Converge2. Open Source in e-learning from the teacher's perspective
The PG Cert handbook states that “the aim of higher education is to enable society to make progress through an understanding of itself and its world: in short, to sustain a learning society.” and with that four main purposes of higher education:
- to inspire and enable individuals to develop their capabilities to the highest potential levels throughout life, so that they grow intellectually, are well-equipped for work, can contribute effectively to society and achieve personal fulfilment; - to increase knowledge and understanding for their own sake and to foster their application to the benefit of the economy and society; - to serve the needs of an adaptable, sustainable, knowledge-based economy at local, regional and national levels; - to play a major role in shaping a democratic, civilised, inclusive society.
I argue that The General Public License (GPL)1 for Free Software fit well into these ideals. The GPL grants to you the four following freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program for any purpose. - The freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs. - The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour. - The freedom to improve the program and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.
In this chapter I discuss those licensing schemes within the context of teaching (from the teacher's perspective) and issues raised, but also the benefits for teachers/students. For my teachings I use the Free Software Operating Linux system Dyne:Bolic2 which offers you all the software you need in order to publish vodcasts, podcasts, radio-streaming and much more. In 2000 the artist Jaromil registered the domain dyne.org3. Dyne.org started as a software atelier, a lab for on-line development of software, a place to show the creations of programmers and to address issues like distribution of knowledge, freedom of speech, and the sharing of free technologies in support of those who have less opportunities to access them.
“Dyne.org is a network, communication flows between individuals, without any hierarchy or power structures. As long as the constituting fundamental of every community are identities, defining themselves with their activity, dyne.org is a network of individuals and doesn’t aim to be in any way representing neither substituting them. If you make us a collaboration proposal remember that dyne.org is not a business company: you'll need to arrange business terms with each one interested, singularly and independently.” (Jaromil 2000)
The Lab develops dyne:bolic, a bootable GNU/Linux system. Jaromil came up with the idea of creating a free and easy to employ operating system for radio broadcasting including his streaming software MuSE after he attended, in 2001, the presentation of the Bolic1 live CD distribution by the LOA hacklab, when they gathered in a hackmeeting in Sicily organized by the FreakNet medialab. In August 2002 Jaromil employed dyne:bolic in the independent net-art project Farah in Palestine. After gaining the experience of the Farah project, the development was focused on lowering requisites in order to be able to use recycled hardware. Today the bootable dyne:bolic CD is a complete multimedia system. At the time of writing (December 2008) the Dyne:Bolic system is being used by the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam for teaching New Media Production to students.
The Dyne:bolic system is a computer operating system that gives the widest possible public access to the technology because it will run on the original Pentium series of machines PCs with quantities of RAM that would not be considered sufficient for a basic PC these days, let alone a multimedia workstation. Dyne:bolic also runs on a Microsoft Xbox.
“It’s a core feature for dyne:bolic! Hardware recycling has been an important activity for the FreakNet Medialab, setting up free surf stations in a squatted building back in the early ‘90s. “…” It is about the politics and philosophy we developed in the Hackmeeting: in solidarity with the poor, and trying to fill the digital divide since the very beginning.” (Jaromil 2000)
This makes Dyne:Bolic unique to give away to students who study any media productions or want to be engaged within e-learing. Also it allows teachers to create online versions of their teachings for free (see example Lewin's MIT course, as mentioned in chapter one).
All the teacher/students have to do is to download the disk image from http://www.dynebolic.org, burn it on a CD and reboot the computer with this CD inside. The teacher as well as the students can then manipulate and broadcast both sound and video with tools to record, edit, encode and stream. There is no need to install anything because the Dyne:Bolic system can run just from the CD and automatically recognizes most of the devices and peripherals such as sound, video and network cards.
Dyne:Bolic includes is released under the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License. The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project (a project to create a complete free software operating system). It has since become the most popular license for Free/Libra/Open-Source Software (FLOSS). The World Wide Web as we know today is mainly run on FLOSS Technology.
Educational adherents of this perceived digital society believe that it signifies the evolution of mobile learning (m-learning)—in much the same way that the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web in the 1990s gave rise to the original development of electronic learning (e-learning). (Atkinson 2007)
This means that free and open source software is a must to be applied within e-learning. I used Dyne:Bolic to produce vodcasts for my teachings. Atkinson refers to them as a prime example:
Within this conceptualisation, portable digital devices are seen as providing a conduit which could be exploited for the provision of both established forms of educational media (lecture notes, presentation slides, websites, discussion forums, etc) in addition to providing wireless, on-the-move access to those new forms of courseware made possible with emerging technological developments (access speeds, file formats etc—as discussed previously). Lectures delivered as podcasts are the prime example of such material. (Atkinson 2007)
Teachers may exercise the freedoms of Free and Open Source Software specified in this chapter provided that they comply with the conditions of the General Public license. The principal conditions are:
- You must conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy distributed an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty and keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of the GNU General Public License along with the Program. Any translation of the GNU General Public License must be accompanied by the GNU General Public License. - If you modify your copy or copies of the program or any portion of it, or develop a program based upon it, you may distribute the resulting work provided you do so under the GNU General Public License. Any translation of the GNU General Public License must be accompanied by the GNU General Public License. - If you copy or distribute the program, you must accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code or with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to furnish the complete corresponding machine-readable source code.
The Free Culture movement (a students group discussed in the previous chapter) focuses on fair use and the public domain as a commons. It sees copyright as private property that poses a barrier to creativity, access to culture, and the distribution of knowledge. According to the Free Culture movement, less restrictive copyrights would encourage people to become participants of a shared cultural landscape, rather than passive consumers. People would be able to remix and reinterpret their own culture. Such an example is the Free Software movement which develops the GNU/Linux Operating System and distributes software under the GNU General Public License. This License allows any teacher to download, use and modify this software and distribute it to the students for free, as long as the modified work itself is distributed under the same license, and the original author is credited. This freedom is key to controlling the space of creation and recreation of our teaching/learning environments. In an interview with the Guardian, lawyer Eblen Moglen, one of the main initiators of the General Public License used by the free operating system Linux, says:
In the year 2006, the home is some real estate with appliances in it. In 2016, the home will be a digital entertainment and data processing network with real estate wrapped around it. The basic question then is: Who has the keys to your home? You or the people who deliver movies and pizza? The world they are thinking about is a world in which they have the keys to your home because the computers that constitute [your home's] entertainment and data processing network work for them, rather than for you. Users' rights have no deeper meaning than who controls the computer your kid uses at night when he comes home. [...] “We want to take a position that moderately and modestly insists that users have rights. And we think that's a position that ultimately has traction, even though business is big, because business consists of people who have rights. (Moody 2006)
Nevertheless, the Creative Commons (CC) license has not been received without criticism, even within the Free Software movement. Florian Cramer, for example, argues that the Creative Commons license “(un)consciously seek(s) to use culture as a resource.“ (Cramer 2005) Cramer suggests the use of other open content licenses such as the GPL4, which can apply to both media content and software, whereas the Creative Commons license can only be used for media content. The advantage of GPL over the Creative Commons license is that media content and software source code can be compatible with each other. A major disadvantage of the CC licenses is their incompatibility with the GPL licensing system. CC-licensed work cannot be reused in GPL-licensed work, unless the copyright owner agrees that the work or parts of it can also be distributed under GPL. Another problem with CC is that different CC licenses are incompatible with each other. Another alternative open content license is the Free Art License5 which is written by an artists' collective in France, and points more towards the “ethical” dimension of alternative licensing then the “commercial” dimension of CC. The Free Art License “was not written by lawyers with questionable or naive understandings of creativity” (Cramer 2005).
For the Deptford.TV project (which I will discuss in chapter 3) we use both licensing systems working on the principles of gift economy, the Creative Commons License and the Free Art License. By using these licenses students still reserve two rights: the original student must be credited, and any distribution, sale our reuse of the work must also be under the same copyleft license. This enables students and teachers to share their content with the possibility to “mentor” students outcome online, something universities just started to look into:
In higher education, it is vital to begin to understand the online mentoring process since there are so many possibilities as well as unknowns. In fact, most of those teaching online do not have a degree or even a certificate in distance education. Consequently, they need to understand the options they have for mentoring online students and assisting them in the learning process (Bonk, Angeli, Malikowski, & Supplee, 2001; Sugar & Bonk, 1998). They need to have a sense of where different techniques are more effective and what disciplines or online experiences might benefit from online mentoring. These issues will rise in prominence as synchronous technologies become used more often in online courses and experiences. (Curtis 2004)
The Creative Commons licensing system allows commercial exploitation of the content only if the companies/individuals using it redistribute their produced outcome under the same free license. This is unlike the common commercial copyright law that gets the content locked away in an archive. From this point of view a teacher can be certain that the participating students benefit from a universal approach to knowledge. One could almost say that using a FLOSS license within teaching/learning lets the knowledge spread like a virus.
In considering a source code as literature, I am depicting viruses as though they were the sort of poems written by Verlaine, Rimbaud et al., against those selling the net as a safe area for straight society. The relations, forces and laws governing the digital domain differ from those in the natural. The digital domain produces a form of chaos – which is inconvenient because it is unusual and fertile – on which people can surf. In that chaos, viruses are spontaneous compositions which are like lyrical poems in causing imperfections in machines “made to work” and in representating the rebellion of our digital serfs. (Nori 2002: 62)
One of the most convenient forms for spreading such knowledge can be within a blog. As I write in the next chapter on blogs within learning/teaching environment I want to close here with a quote from Puni: “Blogging has become one of the most popular applications for many, mainly young, Internet users. Its popularity and familiarity could be used in formal education to motivate young people. Furthermore, the diary mode of these websites and their use of hypertext and other links make weblogs particularly attractive for adult learning and training. Blogs can be used both by educators/trainers and by learners. They could be connected together in a “learning space” and could become part of formal certification ” (Puni 2005)
footnotes:
1) http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
2) Http://www.dynebolic.org
3) Http://www.dyne.org
4) as mentioned above, a license used for the Linux Operating System