Biography: Leon Cych is currently UK Director of Learn 4 Life and specialises in consulting on the effective use of emerging technologies in business and education. He divides his time between speaking, teaching, project managing, filming, blogging and podcasting with key innovators in the UK education sector, especially practitioners' use of Web 2.0 and Open Source technologies in the education sector. His next major project will be to facilitate teaching and Learning for teachers in Second Life as part of a BSF project in Salford. It is quite daunting to be one of the first bloggers on this site for many reasons.
First off, most teachers have never heard the term Open Source Software. Even if they are ICT co-ordinators or network managers, they may not see the need to look into what it is and how it can underpin and transform their teaching. What relevance has it got for them?
So how to convince a teaching force, especially those in management, that using OSS is useful and not just what has been seen, in the past, as the province of hobbyists and geeks?
Part of the problem is much of the language behind OSS appears hermetic, techie and linked to education in a systemic way that requires a bigger leap of understanding than the usual piece of software bought off the shelf. And that is where a lot of current software bought in for schools stays - off the shelf, in a cupboard, unused and neglected or bought in with the curriculum inevitably shoehorned around it. Communities are not in control, they make do according to others' templates instead of inventing their own. Add OSS to the equation and the sheer practicalities of installing and maintaining it become almost insurmountable.
One excellent initiative to begin addressing this, has been the recently launched (and BECTA funded) Open Source Schools site that has some tips on how to get started in small ways according to need . Other projects like Howard Rheingold's Social Media Classroom are beginning to map out similar landscapes. These are ground breaking projects but even more teacher friendly ways of installation and management need to be found that make everyone's lives easier. Educators need pointers to partners and services that make it trivial to install and maintain this stuff.
The launch of Jumpbox.com may be one of them - this site offers over 35 open source apps as a series of Virtual Machines which can be set up and run on local servers without any specialist installation knowledge needed. You can start a Jumpbox and have applications such as Moodle, Drupel, Joomla and a host of other LAMP based applications running in seconds without any technical knowledge at all. It enables a school, at the very least, to try out these applications and see if they are appropriate solutions for their particular community before committing more strategic funds.
This whole landscape is evolving because of economic necessities and the challenge of Social Media and media literacy; the trick is to find how to bind these disparate elements into the mainstream education system using OSS. But remember, as Clay Shirky, the author of the excellent Here Comes Everybody said recently:
"The revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new tools it happens when society adopts new behaviours".