costs, at both the total and per unit levels.

Lourdes Muñoz Santamaría

Three keys: focus on the use, not the tool; the importance of broadband access; keep Net neutrality.

In political terms, it is unacceptable that public investment is not public. Hence, investment in software solutions and content has to be made in free software so that they can be put at anybody’s reach.

In the same train of though, intellectual property rights need to have recovered their original purpose: public benefit, the protection of the author so that society gets more and better culture and innovation.

Two steps in the free software debate:

• Non-discrimination because of the technological solution: neutrality, access warranties… for both the user and the provider
• Opt-in for free software because of argued and objective reasons

A cause does not win just for being fair. If free software is good, its benefits have to be made broadly known, so that the citizenry is eager to get those benefits.

Teemu Leinonen posted on Monday at FLOSSE Posse both an acknowledgment and a critique to the One Laptop per Child project: Thank you OLPC – Maybe now we may start to talk about education again.

While I’m no unconditional defender of the OLPC initiative — i.e. there are things I like, things I don’t, so I still don’t have a strong position for or against — I believe there are some statements Leinonen makes in his post that, IMHO, are not absolutely fair with the project.

I share most of his arguments but I don’t agree with some of them:

On one hand, I don’t think the project pretends that children “own” (in the sense of exclusive ownership he talks about) a computer. I honestly think is a matter of identifying the main user. Actually, the reason — I guess — behind giving the child a laptop and not giving it to the school is so he can take it home. By doing this, it is the whole family that receives the computer, and not only the child, so there is — at least potentially — a multiplier effect. Considering that the project is intended to serve mainly rural, isolated areas, providing a household with such a tool makes sense to me. I personally find the point that in general children do not own things quite excessive.

A second derivative (critique) of assigning not an institution but an individual — the child — the computer is that it goes against all values that foster sharing, community building and so. I would fully agree with such a critique if the XO computer had not a strong bet on mesh networking. I absolutely believe this does make a difference. By mesh networking sharing is boosted to the maximum — at least potentially, of course — and what could be seen as an individual tool becomes a networking node with many implications, including educational implications in both the field of knowledge and values.

Thus, the knowledge exchange that can take place in such an open and collaborative network is only enhanced by the huge amount of content embedded in the computer by default. Besides the fact that, as the software, this content can be localized — and this is a (soft) countercritique to the project’s (supposed lack of) sensibility towards different cultures and traditions — by bringing such content home, at least two things happen: the first one, as stated before, the whole family benefits from having that laptop home and not at the school; the second one is that that content stays with the student. If this student lives away from the school and spends there little time — specially compared to developed countries — it is not trivial that the more time he has access to content, the better. And just a remainder: if he is connected with other students wirelessly, the sense of “classroom” still exists, even if virtual.

There’s a last statement on Leinonen’s article that caught me by surprise and might be due to my ignorance on the project: the OLPC seems to believe that learning programming is the key to all other learning. I must confess it’s the first time I read this argument. If it were true, I’d be sharing most of the criticism around it. Nevertheless, I’d rather add some clarifications about this issue. Regardless if coding is a key issue in one’s education, digital literacy absolutely is. And besides my own thoughts on how literacy will evolve in the future closely tied to digital literacy until they both become “just” literacy, evidence shows that skilled individuals — and this includes by large digital literacy — will have it much better to work and socialize in a Network Society. Just in economic terms, employability and productivity will rely very much in digital skills in a world where ICT-based services will be the locomotive of development, above all in emerging economies.

I want to insist that I share and find most of Leinonen’s critiques really relevant, but I also believe that most of the buzz around the One Laptop per Child project has taken place in geek environments, thus shifting the debate towards technological aspects, and hence infringing a technological bias to the project that, in its origin — and this is my own, personal opinion — the project had not.

Student research seminar: Cindy Shen

Two metaphors– “the cathedral and the bazaar” – are widely used to characterize the organizational structure of the development model of commercial software and that of OSS. While “cathedral” represents rigid hierarchy and centralized control, the “bazaar” model of OSS represents an egalitarian network of developers free of hierarchical structure. Powerful as they are, these two metaphors may help to spread a rather stylized image of the OSS. Empirical studies of OSS show highly skewed distribution and power law relationships of project sizes, project membership, and cluster sizes of the OSS community, but the underlying mechanisms of those power law relationships remain under explored.

This on-going project extends knowledge on OSS by empirically examining the social structure of the OSS community and the mechanisms of the developer network formation. Two research questions are asked: 1) To what extent is OSS community hierarchical? 2) What attributes of the developers are associated with network structure? A developer network was extracted from the SourceForge.net data archive, in which nodes represent developers and links are defined as co-participation in the same projects. In the presentation I will show some preliminary results from p* network analysis, and also plans for future research.

It does not seem that the two models presented by Raymond (1999) are that polarized:

• the importance of project leadership suggests the presence of hierarchy
• Highly skewed distributino of projects
• Power-law relationshiop
• The “lone” developer

It would be interesting to abandon flagship projects (e.g. Linux) and analyze failing projects too. Also try and go beyond case studies and non-representative samples.

Is Open Source Software (OSS) a network form of organization? does power come from authority, resource control and network centrality? (Astley and Sacheva, 1984). Is power acquired by one’s position in the network?

Or is OSS formed through reputation mechanisms? Coordination mechanisms in a network form of organization come from trust, reputation, status, legitimacy… Do people with reputation/status attract ties? And the contrary, does reputation is achievable through network membership?

My reflections

• Lone leaders might actually be webmasters that just got their admin account at SourceForge just to upload the packager

More info

• Working Paper
• Presentation at the 27th Sunbelt Social Network Conference
• PNet
• Raymond, E. S. (1999). The Cathedral & the Bazaar. (revised edition: original edition 1999). Sebastopol: O´Reilly.

These days is taking place the virtual forum of the UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Third International Seminar. OER: Institutional Challenges.

My colleague Juli