Wow, it’s really been a long time since I have written anything on here, but at the very least I have been spending a lot of this time learning about OpenSource.
My experiences have continued to lead me in a firming of the opinion that the adoption of FOSS in education is imperative.
Currently teaching in a Post-16 setting on F.E. and H.E. programmes, but with some experience in secondaries; I do feel that this adoption can work across all settings of education.
Whilst there is some temptation to focus on the financial incentives of deploying free and open source software, these for me are no longer as compelling as the arguments relating to the educational and vocational benefits.
Having spent some years previously as a vocal advocate of the need for proprietary ‘industry standard’ software, this was quite a shift in position for me; I am now firmly for FOSS however. This shift was driven largely by improvements in open source software from a user experience perspective; but recent adoption trends in some industries have broadened my horizons.
And while a lot of my focus is upon software, applications and operating systems in particular; I do also believe in an all-things-open approach, so including things like OER , Open Research and OpenData extending into Creative Commons too.
The arguments in summary are in the following areas:
- FOSS for Inclusive Learning
- FOSS and the Digital Divide
- Open Source for Sustainability
- Software, Ownership and Community
- Open Research and Open Data for Democracy
Applications that have long been considered the industry standard are now being seriously challenged and in some cases overtaken, by FOSS alternatives. A prime example of this would be Blender, which is a very comprehensive tool these days and lots of young people are learning how to create with it prior to attending colleges and universities; equipping themselves with valuable experience sought by industry. The ability to learn is driven by freely available learning resources on platforms such as YouTube which have acted as a catalyst.
My background mostly involved working with Adobe software, which has for the most part remained entirely proprietary until recently, with the launch of some free to access web-based applications.
Employers have historically wanted graduates who could hit the ground running vocationally, so in the creative industries this meant having skills in a handful of core creation applications e.g. Photoshop, Maya, Premiere, Final Cut… They were agnostic enough so long as the graduates were working with some specific applications that meant an easy transition to their software of preference in-house. The discussions held between education and industry seldom mentioned open source. I’d like to think this is now changing, but the idea that open source skills are desirable is yet to gain real traction.
Perhaps a recent global pandemic is about to shift the balance, but there’s also a groundswell of creative influencers out there teaching children to have zero loyalty to products. As a consequence I do feel that in schools we have lots of young people who possess a range of skills that could
TBC