Eleonora Pantò eleonora.panto@csp.it writes:
I completely agreee. I was in the FLC for a visit during the media& learning conference, and I noticed the "windows" effect .. the people presenting technology was very nice and when we asked (also Edith Ackermann was there) for a non proprietary learners response systems they introuced http://www.socrative.com/
Agreed to -- and great to read that Edith is pushing for free ICT!
I conducted an interview of Walter Bender (http://www.sugarlabs.org) for OLPC France a few years ago, and it captures the main ideas about why free software is so important to learning:
http://olpc-france.org/wiki/index.php?title=Interview_Walter_Bender_au_Sugar...
BG: And why free software? Are there any limitations attached to free software, or just more potential? And what is the crumple zone idea that you have?
WB: Okay. So, Sugar has to be free. It has to be free software, software libre. We don't have the right word in English really, for freedom. And the reason is because Sugar is about learning. And learning fundamentally is not about receiving ideas, it's about appropriating the ideas. Putting an idea to use. You can't do that unless it's free software. And there is another aspect of free software which is an aspect of culture, that is important to learning. Free software is not just about sharing, free software is also about critiquing. It's about engaging in a critical dialogue about ideas. And that's fundamental to learning. And so without the culture of free software, the learning is not as rich. So Sugar has to be free software.
Now I'd like to make an analogy to the automotive industry. The automotive industry used to make cars which are very rigid. And when that rigid car would hit a tree, nothing would happen to the car. But all the energy, the impact, would land on the passengers of the car. So they would protect the car and not the passengers. But then they realised that that's actually wrong. People are more important than cars. And so they made this concept called the crumple zone where instead of making the car rigid, they made the car flexible so the energy would be absorbed by the car. The car would fail, not the people. And we try to make that same analogy with Sugar and I think it's inherent in free software as well. The idea of a crumple zone, where we don't make everything locked down or rigid. That's an impossible goal. There's always going to be problems. But instead of imposing the problems on the user, on the child, on the learner we make that be an opportunity for learning.
(Sorry for the long excerpt.)
I think they should focus more on cases of good uses of ICT also for "low budget needs"
+1!
Best,