Open Standards or Which Garden Hose Would You Like to Buy?

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 destination
2) 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.com
4) 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 server
5) Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol - This is how the computers and routers move Internet traffic, which is really data packets

Five 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.