As soon as humans started to separate themselves from the natural world, they began to categorize, explain and ultimately try to influence the processes that they observed around them. Work by Steven Mithen launched a bit of a reinterpretation of Stone Age art. He catalogs many instances of spearthrowers, for example, carved with images of animals laying giant turds.
I consider myself a pioneer for introducing "turds" to educational technology blogging, by the way. And to use the word twice--I challenge you to find any blog that's done that before me. And the purpose of this turd (number three) was, Mithen believes, to help young hunters track their prey. Some form of knowledge was handed down through this medium of technology.
The Golden Bough, Sir. J. G. Frazer's seminal work, argued that the control of information, which really represented the ability to understand and influence the natural world, translated into political and religious power at that point in human history. And because there was so much that humans didn't know, and because so few of the explanations benefited from any kind of research or experimentation, everyday people saw magic and divinity where there was really just imagination. The god-kings--the Pharaohs and jerks like Gilgamesh--were able to marshal their entire populations into building monuments, many of which either depended on or expressed some astronomical understanding relevant to the civilization's food supply. The people had to work in order to please their king, in order to eat.
Let me switch gears for a moment.
I'm very impressed with the Open Source model. Do what you want, as long as you don't impede the continuing flow of the information through the community. A pioneering group of developers will release a piece of software. Once the community gets its hands on it, innovation bubbles like mad--very different from, say, Office or Windows. I, sitting in my office, can make a change to that wonderful courseware package known as
Moodle. My change, if it's stable and serves some need, may even become part of the canon. Hardly a "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" moment, but still pretty neat.
This is a vision of information exchange, not just a software distribution model. People work collaboratively in order to move forward. As the community adds to, say, Moodle's functionality--a blogging module, portfolios (I'd love to see that)--the software evolves. If you look at Blackboard or WebCT, however, you'll see that they respond to consumers based on the pressures of competition. No matter how much philosophy they spew, the last question when the doors close will always be: "How does this relate to revenue?"
I'll come clean. The Open Source packages that we use in my district--
PHP,
MySQL,
Moodle--run on Windows 2000 and IIS. I've played with Apache and Linux, but our network engineer is a Windows guy. I can understand his point of view. The Windows interface is easier, but let's not forget that competition with Apple made it that way. I saw
Pirates of Silicon Valley. I know.
So, I can't claim any sort of priesthood in the Church of Open Source. While I do a lot of programming in PHP, and can find my way around some other languages, I neither have the time nor the inclination to offer up my own changes to Moodle. I can only sit here and cry out for someone to please implement a portfolio module so that I don't have to wrestle
OSPI (even though it looks pretty good) into Windows.
But that's OK. No one really cares that I'm enjoying the fruits of Open Source without contributing to its coding. But I'm still contributing. As part of the community of users, I'm part of a voice that moves the software forward ("Portfolios, please ..."). I'm also part of the army of technical support. If you can't get Moodle to open your Word documents, I think I know why. Email me.
So, the community drives the development, distribution and technical support of the software. It's a fully democratized model. If you'd gone to Gilgamesh with the suggestion that he let the people of Ur weigh in on something once in a while instead of just letting him run around raping their daughters, you wouldn't have gotten far. But it would still have been a few centuries before society became complex enough for there to be a need to know things. Hammurabi's laws, for one, required literacy. Once people knew how to read, they had access to the real magic of the god-king's ritual. The god-kings planted the seeds of their own demise.
Alia iacta est.
Public education rose from the rubble of those palaces. A complex society in which everyone demands a voice requires that everyone know. One of the chief missions of a democratic government, then, is to educate its citizens so that they can function. Education, an arm of that government, must model the democratic process if it hopes to teach it.
And there's the reason to use Open Source technologies. Not just because they're free and have vibrant, supportive communities, but because the ethics of Open Source are the ethics that we should model in public schools.
Humans evolved from controlling the knowledge of the size and shape of an elk's turd (four) to the complete opposite extreme. Maybe even too far--we try to teach students everything that we can, as if they're going to be multi-headed gorgons. Chemists. Mathematicians. Historians. And on and on. But the arcana of information technology is growing complex and mystical, and we're not successfully teaching students to do exactly what Open Source is doing-- collect, share and develop information in a way that is equitable.
Democratization, then. Not with troops, Patriot Acts or limp second-term inaugural speeches, but with our heads. From the turd (five, and last), through an over-rated Athens, the
Magna Carta and blah, blah, blah, to the here and now--as the
Schoolhouse Rock kids used to sing, knowledge is power. We say that off-handedly, but information really does translate into economic power. Just as the god-kings controlled the formulae and processes that built the pyramids, the sacred knowledge of software is flowing into the hands of god-kings like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the latter of which has distinguished himself in making magic and mysticism of technology.
If schools participate in Open Source, then students see the ethical exchange of information and the responsible, collaborative development of a product. Not only see. Imagine a computer class in which students actually maintain and support an Open Source installation for their school. In addition, their homework is to contribute to the community of that project by answering questions on a forum, developing how-to manuals, or proposing (or even coding) modules. Like portfolios for Moodle. Please.
Students need to see a community devoted to open information. If they don't, their experimentations with social software are meaningless and self-centered. Devoid of learning. Students will be dependent on the tools and patterns that are given to them, rather than able to develop their own tools and patterns. Or, worse yet, they won't harness social software to its full potential. It'll just be social, and the line between lifelong learning and everyday living will grow thicker and thicker.
And, one day, the new god-kings will decide that no one eats until there's a pyramid.
