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Open Source Makes a Splash at NECC

(This is a longer, unedited version of a my blog post "Open Source on the Agenda," which appeared earlier this month on Education Week's Digital Education blog.)

Open source technology displayed a growing presence at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) 2009. The Open Source Lab held popular sessions throughout the conference, while the Open Source Playground showcased various technologies and organizations – serving as a mini exhibit floor for the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement. Nearby, NECC Unplugged held free-form sessions, and the Bloggers Café was a hub of spontaneous creativity. While still dwarfed by the exhibition floor downstairs, these features attracted sell-out audiences and an increasingly large and passionate fan base among NECC attendees.

Presentations and handouts touted numerous open source alternatives to traditional software, the best collected in a handout listing the Top 10 Free and Open Source Software in Education. Two speakers stood out among the many presenters who may be familiar to Digital Education readers:

• Steve Hargadon of Elluminate, CoSN, and Classroom 2.0, and organizer of open source and EduBloggerCon events at NECC 2009, presented tirelessly on educational applications for open source software, social networks, and Web 2.0.
  
• Award-winning Georgia educator and entrepreneur Vicki Davis gave presentations on educational use of wikis and social bookmarking groups, among other topics.

Ubuntu Linux was represented in both the Lab and the Playground, with a clustered distribution running 60 thin client workstations setup by Revolution Linux. Revolution’s Educational Services Director, Benoit St-Andre, led a session on avoiding common pitfalls of open source software deployments. He later told me of much larger thin client deployments they have carried out in school districts of up to 10,000 workstations and 40,000 students (which save both hardware and power costs). Local Ubuntu users group volunteers also highlighted for me custom distributions; such as the Netbook Remix (designed for small screens) and Edubuntu, which is targeted specifically at education users. The Wikipedia article on Ubuntu contains much more detail on the history and versions of this breakthrough version of Linux.

Curriki was well represented at NECC as well. Blogger and evangelist Anna Batchelder gave an NECC Unplugged talk on open education resources, covering Curriki and other offerings such as MIT OpenCourseWare, FreeReading, Connexions, and OER Commons — the latter can be searched directly from our Teacher Magazine home page. Executive Director Dr. Barbara “Bobbi” Kurshan touted the value and cost savings Curriki makes possible at a breakfast meeting that also featured Chicago Public Schools technology administrators outlining how open source infrastructure helped them leverage E-Rate funds to enjoy $1 million per year in network operations cost savings.

The other major “exhibitor” at the Open Source Playground was One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and its operating software, the affiliated Sugar Learning Platform. The OLPC project experienced a rocky start, featuring a slower-than-expected adoption and a very public split between the hardware and software projects, but has made strides recently in Latin America. I spoke with the exhibit’s organizer, Mike Lee, manager of the DC-based OLPC Learning Club and a director of the team that operates AARP.org. Mike told me about OLPCorps Africa, an effort to spread 100 teams of volunteers across the continent to deploy at least 100 laptops per team; blog aggregator Planet OLPC provides news updates on this and related efforts. While the OLPC project isn’t officially directed at the United States, there are volunteer projects in cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, and Chicago featuring significant deployments, and local high school students are involved in Mike’s Sugar Labs DC project team as well. One Laptop Per Child really represents a disruptive technology in the truest sense — essentially inspiring from scratch the creation of an entirely new category of computers, known as netbooks, that is becoming increasingly popular and influential.

Labels: edtech, education, edweek, necc09, open source, technology

   Link: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2009/07/open_source_on_the_agenda.html

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