Chalkface Blog

I’m getting it in the neck from two sides at the moment. One or two teachers who identify with the Open Source movement have passed comments suggesting that our online services Paperless School and Yacapaca are somehow morally inferior because we are a commercial company. Meanwhile, colleagues in online publishing are looking askance because we’ve publicly supported Moodle, the Open Source VLE.

Both are completely misguided in my opinion. Let’s start by debunking a couple of myths…

Open source is not free
You don’t have to pay for Open Source software, but you do have to install it, host it and support its users. In practice, support is the major cost of any piece of complex software. So, who’s doing the supporting? If it’s a paid technician or specialised support company, the cost is overt. Suppose it’s the enthusiastic teacher who sponsored the software into the school? They are on salary, and would be putting their energies elsewhere if not doing this. The total cost may still be lower than with a commercial alternative, but you can’t take this for granted. [Update: the going rate for Moodle support is &pound 600/yr, I’m told.]

Open source is not morally superior
If you are a teacher, it’s tempting to think of yourself as a public servant who has risen above the money-grubbing of the commercial world. Let’s test this by looking at how the money really flows.

• Taxpayer -> education budget -> salary budget -> teacher
• Taxpayer -> education budget -> materials budget -> online publisher

In either case, it is the taxpayer who puts a roof over our heads and food on our plates. Of course, some online publishers do get rich, but many others go spectacularly broke.

So why does Chalkface support Moodle, which is Open Source?

Notwithstanding the above, I think much Open Source software has great merit, and indeed Chalkface uses it throughout our projects. For example, this website is built on the Open Source ecommerce platform Zwarehouse, and that in turn is an application of the Plone Open Source content management system, which is written in the (Open Source) Python language. I feel that we have a moral duty to reciprocate.

Second, commercial self-interest motivates us. By helping to give schools a real alternative to the grossly overpriced proprietary VLEs out there, we keep budgets free for other purchases. Logically, some of those will be from Chalkface.

So is there such a thing as a free, proprietary, online service?

If you’ve used Google, you know the answer is ‘yes’. In fact, many online services are free or part-free. In addition to Google, examples include Hotmail, the TES Staffroom, and Flickr. Of those, three pay for themselves with advertising. The fourth, Flickr, has a premium service which allows you to do even more for a small fee.

I mention Flickr last because it’s the closest thing to what we are doing with Yacapaca. For light users, everything – hosting, bandwidth, support, the lot – is free. Power users pay, but only a modest fee. This is the closest you are going to get to having your cake and eating it – a free/low-cost online service, and a viable commercial business for the provider.

Doug pointed me to this discussion on wiki textbooks (MP3, 29MB). They are talking about interesting stuff, but it’s an hour long! In that hour, the three presenters could easily have created, edited and refined a really good wiki page that would have done the same page at least as well. I could have read that in five minutes, and learned as much.

But that’s teachers podcasting to teachers. The really rad thing these days is to get your students to produce them.

This is a fun and interesting experiment for the kids and I thoroughly applaud it. But…think about the implications of letting this be more than an occasional novelty. How are you going to assess such work? Whatever novel assessment methods you come up with, the bottom line is that you have to listen to all those podcasts. Yep, thirty students times one hour each.

And you thought marking essays was a pain!

Comments

Ian,

You are missing a massive trick here. You don’t listen to the podcasts at
all. Before the activity you get the students to develop their own marking
criteria. They then create the podcasts. You then get students to
self-assess (mark their own) and then peer-assess (mark each other’s)
podcasts and produce an evaluation. Thus the students listen to each
other’s podcasts and mark them.

You can then have a class discussion where the students share their views
about each others work – perhaps sharing the highlight and the lowlights.

Constructed carefully, podcasting ends up with less marking, not more. The
main problem comes when you first do it though – it is so amazing that you
want to listen to them all, not that you have to for assessment purposes.

Andrew Field

Until recently the majority of educational blogs have been aimed at HE. That’s starting to change, not before time. Ian Usher from Bucks LEA is now writing about his experiences with Moodle, Fronter and Think, amongst others, in Changing the Game. Looks like it will be a really useful read. Welcome to blogging, Ian!

From Ruth Kelly’s opening address to BETT

…one of the biggest challenges for technology to
support Personalised Learning will be increasing home access.
Yes, the ratio of computers to pupils continues to get better in
secondary and primary schools. Yes, the number of schools with
high speed broadband access is now up to 85%. And yes, over
80% of families now have access to ICT at home. But there are
still over 1 million children who don’t.

We have to move towards a position where we can genuinely say
that we have universal access for all learners. Today, I’m delighted
to reinforce our commitment to improve home access to
technology for our most disadvantaged pupils. (My emphases.)

From the Labour Party Manifesto

We will deliver our cross-government strategy for closing the digital divide and using ICT to further transform public services…

By 2006 every school [will be] supported to offer all pupils access to computers at home.

Oops! Well, what’s a million disheartened, disillusioned, dispossessed-of-their-future kids, here or there. The underclass can no longer be relied upon to vote Labour anyway.