> Its more about what they are allowed to teach or choose to teach. You > could teach the principles of FOSS, the importance of international > open standards etc even without direct access to specific software > titles.
True enough. At a K-12 level though, many (most) teachers will ignore anything not explicitly detailed in content standards. As CS and other not "core" classes (such as art) are under the magnifying glass as the much as "core" teachers. How many of them choose to function as software agnostics? (Whereby they are in fact not neutral but in fact supporting proprietary software paradigms.) How many of them have time or scope of vision that extends beyond state mandated standards, UIL, or AP tests? While there certainly are such teachers, they are a small percentage of an already small group. I do think that the software is a big issue. By teaching students to program in JCreator on a Windows platform - that becomes their reference point, their default mental model for what programming looks like. Does the school use Dr. Java on MS? Sure, it's open but it's on a proprietary OS. Little attention is drawn to the purpose or use of FOSS. (Similarly, most macs have a copy the GPL but how many mac users would recognize it?) This gets into far ranging ethical debates concerning the moral software compasses, figured worlds, and interpretive ideological frameworks of a small number of teachers in an already marginalized field. Teaching FOSS may be akin to teaching "fair use" in schools. Most of the materials regarding "fair use" provided to librarians come from the MPAA... (Though EFF has put together materials.) Proprietary software companies shell out tons of money to be at educator conferences - free software has little visibility in such places. The logistics and difficulty of getting FOSS recognized in schools are problematic. _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
