Open source invading Australian education

Australian schools are subscribing to proprietary software - but the choice between proprietary and open source may have not been made on entirely equal ground, according to Kathryn Moyle, an Associate Professor who researches issues arising from integrating information and communication technologies into school education at the University of Canberra.

A self-proclaimed open source advocate for the education sector, Moyle has published a number of academic papers detailing the merits of open source from practical, pedagogical, sustainable, and political points of view.

Liz Tay speaks with Moyle, a former teacher who has also worked in the South Australian Department of Education and Children's Services, about the role of open source in the education sector, and how policy makers, teachers, students and parents might overcome what she calls the hegemony of proprietary software.

What sparked your interest in open source technologies?

My son. I was doing my PhD in between 1998 and 2002, and as part of the research that I was doing, I happened to come across the expected prices for the Microsoft licences for the school sector as a forward estimate, in the budget papers for the Victorian government. The amount of money surprised and shocked me.

I was talking to my son about it at the time, and he said, 'have you come across open source software?' and he kept pestering me about it. One thing led to another; I got interested, and actually included a section about open source software in my PhD thesis about digital technology policies in the school sector in Australia.

What role do you think open source technologies have in the education sector?

It has many roles. Basically, the back-end of any IT infrastructure can run open source software; most schools that run a server off open source software can attest to the reliability of open source software at the backend.

But because I come at open source not from a technical point of view, but from an educator's point of view, I happen to think that when you're in school, you ought to learn how to use a range of software - we're not in the business in the school education sector of training people to use one piece of software.

Sure as eggs, the software that we train students to use in schools is not going to be the software that is either current or available to them once they leave school. For those students that don't have the money to be able to personally upgrade on a regular basis, proprietary software, I believe, is actually doing those students a disservice.

Should open source be introduced into schools as part of a broader range of software, or should it completely replace of proprietary software?

I'm not advocating a complete replacement, but I am advocating that it should be included into any teaching and learning that is about software. I think that proprietary software has a role. To suggest that we need to get rid of all proprietary software out of schools would be both politically impossible, and also unrealistic about what students are going to face.

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