Open source

Open textbook and open content — two names for low-hanging fruit

“Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has an ambitious plan to reduce the cost of education in California. He intends for the state to develop digital open source textbooks for high school math and science classes. The books will be available for free and will be used at public schools across the state.  Schwarzenegger has tasked California Secretary of Education Glen Thomas with making sure that the new textbooks are ready for deployment in fall 2009.” Ryan Paul, California open source digital textbook plan faces barriers

There’s a fair amount of buzz about how California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is leading a state-wide initiative to put open content in classrooms by providing students with free digital open source textbooks for high school math and science.

I’ve read through the California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP) website and have learned that open source digital textbooks are intended to supplement printed textbooks (not replace them, cough cough) and that sometime down the road, the open source textbooks could provide a revenue stream because the state could license the textbooks to educational organizations outside the state.

According to COSTP, the benefits of open source textbooks are:

1) The complete elimination of the current $400M+ line item for California’s K-12 textbooks
2) A significant increase in the range of content afforded to California’s K-12 textbooks
3) A permanent end to California’s textbook shortages
4) Creation of fully portable content holdings database that scales with classroom technologies as they are introduced.

The COSTP website says that they have begun a pilot program – in cooperation with Wikipedia — for a World History textbook for 9th graders.  The book will be tied to California State Curriculum Standards.

This is brilliant — the state of California is tired of paying out money to textbook publishers, tired of quibbling over whether or not publisher textbooks meet state standards, so the state of California has decided to publish the books they need themselves!

When it comes to cutting something out of the budget, textbooks are low-hanging fruit. They are expensive and they need to be replaced fairly often.  It’d be much cheaper to appoint a state “Board of Textbooks” and pay teachers and administrators already in the educational system to build the books digitally.  (They should pick another name though; I just realized it sounds a lot like “bored of textbooks.”)

The idea of having a closed community use a wiki or some other type of collaborative software to create a textbook isn’t even new.  What’s new is the idea that a state-level Department of Education is trying this out!

It makes perfect sense. The state has the resources to gather the right people from around the state together (in person or virtually) and pay them for their contributions.  The state has the resources  to be able to publish and distribute the textbooks digitally and if need be, in printed form.  The state has the clout to set standards for the content and for the formatting (maybe this will end the format wars) AND the state has powerful motivation to make an initiative like this happen.  Money.

But as Ryan Paul points out, there are a lot of ways State Ed could mess this up.

I think the first way is by not taking the time to educate taxpayers about how the books are being built.  If people start thinking that an open source textbook means that every teacher — or heaven forbid  — every student — has the power to edit his or her textbooks, they’ll be a lot of push back.  But if the state stops and takes time over the next three months to teach the public about how the books will be built and everyone knows which parts can be edited or annotated and which parts can’t, what’s not to love about the idea?

P.S.  I keep wondering if we should call this type of textbook build “open source.”  Maybe going back to David Wiley’s idea of “open content” might be a better fit.  Or maybe we should just drop the “open” altogether and replace it with collaborative or just plain old “digital.”  That way the focus is taken off how the books are built.

Open source - When free is really not free

“It might look cheaper on paper, but if you look at what you want to do with it and it requires a substantial engineering effort rather than a commercial product, then it’s not necessarily the most effective solution.” Adam Honoré,  as quoted in Wall Street Opens Doors to Open Source Technologies

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is open source.  Open source describes a software program whose source code is made freely available for use or modification.

The poor economic climate has given the open source movement a boost as budget cuts force IT departments to look around for the most cost-effective way to get projects done.  You might think that “freely available” is the same thing as “free” — but most of us don’t know how to use that free code.  We’d either end up paying a distributor like Red Hat to help us out — or we’d need to keep people in house that can work with the source code.  Either way,  we’d be shelling out money.

Overheard - Switching operating systems is like going to Burger King and trying to order a Big Mac

People encountering Ubuntu for the first time will find it very similar to Windows. The operating system has a slick graphical interface, familiar menus and all the common desktop software: a Web browser, an e-mail program, instant-messaging software and a free suite of programs for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Ashlee Vance, A Software Populist Who Doesn’t Do Windows

There’s a big blogswarm right now about about whether or not Ubuntu is easy to use.

It all started when a college student in Madison Wisconsin bought a Dell laptop for a distance learning class and the computer arrived with Unbuntu Linux as the operating system.  She was not a happy customer because she wanted Windows — so she went to the local TV station to get some help. The story got picked up by Digg and by Slashdot and Linux bloggers everywhere and the poor girl was bombarded with hate comments.

I’m just not getting it.

Is this an Ubuntu story?  Or is it a dissatisfied customer story?  It’s certainly NOT a story about how girls are stupid idiots and should not be allowed near a laptop running Linux.  But that’s what you might think from reading some of the trash floating around the blogosphere.

Sure, Ubuntu might look like Windows — but hey guys, does it work exactly like Windows?  That is, can you really expect the average college kid who’s grown up using Windows to open a laptop running Ubuntu without a hitch?  Apparently someone at Dell tech support thought so.  That is until he started getting blaimstormed in the media for ending this Wisconsin student’s college career.

The whole thing is kind of silly.  It’s not the girl’s fault, it’s not the tech support guy’s fault and it has nothing to do with Ubuntu.

You’d have the same problem if you asked a Windows’ user who’s never used a Mac to start work tomorrow using  OS X . There are going to be some moments of confusion and getting lost.  It would be silly to presume otherwise. Yeah, the basics are still the same, but things are put in different places and tools are called by different names.  It’s just OS culture shock.  You have a panic attack and you get over it. That’s all that happened to that poor girl in Wisconsin.

The real story here is “What is Dell doing shipping laptops with Ubuntu as the default OS?”

Aha! Now THAT’S an interesting story.  You see, Mark Shuttleworth — who describes himself as a billionaire, bachelor and ex-cosmonaut — has teamed up with Dell to make Ubuntu the operating system of choice for low-end laptops.  And he’s not doing it for the money. He’s doing it because he likes the challenge.  (And what’s more challenging than selling something the customer can get for free?)

His company’s name is Canonical.  According to New York Times it’s worth $30 million right now. Keep an eye out for Mark Shuttleworth.  Like Bill Gates, he’s an intriguing mix of businessman-humanitarian.  Mark Shuttleworth is going to be a very interesting personality to follow as the world’s economy recovers from the Crash of ‘08.

Overheard - JBoss is Red Hat’s golden goose

Red Hat’s JBoss business is growing twice as fast as its Linux business, and it delivers $10 in consulting fees for every $1 in subscription revenue. This means that JBoss is much more interesting to Red Hat’s channel than Red Hat Enterprise Linux is. It also means that JBoss should be the foundation for Red Hat getting into the application business in earnest. Matt Asay, Red Hat: JBoss growing twice as fast as Linux

JEMS is available from Red Hat through subscriptions that include certified software, support, updates and patches, documentation and multi-year maintenance policies.

Note: I’m starting to hear “cloud services” being called “middleware” again.  Cloud computing = middleware as a service (MaaS)?  I don’t think it’ll stick.  The acronym is pronounced Mass and will just remind the user that when his stuff is in the cloud and he’s given up all that control,  he’d better pray.

Overheard: Open source forks

A benefit of open source software is the ability to take the code base of an application and develop it in a new direction. This is, as most of you probably know, called forking, and is very common in the open source community. Sam Nurmi, 10 interesting open source software forks and why they happened

Interesting list! One of the commenters, Dingo Jones, said that Mac OS X is an Open BSD fork.  That’s the second time I’ve read that.  I guess it makes sense — especially now that we know Google Chrome has Microsoft as one of its ancestors.

Overheard: Is the set-top box doomed? Not likely.

Less than two weeks after the blogosphere and press erupted with stories that the cable TV set-top faced extinction as a result of Sony signing onto a major interactive TV initiative by cable operators called Tru2Way, folks close to Tru2Way say the first certification test of the technology is a “disaster of spectacular proportions.” Cynthia Brumfield, Terrible Troubles with Cable’s Tru2Way Initiative?

Cynthia got slammed for this blog post, but even James McQuivey (Forrester) has said “So here’s where I stand on tru2way: I’ll believe it when I see it.” As close as I can figure it, here’s what the big deal is:

1. Cable companies would like to get rid of set-top boxes. They cost them money.

2. TV manufacturers are getting extra press by announcing they are getting behind Tru2way as the standard for allowing the TV itself perform the functions of the set-top box. (True2way is open source.)

3. A lot of industry experts don’t see how the business model for this change is going to work — consumers worry that putting the interface in the TV means it’s one more thing that can break on their TV — vendors remember a former effort to get rid of the set-top box (called CableCard) that just confused everyone and went belly up.

Overheard: Is Firefox 3 really ready for prime time?

It’s clearly come a long way, but with all the download hype, is Mozilla pushing out a not-quite solid product just for a publicity stunt? Fahmida Y. Rashid, Firefox 3 on Linux: Questions about Stability

Today is Download Day 2008 for Firefox 3. Mozilla is attempting to set a Guinness Book of World Records for the largest number of software downloads within a 24-hour period. I sort of want to join in the fun - but I just can’t risk it today — too many fires already.

Overheard: Facebook is loving Hadoop

Over time, we have added classic data warehouse features like partitioning, sampling and indexing to this environment. This in-house data warehousing layer over Hadoop is called Hive and we are looking forward to releasing an open source version of this project in the near future. Joydeep Sen Sarma, Hadoop

Overheard: FOSS is the constructionist learning model in action

The culture that is embodied in the FOSS movement — a meritocracy that is built upon both collaboration and critique — is synergistic with some core principles of learning, so, where possible, I try to embrace that culture. Walter Bender, as quoted in Walter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation

“Constructionism” is a theory of learning pioneered by Seymour Papert. Papert first started developing the theory as a student of Piaget in the early 1960s. Over the course of more than 40 years of research and practice, Papert and his students found that children learn best when they are in the “active role of the designer and constructor” and that this happens best in a context where the child is “consciously engaged in constructing a public entity” — something “truly meaningful” for the learner. Further, the creation process and the end product must be shared with others in order for the full effects to take root.

Overheard: Microsoft disagrees with GPL…again

“With open source software, there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.” Bill Gates as quoted in Bill Gates on Pharmaceuticals: The System Isn’t Working

I have to admit, I am a big Bill Gates fan. Richard Stallman, on the other hand, is definitely not a Bill Gates fan. It’s seems like I read and read and read about Microsoft and open source, but I still can’t hear what MS is saying because I can’t get past the politics and the gigantic personalities of these two men.  I wish they’d both stop blowing smoke.