Free software in education
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:05
Dominik is here to speak to us today about free software in education, news on tools and developments for free software and data liberation in schools. I think it's okay if you start 10 seconds early. Can we get a round of applause for Dominik, please?
00:29
Yeah, thanks for being here. First of all, my name is Dominik, as already said. There was an unfortunate mistake because I forgot to have the organizers at Nils as co-presenter
00:42
to the talk. So let me introduce to you Nils Radek, who will give the first part of this talk. We will be talking about free software in education.
01:01
For questions, there will be a switch in about the middle of the talk, where we shift to another viewpoint on the topic. Important questions for the first part, please can please be asked then for remaining questions. Please ask them all at the end if possible.
01:23
Thanks Nils. All right. So we are the TechEds, we are a free software youth organization. So we are doing free software with the youth, so with children. We are based in Germany, in Bonn, but we are trying to work more and more internationally.
01:43
So we are on a lot of conferences like the Linux days in Austria, or we are here at the FOSTEM in Belgium. We have four fields of endeavor, which we are working on. The first one is to get children excited about coding. We are doing that by doing different workshops on these conferences.
02:03
For example, doing workshops on programming your own game. So children are teaching other children to program their own game. So it's not just about doing workshops, but it's also about a social component.
02:25
So we are, for example, on the C3 every year in Germany, in Leipzig. And it's a big hacker congress where we are doing a trip to with a lot of children. And they are learning about hacking with a social component too.
02:42
We are also trying to present and support FOSS for schools. So we are looking out for different solutions for schools to involve FOSS into their educational system. And then we are presenting them to schools. For example, we are presenting Debbie and Edu to schools, which is a solution for schools with free software.
03:06
Then we are contributing to or maintaining FOSS for schools. So we are contributing to free and open source software. So children are doing this, and that's why schools can easily use this software
03:22
because it has been developed by children. And children have already contributed to this. And our last field of endeavor is to get young people involved in all these fields. Because, as I said earlier, we are a free software youth organization. So we are trying to get young people involved into coding and into these three fields.
03:46
So now I'm going to talk about where children and schools are using software. So why do we want to bring free software into schools? So at first there's home use, for example, for multimedia and gaming.
04:02
So I think every kid is using software today at home. Then there's also learning, for example, on the web or any office software. So when children have to make presentations in schools, for example,
04:21
they have to use office software. Then, of course, everyone is using software to get informed, for example, on the web, but also about news and timetables. So more and more schools are using electronic timetables, for example. And that's another point where children and schools are using software.
04:45
Then, obviously, for communication, children want to stay in contact, schools want to stay in contact, so they are using software for communication. Then there are also subject-specific educational apps, for example, on the school PCs or for the PCs the children have at home.
05:04
And, obviously, children and schools are using software in computer science classes, which are getting more and more important at schools all around the world. So, as you can see, kids and education are an important target group for free software, and that's why we want to bring free software to them.
05:23
But there are a few challenges for FOSS to get more popular in schools. At first, as you may know, free software projects have little or no budget, which means that we can't do a lot of marketing.
05:41
So we have to get attention on other ways, but we can't do evil marketing either. Also, there's an overwhelming number of options for private use and also for schools, because there are a lot of free software projects, obviously, and that's why it's hard to identify high-quality options,
06:03
which means that we somehow have to wake the school's attention. Then there's hardly visible professional support, so it's not always easy for schools or for teachers to see which software solution has professional support.
06:23
And, yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges is that free software is a very abstract ecosystem. So for people who aren't sitting in this deaf room right now or haven't heard anything about free software before, it's hard to understand why people are doing non-profit software development,
06:46
because it seems impractical and unsustainable at first glance, so people might get irritated by that. But we are trying to turn these challenges into unique selling points, which means that we are trying to, for example, give professional support
07:04
and are trying to wake attention on this abstract ecosystem. Oh, I'm not muted? Okay.
07:21
Yeah, I want to finish this section with an actual example, because with an example about how difficult it can be to convince decision makers of using alternatives and everyone who gets into educational organizations
07:40
and wants to more or less sell the concept of free software, of privacy-aware software, and just using free and open alternatives, they often see themselves confronted with a very special kind of argumentation.
08:01
I added this because this is a real case that happened something two weeks ago, in a conversation about open messaging platforms for schools, and this conversation basically was,
08:21
well, you should use an open and self-hosted messaging platform in order to have your teachers and students communicate with each other. And then the headmaster said, okay, but we first need to get approval from the data protection agencies to run an XMPP server.
08:42
Yeah, of course, there are laws that say schools can use and aggregate data for everything that is needed to follow their educational program and that they are required to give to the students.
09:00
But in any case, we can write a paper about this, we can hand it in at the responsible agencies, and we can get approval for this, no problem. But right now, I heard that every teacher in your school has a WhatsApp group chat for their class. What about that? And then they say, yes, that's true.
09:22
Didn't your state's privacy officer just prohibit this just two or three years ago? And then they say, yeah, but WhatsApp is responsible for that. We are not responsible for that. This actually happens, and I tend to say, and this is what I personally am not so good at,
09:41
everyone who may know me also may know that I will not be good at that. You sit there and you want to say, do you what? And then the talk is basically over because you just, you don't have any idea how to argument against that.
10:04
And this is one resource that is really lacking, is people that have the patience to drive such conversations forward. Yeah, so, Nils already talked a bit about the challenges that are seen when selling free software to schools.
10:26
I'm talking about selling because this is basically what you have to do. When we want to get projects into the real world, into use fields, where decision makers sit that are not engaged in the way free software people think,
10:47
then we need to enter the market where we can sell the products in competition to commercial offers. This is why we founded the Schulfrei project,
11:01
which is a German pun from the German word for off-school and liebe software for schools. The idea behind this is that we want to bring different required parts together. The first part is we want to create a curated collection of high quality FOSS products, because there are many aspects in schools where software is needed.
11:24
For example, running the educational, the pedagogic network with workstations for students and for teachers. Then there might be an information system where timetables, substitution plans, ordering of meals in the Mensa, or things like that are handled.
11:46
There might be the idea that courses shall use a learning platform like Moodle, and maybe there is a requirement for file sharing for groups where you use to share calendars,
12:02
to manage contacts like parental contacts or stuff like that. The first part is identifying these fields where software is needed in schools. Then most of the time you can fire up your favorite search engine, enter free software, information system, free software, cloud system, free software, learning management system,
12:26
and you will be overwhelmed by all the results. Normally what decision makers do is they look at this list and they see, here is a mailing list, here is an IRC channel, what is that?
12:40
They close their favorite search engine again, and go off to their IT partner company, who is a Microsoft Gold partner. So what we want to do is we want to identify high quality choices for these different fields and put them together in presentation material like websites, informational folders,
13:05
where they can be presented in a way that is easy to grasp and that offers a comprehensive list of what these products can do for the schools in order to follow their democratic educational goals.
13:25
Then once this curated list is there and exists and is filled with solutions for different areas, the next step would be to attract IT companies into offering support for these products.
13:43
Because there are doubts inside IT companies that free software projects are sustainable, that they can be offered support in a sustainable way and without need for immense costs
14:01
to get employees up to date about the project and stuff like that. There will be a third part, the third part would be that once free software is brought into schools in this way, is to get students and computer science classes into contributing to these projects.
14:25
We have already started to do this in the Alexis project, which is a school information system for timetabling substitution plans. And it is not only that, it is an app platform that can be extended with all kinds of apps
14:41
that handle informational data inside schools. And we intentionally developed this in a way that it could be a textbook example for a Python Django web framework project with clean code following best practices and all that.
15:00
And what we want to happen is that schools are enabled to identify points where they want to digitalise some process, they want a tool that helps them do something in their organisation and they can actually go to their computer science class like 16-17 years old students maybe and they can say here, we want to do this and that
15:22
and they find this framework and they can learn how to do web development with this and they can create something that is actually used in their environment. Normally in computer science classes, projects are just coded as examples on how do you query a database
15:42
and then the students sit there, operate on some example database and after that it is thrown away. We want to replace this with students doing something that has an actual impact on their environment. And this is quite a difficult thing to do actually.
16:04
Both create a stable and robust product and position it as a learning system for students to contribute. I think I have to hurry a bit. Starting with the bold hypothesis, every user is a contributor.
16:23
I very much want everyone in the free software world to keep this in mind. There are no users that are no contributors. Some may be very passive but in the end they all are. And young users are one group that is underrepresented in free software as contributors and as users.
16:42
While projects should generally keep an eye on who uses their software in order to make a user experience better, look at things from a different angle, maybe identify cultural aspects that make software difficult to understand in certain areas of the world, children and other young users are another group that is underrepresented and that projects need to actively listen to.
17:10
Actually what we do in Alexis, we have partnered, we have merged an old project that we had with a project a school in Lübeck in Germany started
17:23
and we found out it was more or less the same. In both projects there were both adult people and students who created the software and now the two groups merged. The projects were merged and the maintenance of this project is shared between a 15 year old student and me.
17:45
It really regularly happens that I have my code reviewed by the student because they see things that I have just gone blind for and I don't see anymore and they may have another way of thinking about things and to create algorithms and all that.
18:07
So maybe not only mentor young people but also listen to them and maybe think about letting them mentor you.
18:20
One problem often is that many tools used in free software development are discriminatory. I think I won't elaborate on this because I do this every year and it gets boring I think. Like GitHub they keep out everyone who is younger than 13 years with terms of service
18:41
which is based on them having to fulfill the copper law in the USA and why do they have to do this? Because they have a pro version of GitHub and on the main page they have a big green button that says GitHub Pro or something. I think it has also changed throughout the years and we had a discussion with them
19:01
and their legal department said yeah well if we make this button less prominent we don't have to follow copper anymore because this is the only thing we are advertising a premium product. This is the only thing that makes us relevant to copper and then the marketing department said but it has to be green.
19:25
This is the reason why young contributors cannot contribute on GitHub. There are some ways around this. First is to use free and open platforms.
19:40
There are many. EdioGit is a service hosted by TechEd for educational use and for educational projects. Framagit is an alternative by a French company I think who also hosts a GitLab instance. And also don't require people to register an account with some platform.
20:03
Maintaining a mailing list and just accepting email, just accepting questions or bug reports or patches by email is not a very high cost for a project so maybe just do that if you think you have to use GitHub or GitLab.com or another commercial platform maybe just put up a contribution guide and say if you cannot register here for some reason
20:24
send us an email which can go here and we will consider your contribution. If you want to support forcing occasion just do it in your local community or if you want to support us or get centralized things to lead efforts in a focused direction.
20:55
You can stop by our booth at building K level 1 in the education area.
21:01
Our young people can need some money to visit conferences like that. I think I have 30 seconds before I am thrown out for advertising. So thank you for listening and any questions are welcome, both now and at all. So we do have some time for questions.
21:26
I'm just going to pass around the, let's just start here and work our way around. Thank you. That's okay. We had exercise earlier. Thanks very much for your talk and I really appreciate the fact that you're really thinking about how to bring open into schools.
21:42
And so part of me, I'm not familiar if this exists already, but in OpenStreetMap we have something called Teach OSM. And so Teach OSM is created by teachers and people to help people use OpenStreetMap. And so there's also a whole negotiation on here's why you should use OpenStreetMap and this is how to do it and it's shared curriculum. Is that something that you're scoping or is that something that already exists that would support your project?
22:04
So maybe it's a two part. Thanks. Pardon? Do you want to answer the question? What was the actual question? I couldn't identify the question.
22:20
I thought this was another contribution. Hold on. Hold on. Sir, I have deep compassion for Germans who are not native speakers of English now that I live in Germany and cannot say mein Deutsches Schlecht correctly. So I believe that the question was if there is a body of work for these free teaching tools
22:43
and an actual active program to use these tools with folks to do training. Is that a correct summary? How do the teachers understand why this matters? How do you become your advocates? So training the teachers and professors about the program so that they start advocating for the program within the schools.
23:01
Yeah, this seems like a very good idea. We also intend to do this and everyone should do this and get people who drive the efforts forward and also get people inside schools who understand what they are doing and why it matters.
23:20
And then in turn teach it to the students, of course. Thanks a lot for your talk. Well, my kids still go to school and I try to somehow build a community out of the kids at the school
23:40
by teaching them some stuff with Scratch, Raspberry Pi and other stuff, and it failed miserably. So at the end of two years I had two participants, then we closed the whole thing. So do you have any recommendations how to set up a community at one specific school recruited out of the kids?
24:03
This is a very difficult question, I think. Most of the time you do not create a community, but a community creates itself, I think. But I'm not an expert for this deaf room. Maybe this is about how TechEds was founded.
24:26
We did not say come here and do projects together and be a community, but we offered young people ways how what they do can matter to others. And they presented conferences, they do not only learn Scratch or they only learn programming,
24:46
but they are very quickly drawn into projects where what they do matters to the outside world. I cannot say much more, but I think this might be a key aspect of actually getting a sustainable community that exists for a longer time.