I was reading Dana Blankenhorn's blog on ZDNet about control being the real advantage of open source software. You can read the blog here. Dana does a great job of really putting it into simple terms: control over your applications and your budget. Simply put, do you want to be in control of your code and your costs?
In previous blogs, I talk about software vendors and their true motivation: selling more software licenses. I often tell people that Microsoft is a great alternative if you are an all Microsoft shop, but you had better plan on living within a well defined strategy that pulls you in and makes you prisoner to a well defined revenue generating upgrade path. I have always marveled at the Microsoft upgrade machine and how it pulls you down the path. Check out this timeline of the Windows OS only. It is simply amazing since pretty much every point on that timeline represents a software license bought by millions.
So when is K-12 education willing to take control? There are applications out there now that bear scrutiny for production use. A search on Sourceforge with the keyword education yields 267 education related projects. SchoolForge compiles lists of open source software and links to other sites that maintain lists. There are probably another 50 software titles in all of these sites. Point is, there are plenty of foundations out there now that a district can take and build out further.
Like I ask many districts, why aren't you trying open source? It is time to take control of your software and associated costs.
I want to revisit an earlier blog I wrote on open standards. I am always reading and learning whenever I possibly can. A recent book I read, Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, talks about standards and the advent of the Internet, This part of his 10 "flatteners" that he details in the book. I began to think about technology leaps and the Internet is one of those that really is amazing if you think about the short time of its existence. After Al Gore created the Internet and Netscape released its browser, our world and the way that we communicate, research, do business and so on has fundamentally changed.
I often like to ask people the question "When is the last time you composed a handwritten letter?" Email has become the defacto form of written communication for many of us and handwritten letters are a thing of the past. How many of you set up your bills to be paid automatically with your on-line banking service? How many of you buy things on-line from people in other countries? The list of ways the Internet has changed our lives goes on and on in numerous directions.
What has made this amazing transformation able to take place in such a short period of time? The answer may surprise you in its simplicity, but let me give you a layman's example first. When you go to the Home Depot, Lowe's or a local hardware store to buy a garden hose, do you ever think about having to buy a hose with a certain fitting for your specific faucet at your house? Should I get a 5/8 or 3/4 size fitting? Of course not! Why? Because faucets are produced in a STANDARD size. Instead of having to worry about a fitting size, you only concentrate on what you need the hose to do. You might need a soaker hose for your shrub bed. You might need a hose that retains its elasticity in cold climates since you live in the far North. You might need one of those hoses that rolls flat when all of the water is out of it to conserve space. What you don't need is different faucet fittings because they are all STANDARD.
Standards. Have you ever really thought about the Internet? Most of us double click our Internet Explorer icon, connect to the Internet and go about our business. We never think about what happens behind the scenes, but that is where the real power of standards emerges. Let's take a quick test:
1) What does HTTP stand for?
2) What does HTML stand for?
3) What does FTP stand for?
4) What does SMTP stand for?
5) What does TCP/IP stand for?
Answers
1)Hyper Text Trasnsport Protocol - This is the protocol that enables a web browser to parse a URL and take you to that destination2) Hyper text Markup Language - This is the standard lanuage that tells web browsers how to format the web page before presenting it to the end user.3) File Transfer Protocol - This enables the transfer of files from one computer to another. An example is uploading a video file to youtube.com4) Simple Mail Transfer Protocol - This is how email is exchanged. Post Ofice Protocol or POP is another email standard that allows you to get email from a mail server5) Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol - This is how the computers and routers move Internet traffic, which is really data packetsFive technology standards that have fundamentally changed the world in many ways. What if K-12 education chose to go the same path and adopt universal technology standards? What if K-12 chose to uniformly adopt the SCORM standards for managing instructional content? All vendors who produce instructional management systems and all publishers would have to adhere to the standard. So the focus would change from what is the best technology solution to what is simply the best solution. Much like garden hoses, districts would choose the best instructional management system without worrying about the technology or which publishers content was compatible with the instructional management system.
What about interoperability standards like SIF? What if school districts told all of their vendors that they were required to have SIF agents on their applications? I can guarantee you that the vendors would step up and produce SIF agents to be able to compete for the business. If standards can fundamentally change the world and its use of the Internet, why wouldn't K-12 education take the same path? I don't know the answer to this question, but would love your opinions.
Advocate open standards to your district technology leaders so that you have freedom of choice and not a vendor upgrade path. There are many open source applications that adhere to open standards that are widely used today that your district can employ as well. I recently asked someone how many computers they had in their district: 35,000. I then asked if they had Microsoft Office on every computer: Yes I then asked how much they paid per license: $15. Hmmmmm, let's see: $15 X 35,000 computers = $525,000. So then I asked why they weren't using Open Office, a open source, open standard office productivity suite: They didn't know about it, but when confronted with the idea, couldn't come up with a reason not to consider it.
I have always told people that Microsoft makes excellent products that are very well integrated, which is great if you are an all Microsoft shop. But one thing that you had to realize is that Microsoft is a software company. They exist solely to sell us software licenses in ever increasing amounts. So if you plan to be a Microsoft shop, plan on constant upgrades because that is what keeps Microsoft in business. But if you can return $525,000 to your operational budget by using a free office package that gets regular upgrades from its development community, why wouldn't you? When is good enough good enough for an industry that always screams we don't have enough money?
Open standards. Flexible infrastructure. Leverage your vendors instead of being restricted by your vendors. Be a pioneer and lead K-12 to its next transformation. Look at Brandon Elementary School in Atlanta and how they used the K-12 Linux Terminal Server Project, an open source solution, to decrease computer down time, increase life cycles of hardware, reuse older equipment and decrease costs associated with maintenance. What a great idea!
Open standards. Flexible infrastructure. Be a pioneer.
Working in K-12 is great for someone who likes to work on complex issues. For me, education truly represents a challenging public institution that is beset by bureaucracy, run under archaic rules, facing demanding state and federal legislation and, at times, plagued by individuals who have no business being in education. School boards are an especially sore spot for me since many representatives are elected and truly do not have the skills necessary to govern the business of a school district.
But within this challenging environment are a number of very bright people who are dedicated to helping find solutions to the many issues that confront K-12. One of the areas that is widely discussed is school reform or school improvement in support of student achievement. Many of these approaches are based on W. Edwards Deming's continuous improvement model and use an iterative repeating approach that can be described as Plan, Do, Check and Act. Several people have taken this approach and turned it into a repeatable methodology. The 8 Step Instructional Method was coined by Pat Davenport and Gerry Anderson at Brazosport ISD. Larry Lezotte has built an entire company around Effective Schools and Tom Guskey has built a Mastery of Learning method around Benjamin Bloom's work.
All of these methods are dependent on at least three universal items: good curriculum, effective instruction and sound instructional system design. While I have been knowledgeable of school reform and the many experts and companies around it, I was not familiar with the concept of Instructional System Design. That was until a friend of mine at Tetradata recommended a book to me: Fix Schools First: Blueprint for Achieving Learning Standards by Jack Bowsher, a former IBM VP in charge of corporate training.
In his book, Jack educates the reader on Instructional System Design (ISD), which is an approach developed by the military in WWII. In WWII, the military faced the task of taking thousands of untrained troops and having to get them trained very quickly on complex equipment and military tactics to be ready for battle. The system developed, ISD, was based largely on Robert Gagne's Conditions of Learning and the Nine Events of Instruction
Jack advocates the theory that everyone, except for the few such as severely disabled, can master curriculum content if effective ISD has been executed. Jack, like myself, is a proponent of curriculum standards, integrated curriculum, frequent assessment to determine mastery and required mastery of standards for advancement. Jack correctly presents an approach that is standardized and top down. Challenging curriculum standards are developed by government agencies, district directors of curriculum and instruction design a supporting curriculum with appropriate content, teachers are given the foundation of the curriculum and then personalize it for their classrooms, students are frequently assessed to determine mastery and specific professional development is given to teachers in support of their efforts.
Today, we see many teachers designing their own lesson plans and many districts with multiple curriculum's and differing curriculum resources. Teachers don't have the time to develop curriculum lesson plans and content and their time is better spent on delivering instruction effectively. And students who are highly mobile within their district, should not have to encounter a different curriculum or instructional calendar as they move to a different school. All lesson plans should have the same instructional approach and method to determine mastery. Common standards, common content and common assessment allow us to then use data to accurately measure and analyze our efforts to determine success.
ISD merits your attention if you have not learned about it yet. Gagne's 9 Events of Instruction are a practical approach designed for success that should be of value to any educator as well. Good ISD is a complex effort and should not be taken lightly, but rather well thought out and implemented to survive transition in leadership and district administration. Follow the links in the blog and explore these ideas. I believe they have foundation and can help you be successful in successful education for all students.
