 Welcome everybody. Can you still hear me? Yeah, it's on. Welcome to the panel discussion that was created by Jonah Brasovic. Jonah is a staff member here at the university. He is in educational technology. He will talk with his team about, let me briefly look at my paper here, the pedagogical freedom of the Debian software. I think you are going to introduce your own panel members, isn't it right? Absolutely. This is really bad. A applause for the panel, please. Thanks so much for coming out on a Sunday to support free software. I want to first introduce the panel, and we have a great panel that's composed of a lot of different folks. Matt Caringa is a software developer who recently defended his PhD dissertation just last week, and the title of the dissertation was Social Software and the Struggle for Freedom. He'll be starting as an assistant professor at Adelphi University, leading up a brand new program in educational technology. So that's great. Alicia Selly is a faculty librarian at Brooklyn College, which is part of the City University of New York, and she's doing a lot of really interesting education and work around teaching students how to think about and use technology and open access and media literacy. Mallory Nodal is a public school, has a great deal of experience as a public school teacher and is an organizer in technology who's been organizing for over a decade. She works right now with, she's a member of the May 1st People Link Collective. What's the best way to describe it? It's a membership organization that provides a lot of technology services and organizations to NGOs and activist organizations, and their Aldebian shop there. Finally, we have Shamim from the Fadina, well, it's from the Ferradian Technologies, and they are a provider of the open source Fadina software, which is software that's being used currently to administer and manage schools throughout the world internationally, and they're working really hard on moving directly into supporting more teaching and learning activities. So that is our panel. I wanted to start things off by just giving you guys an understanding of my take on the motivation for what we're talking about. I think right now in the educational world, it's still the case that a lot of people regard technology as the plumbing, the stuff that kind of is unseen and makes things tick, but isn't particularly visible. I think nowadays it's really the case that software architecture has started to resemble traditional architecture as more of a leading art. So for example, if there was a building on campus that was being frequented by 80% of the student population three times a day, a lot of people would care a lot about how that building was designed and what was going on there. I found in my experience that educational technology is a really compelling and provocative example of the importance of freedom, and if you follow along with the architectural idea there, it's really easy to see the ways in which people teach are now being mediated by the software that they're using each. So whether or not you want your students to raise their hand before they speak or speak at a turn like in a seminar, or whether or not you're setting the chairs up in a circle or in rows, has direct corollaries in the software that you're using to teach. And the importance of at least institutions, if not departments or professors and teachers themselves to have control over their teaching style seems more and more paramount and is a really vivid example for the importance of having control over the kind of software that you're using to teach. And beyond that, I think we really wanted to stress and the composition of this panel is meant to represent ways in which what's going on in the educational world really cuts across sectors. So what we're trying to do today is talk a lot about ways in which technology is being used to teach, not only technology is being used in the educational sectors. So to the extent that many of the ways in which we're using technology is mediating communications between humans and humans nowadays, not just humans and machines, many of these systems exist to or attempt to balance the flows of knowledge, communication and power. And I think that's a problem, I think especially a lot of people in this room would recognize in the abstract that exists between not only teachers and their students but also government and their citizens, nonprofits and their constituents and honestly even corporations and their viral customers, the viral campaigns with their customers. I mean there's certain ways in which these features cut across a lot of these different sectors that are not obvious. So I'm definitely interested in ways in which we can make what's going on in the educational world more interesting and relevant to what's going on in other sectors and vice versa. There's certainly a problem in academia where people continue to regard their problems as singularly unique and isolate themselves from a lot of what's going on in the rest of the free software movement. So I think with that in mind I want to kick things off and Matt's going to start talking about some of his work in this area and then we're going to go around just a second on the structure here. We're going to do really quick introductions and then I'm going to see a couple of questions for the panelists and we really want to try to run this more as a conversation. Very quickly just kind of show of hands. How many people here currently work in the educational sector? Okay, so there's a lot of people that have this background experience and how many people came here to learn more about what's going on with software in this area? All right, so quite a mix. There you go. So Matt, take it away. Is this on? There we go. All right. So when I was invited to talk in this panel I looked up Pedagogical Freedom on Google to see what it meant and this panel is the first hit. So I feel lucky that I'm going first because I get to define it and there's a freedom in education is nothing new. I think just the term is a little bit newer but freedom in free software and software freedom means different things to different people and there are different values that people emphasize in it and when you talk about freedom in education the same thing happens. What it means and what freedom we're looking for is different and there are different values that are highlighted in different aspects of it and I want to talk about one idea of freedom in education that I think is particularly relevant today and motivates the way I think about educational technology and educational software and tools. So I'm going to start with an idea from a French political philosopher Jacques Ranciere. He's currently writing this from 1990. He said one doesn't owe people what they can take for themselves and education is like liberty. It isn't given, it's taken. So as I'm working on my degree and working in schools and working with the Internet and seeing things change over the last 10 years I started to think about where we are and the importance of thinking about education and learning beyond schools and not instead of schools per se but what is the role of the school and what is the role of the tools that we use there and for free education it's about people being empowered to learn for themselves and not receiving a packaged program or packaged curriculum and I think we have the ability to use technology to help forward this goal. Technology is not going to do it on its own but if we think about it in certain ways it can and I'm going to refer to Ivan Illich who wrote a de-schooling society in 1971 where he kind of attacked the idea of schools as instilling this consumerist mentality where well I'll just read what he says he says many self-styled revolutionaries are victims of school they see even liberation as a product of an institutional process only liberating oneself from school will dispel such illusions discovery that most learning requires no teaching can be neither manipulated nor planned each one of us is personally responsible for his or her own de-schooling and only we have the power to do it. This is a very de-motivating thing while I'm working on my PhD in education but also helpful in terms of thinking about software so what Illich says is what we should start with not the question of what someone should learn but what kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn and I think that there are parallels in that thought with the open education resource movement for example and what they say this is from the Cape Town Declaration 2001 it is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint and this idea obviously comes from free software but the power in it is that what we should develop are things that people can use and adapt to their own purposes we shouldn't try to come up with one solution one monolithic way of teaching or education and the types of educational technology that I like the best are restrained and focus on letting what people can do for themselves to let them do by themselves and what technology can augment to let it do it so I'm always hesitant when I see like a total integrated learning system that's going to teach you everything to end and do assessment and track you from kindergarten through, you know, 16 but I think that what we can learn as educators from free software generally is that free software thrives and the freedom in free software thrives in open protocols, in open formats and that collaborating on those and thinking what are the protocols for open education what are the formats we need for people to teach themselves that's the lesson that educators can take and work with people in free software to really get that out there and that's all I'm going to say for now but we're going to have time for questions later so I have a little bit of a different take on this because I'm approaching this from the library so I think of education maybe more sometimes as a space that students come into but I wanted to ask the audience what do you all think that librarians do so tell me yeah just shout it out oh okay, catalog hand out books run teaching and learning software at universities worry what the patrons are using the computers for worry what the patrons are using the computers for collect history okay and what sort of I guess higher goals do you think that librarians think about when they're doing these things archive digital archive what was that I'm sorry okay so preserving information for the long haul okay make information accessible worry about budgets well what I would ask you is how are the goals of librarianship and how are the things that librarians do different from what perhaps software developers do or how are they similar so for all those things that we just mentioned are you all also working for free access to information which I think is one of the main tenets of librarianship are you working to make sure that knowledge is preserved over time I think there are many many alliances that librarians have with free software developers and people who are interested in free education as well so what I see happening in my field right now is that many librarians are interested in open access and there's a lot of interest in making our own publications that we are creating open so that they're not going to be reliant on proprietary systems or whatever kind in order to read the work that we're developing and we're also really interested in open access just overall and free culture more and more which I think is very exciting but I also think that while these developments are really great and wonderful we're not thinking so much about how we can implement free software and I personally when I teach usually have 50 minutes so I'm in an academic setting I'm at Brooklyn College and I have 50 minutes in which students are brought into my library and I am supposed to make the information literate which for me is a lifelong goal it's very very difficult to squeeze into those 50 minutes and what I feel like I'm able to do is to make them start to question software to make them start to question information systems that they use already such as Google so I get them thinking about why a hit shows up as the very first in terms of relevance on a Google page like why they don't know why that happens or why it's a secret from them that that happens but I don't know how to how to get them from beginning to question these systems in that 50 minutes to then understanding some of the alternatives I want help from all of you today and beyond this session and I also think that I'm very interested in how librarians and techies are educators and how we can work together to form alliances to further understand where we both need more help I think that librarians often are the people who might be teaching students or people outside of the educational realm how to use technology but we need more help being advocates for freer systems I'm going to go over to Mallory whose work is more involved with advocacy and activism which I think in many ways is a form of teaching too I actually have two distinct perspectives one is, and I'll just go chronologically I was a public high school teacher for a few years and not specifically related to technology or teaching technology, but I was teaching science but I just, in learning about the systems specifically in New York City but I think it applies everywhere based on just questions I've asked and answers I've gotten from other teachers and other places and also in other people that work for public systems everywhere the biggest barrier I think to implementing sensible collaborative software is a policy level where governments spend their money based on contracts they make and that is something that we can influence but it takes a lot of advocacy at a really kind of icky level you have to start asking governments to stop making 15-year contracts with Microsoft, that sort of thing until then, all of our students that are educated in public schools all of our professionals that work in the public sector are going to be well-versed in Microsoft products Microsoft software but I think that what I saw is that the high school teachers that I were working with that were really trying to reach their students and bring literacy into the classroom often were using online collaborative tools more and more, they were using Google Docs they were using Twitter teachers that were rogue and they would go and get YouTube videos downloaded and show them in their classrooms because YouTube is blocked by well anyway the New York I don't know what else for but there's a filter on those sorts of sites but anyway, so teachers and educators are definitely seeing the use of collaborative online tools so there is some possibility of getting things changed I'm just making the filters less severe and then my other perspective is as an activist organizer so I've been advocating as an advocate for free software use in social movements really around the world in lots of different settings I think that it's easy there are many arguments that have to be made for using free software in social movements and one of the easier approaches would be to talk about anti-capitalism non-corporate use and freedom obviously free speech and freedom it's not something that's such a stretch but I think also then kind of what this panel is trying to get at is why should we be using it in terms of its power to educate and to collaborate and I think that in those ways the two distinct perspectives I have can be related together that it's truly the what is so important about free software and it is the ability to collaborate with people that are sort of building it making it better but also the folks that are using it in sort of educational level so I could the other thing I wanted to say it's you reminded me of the title of this panel is the same title of a book by Paula Freire no? no what is that? pedagogy of the press no no no but I will anyway yeah yeah I think so there's a long history of sort of this idea of freedom and radical education and advocacy so it fits in really well and I was also going to mention then that Paula Freire Institute in Brazil started a world education forum many years back it's part of the world social forum movement and this year in October it's going to be held in Palestine and for various reasons it's going to be polycentric mostly in terms of physical access to the spaces for as many people as possible and so because it is polycentric in about five different locations they're going to be using technology in a way that's never been I don't think been used before they're going to be doing a lot of internet streaming and some other things so at that level anyway I mean I know it's been used before but at such an over level I just wanted to mention that is something that people had questions about which is also I guess if I there's time later I can talk about the experience that we had with the US social forum that there are a few people in the room that were there working on this in a very collaborative way and there are some interesting stories about how we were able to integrate sort of educating movement activists using some of the free software that we built together to tell us a bit more about the Fedina software and some of the work he's been doing around that yeah sure John thank you the panel has given good points regarding the education system so that's great actually I'll be talking about more on a software actually it's a system which can actually do the school management online so basically the product name is called Fedina it's an open source school management system and it helps like all the teaching it actually solves all this teaching and school related activities online so you can, I mean it's accessible 24 by 7 basically I'll just quickly touch upon the history of how the project Fedina was developed like few years back when actually the software was developed by a company called Ferrari and Technologies and before starting the project like we wanted to see if there was a solution or a one-time solution which actually solves all the modules which we need for the school management which was actually an open source so there was no at that time which actually has all the modules or all the solutions that can solve for the school management so keeping that in mind the enthusiast developers in Ferrari and like they came up with a solution which actually can help the world in contributing the educational system because it's available as an open source and we would like all the enthusiasts here actually to see the software for themselves so I'll just give you a background like what it includes and how does it help the educational system so the last version the first version actually was released last year and basically the main goal was to see the software will be accessible by everyone because for providing a solution which is like so that all can use it like it's the user friendliness that's what more important because we don't need to have a software which is complex and have training course involved in that so that is one of the main features which we have built in Fidina so it's really eye-catchy, the designs are eye-catchy basically like anyone with a basic knowledge in computer can actually work on the software so that's one of the main benefits and the advantages of Fidina or the modules present in Fidina it's basically all the modules which you need for a school management so basically it has the student admission, student attendance then you have the time table you have the examination you have the features like resource, finance so you have the system where you can actually have a school running using that software so apart from that you have a reporting module which for each of the modules which are described above has like you can create reports from that you can actually customize the reports you can actually filter to create reports online and the data is available 24 by 7 so you can actually use it anytime basically if you see that the advantages are like the teachers I mean the productivity will be much more increasing because they can actually track their students, their progress their attendance, their marks and also apart from that like we have messaging alerts from the software itself where you can send alerts, you can send emails so basically it helps in all the teaching related issues online itself and we are actually focusing on e-learning because that is going to be a vibe now like e-learning, e-school and e-infrastructure so that that's going to be coming in the next version of Edina where actually all the teachers worldwide can actually collaborate their information using the software so coming to the advantage I mean the users like currently it's being used in like Africa and India most of most of the schools in Africa and India has already implemented the software and they actually understood the potential how much it can help the education system because some of the softwares are not readily available like it involves much cost training and it's not affordable by some schools so for those like, Edina is really a helpful thing like they have understood their potential of the software and they are implemented in their system so now in the next version which I was talking about was the e-learning and if that comes into place those schools, those remote schools actually can greatly benefit from the software because teachers from other worldwide can actually use that system and provide help to the other schools worldwide so that is one of the greatest I mean the module which will be putting it in Edina so there are other advantages too like if you see that's helpful for like the students as well as the parents to have a look into their marks there are some modules which are really helpful so all these are based upon the easy navigation like you don't need as I was mentioning before like you don't need a trained a trained professional or a school authorities do not need to hire some professional although I mean like computer professionals would need to work on the software or to understand the system so it and basically it has all the modules to run a school so and the other modules which will be adding to the software is going to help in the future like we are going to add one is the infrastructure the e-learning and then we are going now it's like for the schools and we are going to actually expand it to the campus as well as universities and basically one of what Alicia was talking about the library management like we are going to improve that too in the software so that's going to be a good thing Fantastic and anyone that wants to learn more about Edina should really stop by and ask questions as well. Yeah actually like one point more like I would like all the questions here to actually go into the project website actually contribute there into I mean ideas or I mean because it's an open source so everyone has to contribute to it to make it better so I would greatly appreciate that. Thank you. No but I would like to have the ribbon team involved in it and make it a success. Thank you. Yeah thanks so much. Where I wanted to start things off and I think we already touched on this in a few of the introductions is really with this question of what the educational world can learn from the Debian community and what we might be able to offer or teach the Debian community in turn. I know in my personal journey when I first got involved with free software it really opened my eyes to ways in which communities could self organize and create learning systems that really got me intrigued by the possibilities around educational technology if we can only you know bottle that energy and articulate that process it really seemed very very promising so did anyone here have particular thoughts on that question? Matt I think you started talking about that when you were talking about open education. Just to continue sorry to talk about a little bit I am starting this new program in September and it's about educational technology for teachers they are going to be in K-12 primarily and one of the questions I have is what should they know about free software and you know what do you want what do I want teachers to know about free software what do I want kids that are in K-12 school system compulsory school system to know about open source and free software and what it means and I think that we in education need to develop some idea of what a digital literacy of free software means and kind of the skills we want to get across and I think that's something that you touch down a little bit in the library it's like 50 minutes isn't enough time to do it and once in your life for 50 minutes you are never going to get there so when does it start how does it start and I think that in the U.S. we are behind most of the world in this yes and I think Hans is talking this morning you know this the important idea of you know free in theory and free in practice and whether or not there is a certain kind of complexity that is a barrier to entry as well and crucially and I think Alicia was going to get to this in terms of open access whether or not there are you know any layers here that make sense where it makes sense to talk a lot more about media literacy and ways in which the values percolate through the systems maybe pass that over she can yeah I think one of the things that I do a lot is talk about that dichotomy between producers and consumers with students and try to let them know that sometimes they're searching for an article that doesn't exist and they may need to be the person who writes that article but I often don't think about it in terms of software so that was really good this morning's talk was really great for me to start thinking about that and urging students when they're upset with the way that systems work to do something about it and to make it more of a participatory experience and more of an empowered educational experience and I think we've all shared and talked about probably everyone in this room has had the experience of the contrast between the ways in which we dream of software being used and the challenges around trying to cultivate that culture of use right so whereby user students anyone shows up and starts using software in very different ways now I imagine with trying to work with the organizations at May 1st and there's a lot of disconnects or challenges or there's a lot of effort that goes into training them on how to use those systems but there might be cases on a few different fronts yeah I think that the more that technologists and developers can start working even just in a volunteer capacity with social movements that I think positive things will come about one major thing that I hope I mean I think that I've actually learned a lot more about activism through looking at it through technology but going the other way I guess like the question of diversity and empowerment of certain communities and having voices heard of different different abilities, different approaches needs to definitely shift within technology development so I think that only comes about when we begin really working together I mean social movements and developers in like a really intimate way because it's the kind of thing that does take time to sort of build bases build relationships because it is very interpersonal we're talking about you know social movements feeling put off by technology because of emotional like emotional responses so it's not something that can just be solved easily other than just just more time and more overlap between two kinds of organizers and while you have the mic I know that at the social forum there was a tech congress that convened and came up with a lot of principles and values that I think apply strongly to the educational community as well and of any of this bring to mind absolutely so I mean just to kind of give a brief background is the technologist that worked a lot on the U.S. social forum so these are already folks that are both in tune to what's happening in social movements and are intimately involved in them enough to spend time volunteering for it and also the movement folks that have just begun to become empowered by technology and know about it so there's that strong overlap and we came up with 10 principles and sort of in what is the relationship between you know technology activists and movement activists and back and forth right so it was really good exercise and you're right I think it does apply to lots of different like education for sure and there's ways to learn more about all these things during questions and follow ups for sure open stuff to the audience I wanted to give people a chance to to bring up any of the challenges and problems that they've encountered with either free software or constraints that the proprietary software has imposed oppressively perhaps on their teaching and learning whether I know for example this morning we talked a lot about the importance of free software and the importance of accessibility to the software but ways in which the movement for freedom is being outflanked by a land grab for data Alicia I know that's really important in your work as well I guess to me personally I think I can see it more on the outside of people who still need to be convinced and I think that sometimes even if you're ideologically aligned with free software movement it can still be really really difficult to convince people to make change in their day-to-day habits I was just at a conference this past week of librarians who are interested in teaching and there are many many many iPads and institutionally purchased iPads and I've done a lot of work with anti-DRM and ebooks and it just kind of breaks my heart but I'm not sure where to start that conversation a lot of the times so I think the techies that I know have been really great in constantly reinforcing that another world is possible and being really supportive of even tiny movements towards free software and I think that however we can expand that network of support and I guess love for software instead of condemning people for maybe uneducated decisions would be really great so I guess that's what I would really like to further from the community do you have any thoughts about that piece or rants that people wanted to one thing is like I was mentioning like it's a good point like I mean all the educators I mean people who are enthusiastic like actually should wonder if you teach other to make it better so I would I mean really encourage like I think we should start something like and I mean not just this panel should not just be inside this panel and if you go out I just want to say I can't understand it but sometimes the beauty of free software is an apparent to everybody and especially when I'm talking to educators who share many of the same values I do I try to remember to approach it from their point of view that there are educational benefits to free software and that you know that I think with movement politics the same thing I'm always kind of shocked when they fire up PowerPoint and when just but it's not their main goal they don't care that much about software freedom they care about other things that are equally important and we need to remember that they have other goals that are important same thing with teachers they have other things they're trying to do that are really important and so you need to present it or I need to at least when I talk to them present free software in terms of their own goals and I think that very receptive to it even faculty members sometimes it is an uphill bow or a continuous one but tiny steps I like that a lot and alternative worlds are possible we weren't positive who was going to be in the audience today but we're totally open to taking this in a lot of different directions I don't know if people were most interested in learning about particular pieces of software new frontiers things that we're learning great we've got a bunch of questions I think we want to get to the mic for the video but I'll repeat a question if people can't get there there's another one oh great excellent mine's pretty easy it's just a follow up for the gentleman that just spoke who's kind of contrasting people that see the beauty of free software versus those who might we're horrified when we see what they're using for whatever reasons and you said something for equivalent reasons but isn't if you're going to posit that the economy isn't their reason always and everywhere ease of use sorry just repeat the very last thing he said it sounded like the most important isn't their question isn't their point of view always ease of use like that's why they're using well ease of use maybe the question but I think that's legitimate concern because their goal is to maybe to prepare a class or to prepare research and to have to fight with their city bureaucracy to get open office installed in their computers is a really big battle for one teacher to take on when they're trying to teach a class if they are the tech leader for the school it's more that person's in their purvey to handle that and so yeah ease of use is definitely a problem I don't think it's just like the UI there are a lot of issues around it does that make sense does that answer your question a little bit we're generally when we're speaking of ease of use not living yourself to the UI but we're saying change of habits how easy it is for the person to change their habits in general just I've worked I guess we've worked in the New York City public school system and I cringe anytime I boot up a computer there because you can't install anything you can't access anything and it won't work at the time no that's absolutely true it's not just education right it's like any government office and many private ones too so definitely I agree with you that there's a lot of potential in how lessons from free software can change education but we've taken it for granted that that's the case so none of the kids that would be using open office would be hacking on open office maybe some of them would but how I really want to hear the practicalities of how using open source software in class or how importing ideas and methodologies from free software development into class changes education because that's something that I haven't heard yet well I could probably take a stab at that I think if you buy into the notion that the values that go into the software or into the creation that percolate through into the features of the software it's not surprising for example that when you're using media wiki there'll be an option to license the creations of your work under Creative Commons license whereas I think I'm really surprised to see that as an option in Adobe for example so there's a lot of different ways in which I think the processes that go into the creation of the software end up being captured and embodied and end up becoming priorities in integers that are expressed to the users and in cases like open office for example where maybe it's trying to replicate existing pieces of software that may not be quite as obvious though even open office has a plug-in and extension infrastructure that allows anybody to create additions to it so beyond which I think I'd also like to make a strong case for potential so even if people don't exercise their freedom when they wake up and realize that they could have there's something maybe transformative especially if you make that lesson yeah oh sorry it looks like there's some other responses to that did you want to jump in I don't think that I mean it depends on the sophistication of the people who are being who are like you can't expect a kindergartner for example to contribute probably to much of any of the free software that they use but depending on their experience you can also I think encourage people to just to submit bug reports and this is something where the free software community needs to be better about accepting bug reports from non-technical users but that's part of the process of the sort of democratic engagement that Hans was talking about in the initial piece I don't know how many educators are actually doing this but part of the education process when you're using a software it's when a kid says I would I could or oh man it's so stupid that that's an opportunity to just turn around and say you can and the way to do it is to talk to the people who make it so I think it's a concrete thing if we can get free software developers to not bite those people's heads off and if we can get teachers to encourage students to participate in that way that encourages that read read loop excellent yeah I'm actually I graduated from high school just this year so like all these things but the point that I always thought we had computer science classes at our school and the thing I hate about these classes I really dislike computer science classes in general because we always write every software thing from scratch the basic thing from scratch if just for once they put like some random software free software application and they just you know say change this so that you know this changes so it does this instead of that just some little simple thing I think that would help us a lot more than some of this just the basic you know software things that we've done over and over and over so I think that that's another thing that free software could be used for even in more technical areas in like let's say high schools even yeah the opportunities for civic engagement within the curriculum are really really about want to pass that along and then I mean in some ways I'm just echoing what has been said but software touches our lives so intimately in such profound ways and questions relating to privacy, privacy, security, transparency right are really quite important and some students really don't know about for example the effect of Google on their lives and I think actually introducing and using free and open source software in the classroom is then a vehicle by which to address these much larger political issues so it's pedagogical in that way too so it's a little bit tangential or ergotional but I think that's a great way to make those issues much more vibrant and tangible to people's lives too right software is a foil which is kind of where the book liberator fits into the panel we'll talk about it a little bit more later okay hello right this is just a little anecdote that was in the youth in the UK a little while ago and demonstrates the disconnect that's about the size of the Great Rift Valley in Africa between most of the population and free software on this subject because we tend to assume that people have at least heard of the idea and there was a local education authority in the UK where they found that children were swapping CDs with Firefox or Ubuntu I can't forget which on them and the teachers reacted to that by getting the LEA to issue a leaflet saying that swapping software was pretty much equivalent to graffitiizing the front of their building and then various free software developers got in touch with them and were fairly polite and that went up through the hierarchy to the point of the person that made the decision to publish this leaflet sort of county wide and she phoned up, she looked up the details for Mozilla and found their head office number or whatever and got in touch with someone from Mozilla and said to them is it really true that you're allowed to do this stuff and they said yes and she said well could you stop it because it makes the it makes it really difficult to write this leaflet if people start doing like anarchistic things like giving away software so that's how wide the gulf is people just don't realize that it's even an idea that you could give away software so much and I'm sure Alicia it's really important I think because a lot of free software developers believe that oh we'd be able to circumvent a lot of these barriers and inhibitions but it's crucial to understand that it's the librarians and teachers for example who will be most compliant and are in the position to actually be doing the occasion around how to most effectively and when to use these tools, were there any particular stories you wanted to share? I think about copyright a lot and librarians also and how we are often really we I necessarily want this but a lot of librarians are very very very very very afraid of getting a cease and desist which I think has a really big chilling effect in what we're then able to do so I think I just heard Jessam and West who's a very famous librarian speak at the Hope conference a few weeks ago and one of the things that she stressed was having techies really really accentuate the fact that it's free or it's legal like it's okay it's legal and to really like talk to those fears when you're approaching implementing something new Excellent That's cool One of the things that came to my mind was that there is a strong relationship to in particular what you mentioned and what Andy presented in his talk just before this one and maybe you all could talk with Andy and look at his presentation because he explicitly went into the question of how to make the politicians more positive towards open software and in the end it is probably something like the more you teach people use a certain type of software the more people are going to use it there's a famous phrase by a professor in high performance computing who says I don't know what kind of computer language people will be using 20 years from now I have no idea how it will be called but it will be Fortran and that's a great thing if we could change people in such a way that we can say we don't know what kind of software people are using 20 years from now but we know it's open source and to quote Andy you should use open source rather than free software because free has a nasty ring to it he has an argument to that so you should talk to that but it's something that you really should do and I liked your panel and I think I'm going into your time but anyway oh no we are not opening this up right this second I do I do want to encourage folks I got double I encourage folks to stick around at four o'clock today Gail Brewer who is actually a council member in New York City will be presenting and so there's a little bit of government people could make some of these cases lunch is next we're running down on time but yeah although I'm getting different reports from the Meisters we have a couple more questions that I wanted to try to get to it was open office and that was also mentioned in some of the talks this morning one of the things I think it's worth thinking about using software and education and I think may make open office it gets a lot of press for important reasons because it uses the same document format as word and that's kind of what everybody's using now but it's not clear that's a great example of software used for education because it's so huge the point we made several times how many people are really going to go hack on open office and things like open office and fire flocks they're very intimidating because they're giant in the engineering world the lingua franca of writing papers is not word and hasn't been for years and tech is very and tech is very different that way it's a whole different experience when you start writing a bunch of stuff in law tech because it's a macro language and you discover that you've got a set of macros you use a lot you might want to pull them out into a separate file and before you know it you're doing free software development and that type of a program is really different from a user experience than open office and leads more obviously and directly into the educational experience and I think that's something to look at there's so much emphasis put on user interfaces that look like windows where it's a nice smooth shiny surface and everything just flows the problem is that if it just flows how do you get underneath it and change the flow to some degree they're contradictory right thank you very much and I think Mallory was trying to bring up in a lot of her examples around collaboration ways in which the network infrastructure is creating a new layer of interactions for example so the collaboration work the annotation work I don't know if people here were expecting us more about Moodle and Sakai for example which are very popular in the educational world and contrast that with some of the more general content management or collaboration tools does anybody want to speak maybe to the difference between these monolithic systems and smaller tools that are loosely coupled like you guys have strong opinions on that we lost our mic I guess we're totally out of time lots of questions that was my reply but yeah something that open source can offer is that we can customize more tools for education I think we need to do it more often and like younger computer users need different tools and different software and a lot of times they just get the same bland stuff that everyone else gets and that's a bad thing I think and I just practically open source a great way to do that because you can have people who are closer to the learners developing the software rather than a corporation who is much farther away even if it's a free software corporation who is doing it so I'll give your mic back to you so one more question I think this is more of a response maybe your last question I have two quick things to say for Firefox being an intimidating product there's actually a wiki page on Firefox that's a complete walkthrough of how to get the source add a feature which is changing where tabs appear it's a really cool walkthrough try it, I can give you a link in person and as to the person who said that high school CS education sucks because they don't teach you to modify things talk with me afterwards, I want to get some grassroots products going to go to colleges and high schools and teach people that they actually can modify software thanks so I'm from Melbourne where I work there's a lot of people that are excited about the possibilities of iTunes U it's not really my area I don't really even know what it does but I'm wondering if there's some comments from people about the good thing from the Free Southwest because it's a bad thing, are there alternatives iTunes U is problematic I think even before you get to free software it's completely inaccessible the 508 compliance is entirely broken there what's really frustrating about this is for people that don't know Apple is once again very aggressively trying to hook people in the educational world on their tools and products iTunes U is a university-wide that provides universities a lot of free storage, actually not that much nowadays and the administrative tools to kind of get their multimedia up in a way that can be easily distributed to mobile devices and they also do a little bit of authentication integration which is useful for folks but even though they speak HTTP you cannot access the content using a standard browser so you can't easily get to it say from operating systems that don't run iTunes it's tricky there's no computers yet that I know of that can process the information inside of iTunes so I think it is situations like that especially in the cloud and software as a service that are beginning to threaten freedom in a lot of the ways that we're describing do other people have direct experience with iTunes or that was a pretty specific question yeah I think we should stop because we're running into maybe we can continue this discussion over lunchtime I would like to thank you for all your presentations thank you thank you once again and I hope to see all of you back after lunch enjoy your lunch thank you for your presentation