August 2007 — Features
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Opening a New Door
Coming of Age
As the Danville example illustrates, this accelerating adoption rate is also being fueled, at least in part, by the arrival of a growing list of solid open source desktop applications for K-12 education, Hargadon says. "OpenOffice has matured to the point where you can actually use it as a replacement for Microsoft Office," he says, "and you're not going to have to worry that people are getting trained in an unfamiliar program. You also have specialty programs that are providing schools with capabilities they would not otherwise be able to afford. Moodle has probably done more for open source software (OSS) than any other program out there for schools." (See "It's the Apps".)
"We care about the operating system, of course, but it's the applications that matter to our users," Powell says. "The only thing these kids care about is getting to the internet, and being able to play their music and write the papers their teachers want them to write. As long as they can log on, they don't care if they're using Windows, Linux, or a Mac. It took me two days to prove that; we just went into the classroom and made sure that everybody could log on to the internet, and we haven't heard from anyone since."
Although cost concerns are moving an increasing number of schools to consider open technologies, the force that may ultimately push K-12 to a tipping point in its slowly evolving relationship with open source software is, for lack of a better term, peer pressure. "The people making decisions for computing at a school are most likely to be influenced by what other schools are doing," says Hargadon. "Which you can understand; they're responsible for keeping the equipment working—sometimes thousands of computers with too few staff—so it makes sense for them to do what everybody else is doing. It doesn't pay for them to take a risk that might keep the kids from having access to the computers for three months. The schools need to feel safe making the decision to implement open technologies, and there's safety in numbers."
Indiana Program Raises the OSS Bar
One headline-grabbing example of a Linux deployment that is likely to provide K-12 IT managers with the solid footing they need to justify the open source move is the Indiana Affordable Classroom Computers for Every Secondary Student program, better known as InACCESS. Launched in 2003, InACCESS has been called the largest K-12 open source operating system rollout in history. The state is working with funds from a grant to distribute low-cost, easy-to-manage computers, placing more than 22,000 workstations in 24 Indiana high schools, all running various flavors of the Linux open source operating system. The program's ultimate goal is to provide ready access to computing resources for each of the state's 300,000 students.
A cornerstone of Indiana's program is choice, which Mike Huffman, special assistant on technology at the Indiana Department of Education, points out is also a core value of the open source movement. Each school in the program can choose whichever version of Linux it wants. There are more than a few varieties of this Unix-like OS in circulation these days (about 300, by one count), so the 24-plus Indiana schools already in the program have a lot to choose from. So far, they've implemented four commercially backed distributions: Novell's SUSE (as did Danville District 118), Red Hat, Linspire, and Ubuntu. (A distribution or "distro" is the operating system plus assorted software.)
