FOSS and pedagogies
I’ve noticed a lot of buzz about open source among e-learning folks, but I thought it’s just about the low cost, a point of view I don’t find theoretically interesting at all. Then I heard Graham Attwell speak at ITK 2005. Teemu Arina made some notes about Attwell’s presentation:
According to Graham, Open Source is a good thing for education. Open Source software is able to reflect on particular pedagogical approaches. Previously on the LMS [Learning Management System] dominated market, management was the paradigm instead of learning. In that sense, educational software improved in the way how it operated and not in conceptual terms. The reason for shift towards more pedagogic thinking is mainly because of Open Source.
Although Teemu writes about a different session than the one I attended, the point is still the same: that free/open software enables users to produce software that is based on more flexible ideas of pedagogy and different values. It allows us to create different pedagogies, experiment and fool around. It seems to me that different technologies embed different social values, and you can see this in the field of educational software: whether it’s the “Intellectual property”-driven idea of a learning product or learning as participation in a knowledge creation community - be it in an intranet, www, wiki, or something else - let’s leave the technical solution open for the learners and educators.
