Open Source has to be Easy

I was reading Chris Dawson's education blog on ZDNet as I do often. he had a recent post about Linux and meeting all of one's needs. This is very true and more than anything adds credence to my title. In order for any us to get people to switch to open source alternatives, we have to make it very easy. Much like Apple computers, it just has to simply work.

At OS4Ed, we are doing our best to emulate this practice. That is the reason we created an automated installation process so that non technical users could easily try our software. Eliminating upfront license fees, lowering total cost of ownership, 100% web-based, built on all free open source software doesn't mean anything if it is not easy.

How do we successfully move people over to open source? Make it so easy and so affordable that the decision is no brainer.

Intel Classmate PC - China, but not the US?

Intel has announced the release of its second generation Classmate PC at an event in China. We have closing schools, declining budgets and a well known gap between students and available technology in schools, yet our companies are selling low cost PC's everywhere else. Why isn't there a stronger push to get these low cost PC's into US schools? My guess is that profit is a motive.

But in the long run, the more students get exposed to technology, the more they become technology enthusiasts creating lifetime clients for the industry as well as future employees. M$FT is smart about this selling their software to education for next to nothing in many cases, thereby creating lifelong users at an early age.

Education has to push industry and ask for these things. Come on educators, you are smarter than this! Control your vendors, not vice versa.

Catholic Schools Closing at a Record Rate

A recent EdWeek article talks about the crisis facing Catholic schools and the closing of 1,300 schools since 1990. Budget issues are cited and I truly think that open source can play a major factor in all education as a way to replace costly commercial software that continues to eat away at instructional budgets. Where education is often a laggard in technology, this is an area where they need to be a leader and show others that open source alternatives are viable and force change among the traditional software vendors.

Education, stand up and flex your muscles! In many cities, you are often the largest employer with the largest budgets. You have the ability to enact change in the software market. You also have the ability to be leaders in helping open source companies like mine develop true alternatives to costly proprietary systems. Step up to the plate and help us give money back and sustain small faith based and independent schools that are doing great jobs in educating our children.

Open Solutions for Education

In the time since I left IBM, I have joined and invested in a small startup called Open Solutions for Education or OS4ED. ( http://os4ed.com) The mission of our little philanthropic venture is to produce quality open source alternatives to costly K-12 administrative software. The business model is like most open source models: Give it away for free and make your living from fees for maintenance services, training, customizations, etc.

Yesterday we released our new SIS, openCentre, and opened the demo site. I encourage you all to visit and try it out. The demo is located at http://demo.os4ed.com. You can log in using these credentials:

Administrator - User Name = admin, password=admin
Teacher - User Name=teacher, password=teacher
Parent - User Name=parent, password=parent

We also have an alpha version data warehouse and are set to release an add-on module for critical communications called EasyCom. We are excited about our efforts and hope you find our SW fits your needs. Enjoy!

Linux on the Desktop

I recently left IBM having been an education consultant for 7 years. During this time, I decided t make the full commitment to using Linux as a desktop. The Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 release has gotten generally good reviews for its ease of use, so I decided to give it a try.

My HW setup is a standard IBM Thinkpad T40 laptop that was a used purchase. It has the following specs:

• 80 GB HD (Western Digital)
• 1 GB RAM
• Intel Wireless Ethernet Adapter
• Broadcom Ethernet Adapter
• all of the other standard stuff like modem, USB, etc.

I downloaded Feisty Fawn and created a bootable disk using CD Burner XP, a free and really nice CD burning SW application. If you use this application, please donate some money to keep their effort going. This is a great example of the reasons why free SW works.

Onto the installation. I inserted the disk into my CD/DVD drive, connected an Ethernet cable and booted my laptop. I was offered some choices and after choosing the installation option, everything started as promised. Approximately 20-30 minutes later, I had a running installation of Ubuntu with the basic set of tools that I needed to accomplish my daily activities.

Nearly 30 days later, my laptop has never crashed and I have gotten the hang of getting apps or plug-ins using the command line options. All in all, I am quite pleased and am still only using this Linux based laptop for my everyday needs.

Free and Open Source Software

In my last post: It's Not About Free Software, It's About Control and TCO, I made an argument that a model based on software given away for free with all of its source code was not a sustainable model. In the post, I used the term FOSS and defined it incorrectly. My thanks to gnuosphere for pointing this out in a civil manner befitting an education discussion. Gnuosphere also provided this link to the GNU definition of FOSS.

So going back to the original post and altering the definition of FOSS, I think that the model of simply giving away open source software for free is not sustainable, particularly in situations where frequent and disparate updates are required, a situation very common in education. The post was simply a statement that the real benefits are the open nature, the control that exists because of that openness and the lower total cost of ownership that can return real dollars to the instructional budgets of schools.

Watch this video as an example of an Italian organization of schools that replaced Windows and M$FT Office with Linux and OpenOffice to realize a lower TCO with free OSS and lower maintenance fees. Sounds a lot like the model I proposed.

It's Not About Free Software, It's About Control and TCO

Often times when discussing open source software, you hear the term FOSS, which stands for Free Open Source Software. To me personally, FOSS is very idealistic and somewhat unrealistic. In case most people have forgotten, we live in a capitalistic society that rewards those who create wealth. Ultimately, we must provide necessities for ourselves such as food, clothing and shelter. Writing free software and then giving it away does not lend itself to a supportable model. Even considering the power of community and collaboration, it is likely that those two factors are not enough to sustain a long term model producing FOSS.

So where does that leave us? Paying customers of course that enable a philanthropic software model to exist over time with sustainable results. That is not a bad thing and the reality is that is the way successful open source software works now. In my lowly opinion, OSS is really about control and total cost of ownership, not free software. Let's look at these two items separately.

We will start with TCO because it is very easy. For the record, I will say that M$FT produces very good products and for those education organizations interested in an integrated environment, M$SFT fits the bill for them. The caveat is that M$FT is in business to sell software licenses and over time, a M$FT district will be forced to upgrade products and pay additional costs for those upgrades. Often times, this means a requisite hardware upgrade as well. Anybody say Vista? This can become very costly and in large districts the sums of money spent can be staggering. Take Broward County Schools that two years ago tried to get approval to spend $68M on Apple Computers. That is a chunk of change to say the least.

Or take the FLDOE's Sunshine Connection project where M$FT gave them the software for free and some services to implement as well. I think that the total value could be around $20 million supposedly. Did M$FT really give away $20M or did they secure a long term annuity stream of revenue? I recently read in a white paper somewhere that Sharepoint 2007 has certain functionalities that require Office 2007. In other words, to enjoy the full potential of Sharepoint 2007 you must acquire Office 2007. So let's do some simple math. I am going to assume that the state of Florida's education system has about 1 million computers. Let's say at some point in time, that the FL DOE forces everyone to do at least one thing in Sunshine Connections that requires Office 2007. Assuming a per desktop license fee of $25 for Office 2007, that comes out to $25 million and it seems that over the long haul, M$FT is really giving Sunshine Connections away for only $5 million. And as the years go by and more upgrades are required and profits rise, you begin to realize that M$FT simply made an investment in FL to drive an incredible revenue stream over time.

OSS presents a situation where schools and districts can begin to take control and manage TCO to their benefit. Let's consider Linux as a start and specifically, let's look at thin client technology. For our example, we are going to consider Brandon Elementary School in Atlanta, GA. Brandon had approximately 1-2 computers per classroom running Windows XP and was experiencing a myriad of problems with those computers. Because it was an elementary school, Brandon did not have the proper technical resources and depended upon two parents for maintenance of their computers. These poor souls were spending a great deal of their time fixing these computers and decided to look for an alternative. They found K12LTSP and decided to give it a try. Using equipment donated from local businesses, they built an environment of 35 K12LTSP servers that are now managing approximately 250 Linux thin clients. They have raised the average number of computers in the classroom from 2 to 6 and have 8 or 9 in some classrooms. The uptime has been amazing and they are using thin clients running on 350MHz processors. Businesses are throwing away computers with that kind of processing power and would willingly give them away to schools. You can read the entire article here. Bottom line, Brandon estimates that they have saved about 90% costs per computer. That is a lot of money. Here is the direct quote from the article:

"Having Linux on the desktop has been a shot in the arm for the school in many ways. Howard and Fragakis estimate that installing used hardware with a cost-free operating system saved Brandon Elementary 90% of what it would have cost to install Windows XP PCs, and that doesn't include savings on operational and support costs. But the biggest benefit can't be counted in dollars."

As the years go on and they don't spend money on new hardware or new software, the cost savings begin to skyrocket and you can see that the TCO picture gets prettier over time. A side benefit: Brandon's test scores have risen and were the highest in the district and third in the State of Georgia.

What about control? Let's look at student information systems and small school districts. For this case, we will examine PowerSchool. PowerSchool is a SIS that was developed by Apple and later sold to Pearson. Pearson owns many SIS offerings and currently has greater than 50% market share for this particular application. In the small school districts, it is the dominant player by far. How much does PowerSchool cost? Here is a recent offer: http://www.pearsonschoolsystems.com/email/files/PremierBundle030708.htm

For the low one time licensing fee of $28 per student, you can acquire PowerSchool for your district of 1,000 - 3,000 students. These fees include implementation services, which I am guessing is installing the software and making sure it is working correctly. I can pretty accurately guess that fee does include services like data conversion from your old SIS. You can have those services performed for you at what appears to be a fee of $225 based on the Apple price list for Arkansas from 2005. So I have 3,000 kids, which means I pay $84,000 to acquire the software, have it installed and make sure it is running correctly. Should I require any additional services for something like data conversion, that costs and additional $225 an hour plus travel. For our case, let's assume that we will need one resource for one month (160 hours) to successfully convert all of our data, validate that it is correct and turn off the old SIS, That now adds another $44,000 assuming $2,000 per week travel costs. Now I am up to $128,000 total so far. At the end of year 1, I have to pay maintenance. For our example, we are going to assume that our district has purchased the Premier bundle, which includes a SIF agent for PowerSchool. According to the AK price list, maintenance comes to about $8 per student adding another $24,000. I am also going to assume that the three days of included training is not enough and add one more week. According to the AK price list, that will cost me $1,595 per day X 5 days = $7,975. My grand total is now $159,975.

What if I went with an open source SIS? There are multiple efforts underway. Centre, SchoolTool and OpenAdmin are examples. Of all the ones out there, I would guess that Centre is the most mature and has the most traction. Since it is open source, I immediately eliminate my one time licensing fee of $84,000. Let's assume that maintenance and support are equal. I checked Centre and they sell state reporting modules for $2,500. I don't know what they charge for data conversion of customization services, but am going to assume a flat rate of $100 plus travel. Using our earlier metric of 160 hours that adds $24,000 to the total. For training, I will assume the same $100 X 8 hours per day X 5 days = $4,000. Our grand total now comes to $54,500 representing a cost savings of $105,475 or 66%.

Over time, I would invest some of that savings into training resources in the open source technologies so that I could make my own changes to the source code. I don't get PowerSchool's source code. As an example, my state changes its reporting requirements and I have to add a field of change a field. I can have my resources do that instead of paying Pearson $225 an hour to make those changes. Over time, since I have access to the source code and because I have invested in my resources making them proficient in these technologies, I might choose to give up maintenance and support further saving myself $24,000 a year. And because I don't use M$FT products, I am not forced to upgrade my operating system and hardware saving large amounts of money.

While I think OSS has a ways to go, a 66% savings argument is very compelling for a small school district with very limited funds. While I talked about specifically about thin clients and SIS, there are a multitude of products out there that can run much a school district's major functions. In addition to the SIS, there is:

• Moodle for Learning Management and On-line Courses
• OpenBiblio to manage your library
• A variety of open source portals to manage your web site (Joomla, DotNet Nuke, Websphere Community Edition from IBM)
• Mambo for content management
• OpenOffice or StarOffice
• Edubuntu

The list could go on for quite some time, but you get the idea. Are you ready for lower TCO and better control of your IT environment? Time to investigate OSS.

Open Solutions in Education? - Let's Do the Math!

I recently was told by a friend that works at a district that they have been looking at options to replace their homegrown SIS. They are a small district and so PowerSchool was a natural choice. Pearson, the new owners of PowerSchool, quoted them $28 per student just for the software and data templates. That didn't include any help converting their existing data, modifying business processes or working on change management. In fact, Pearson quoted $225 per hour to perform these types of services. I am not sure about your small district, but my friend's district could hardly afford to pay a vendor $225 an hour plus travel expenses.

It occurs to me, that districts, especially smaller ones, should be considering the many open source options that are out there today and being used. Do you need a student information system or data warehouse? Try Centre (http://www.miller-group.com). Do you need a learning management system that can deliver courses on-line? Try Moodle. (http://www.moodle.org) Going Linux? Try the latest distribution of Edubuntu, based on the new Feisty Fawn release of Ubuntu. It comes pre-loaded with education specific software (http://www.edubuntu.org). How about a libary solution? Try OpenBiblio. (http://obiblio.sourceforge.net) How about Linux thin clients? Try K12LTSP (http://www.k12ltsp.org) You can use old PC's (remember those PC's businesses try to give you? Hint, Hint.) or buy brand new pre-configured clients for about $200.

The fact is, that for those districts that are willing to be pioneers and accept a few occasional bugs or forego some functionality for a period of time, open source solutions are coming into their own and maturing to a point where districts should consider using them in critical situations.

Many people always say get open source because it is free. That is not true and it is misleading. Open source must be supported and there are costs associated with that support. Open source often needs customization and there are costs associated with that effort. (Usually not $225 per hour). But over time, the total cost of ownership (TCO) tends to be far lower than that of a commercial alternative.

There are also the associated costs that can go away as well. Going open source can remove these licensing costs: (these are estimates only)

Windows Operating System - $50
Microsoft Office - $50 (use OpenOffice)
Windows Server - $2500 per server
Exchange Email - no idea but will guess $2,500 (use Zimbra. Comcast thinks Zimbra is good enough for its 12 million clients)
Microsoft SQL Server - $2,000 per server (use MySQL or PostgreSQL)
Many more could be listed.....

The real difference in open source is the word open. You get the source code and when you train people with the skills to modify the code, you have the flexibility that a commercial vendor takes away from you. State department changes a data collection requirement and you have PowerSchool? Guess what? $225 an hour to make the customization to fulfill the new requirement. You have an open source SIS? Only the cost of your IT guy and a fix in place much faster in most cases.

Open also means that your solutions can run on older HW, which can be a huge cost savings. I asked a friend in a large district how many PC's they had and he said about 35,000. I asked him if he had ever heard of OpenOffice. He said no, so I showed it to him and he was impressed that a free product had that many features. Let's do the math: 35,000 X $50 (M$FT Office license fee) = $1,750,000. So let's see at an average salary of $45,000 plus benefits, which probably comes to around $60,000, that buys me a teacher that is completely paid for for the next 20+ years assuming some raises along the way. By the way, that district must pay licensing every year for that M$FT software, so every year I add a new teacher that is paid for for the next 20+ years.

Also, by being able to use older HW, I can avoid the HW refresh cycles that are driven by new commercial products. Can you run Vista on your current desktop or laptop? Ummm, probably not and that is why HW vedors love M$FT. Imagine avoiding one HW refresh cycle for 10,000 computers like my friend just did. 10,000 X 1,000 = $10,000,000, which buys me 166 teachers for 8 years.

I can go on and on with numerous examples like this, but you should have the idea by now. Perhaps open source is worth a look.

Challenge Me Please!

Why isn't there somebody out there challenging the basic notion of having to pay high prices for administrative school software? It seems to me that with the budgetary pressures facing school districts, that some company will surface and provide quality open source software that can be supported and maintained for far less than the commercial alternatives. Why isn't it happening?

Am I way off base? Somebody challenge me and let's get a useful debate going on how we shift K-12 to an open source community software industry. Education is a collaborative community anyway on many other things. Why not open source software?

Open Source in Use at K-12 Districts

I recently wrote a post discussing the slow rate of adoption of open source alternatives in K-12. For this post, I thought I would give some examples of actual districts using open source alternatives in their districts as business as usual. Let's start with Plano ISD in Texas.

Plano ISD is actively researching and using open source software. Since 2000, they have been building and converting on-line courses to the Moodle open source course management application. For graphical work, Plano has rolled out Gimp, an open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop. They are using Open Office and WordPress, an open source blog tool and weblog platform. In the back office area, Plano is using Linux in its server farms. You can read more about Plano ISD and its use of open source in this interview done with Jim Hirsch, the CIO.

Saugus Union School District located in the Santa Clarita Valley in Northern Los Angeles County decided to move to Linux as they encountered dwindling support from some of their application providers for the Novell platform. Saugus has become a case study for the CoSN open technology initiative. Saugus has converted 9 critical network related applications to open source alternatives and arer realizing multiple benefits including lower TCO, easier maintenance and better efficiency. You can read the case study here.

The State of Indiana is another example rolling out Linux desktops across the state. I spoke with Mike Huffman about it at the CoSN conference and what used to be minimal interest is now turning into majority interest with vendors coming from around the country to see it in action. You can read more detail about this effort here.

While adoption of open source is moving slowly in K-12, there leaders who are taking the first steps and realizing the potential of open source and the collaborative community model. If any industry can truly benefit from open source, it is K-12 education. If you are an educator, have you investigated open source? Try some of these links to popular open source web websites:

The Open CD - A project capturing quality open source applications and distributing them to interested organizations (http://www.theopencd.org/)

Moodle - Open source course management solution in widespread use around the world (http://www.moodle.org)

Open Office - A Microsoft Office like free productivity suite containing all of the same basic applications, and more, as MS Office. It is absolutely free and it absolutely works. I use it everyday. (http://www.openoffice.org)

Edubuntu - From the makers of Ubuntu, one of the easiest to install and use versions of Linux, comes an education specific version of Linux. It is excellent and easy for non-technical people to get installed and running. (http://www.edubuntu.org/).

Open Source Alternatives - A great website that allows you to find open source alternatives to popular commercial products. Includes links to the sites where you can get the open source software. (http://www.osalt.com)

School Forge - A Source Forge like site collecting open source software information specific to education. (http://www.schoolforge.net).

What is Holding Up Open Source in K-12?

I use MySQL to develop personal projects in my spare time. It is an easy database to install and manage and its performance is great. In fact, in some recent testing, MySQL outperformed Oracle. I was interested in the customer base for MySQL, so I checked out their customer page and was very impressed with the list of known clients across almost all industries.

I did some research and found a Forrester report on open source projects. Listed as the leading projects with clear development road maps, strong infrastructure and mature technology were MySQL, Eclipse. Apache HTTP Server. Apache Tomcat Application Server, LAMP and PHP. Most of these products are in critical application use around the world. Apache HTTP server runs about 2/3 of the world's web sites.

So why is K-12 education not adopting open source technologies? Look at the benefits:

• no license costs
• lower maintenance and support costs
• access to all the source code
• ability to be flexible with applications and make them specific to your needs
• open standards allow integration with other software
• the user is now in charge and not subject to recurring software upgrade cycles, which can also mean hardware upgrades

I often hear that "we don't have the skill sets", "our resources don't know these technologies", etc. What I don't hear is sound reasoning like "if I spend $5,000 and get this individual trained in these technologies, I can replace this application that costs me $5,000 in maintenance and support every year and requires me to do upgrades to get additional functionality further locking me into a proprietary model.

I would encourage districts and schools to "experiment" with small, non-critical applications to get their feet wet and explore the possibility of open source as an alternative. I think you will find that it definitely holds potential. Try a web-based form to collect some information, or a simple database application to try it out.

Open source is gaining in viability and those districts that do not begin to harness the potential will continue to spend valuable operating dollars that could be going to instructional resources.

Noodling on Moodle

I am deeply interested in open source and opens standard applications for the K-12 market. Having been an implementer of many different commercial software packages, I am amazed at the large amounts of money that schools and districts are paying for administrative software that is often times simply not good.

I remember the time very clearly when I was evaluating a student information system (SIS) and entered negative test scores, erroneous data such as letters in a numeric field and the SIS simply accepted the entries. I am sure that there could be some customization, but that would likely cost additional implementation dollars that this market can hardly afford.

Thus open source alternatives. Previously I have written about Centre, a young open source alternative to the commercial SIS systems. Today I want to talk about Moodle, an open source Course Management System (CMS). Moodle has over 150,000 registered users and documented over 20,000 sites using Moodle. There are 38 sites that serve 20,000 users or more and one that serves over 42,000. There are 35 certified Moodle partners that provide support and training services for schools and districts that use Moodle. Most of them offer customized development services as well.

It boggles my mind, that a proven open source system in use at over 20,000 places around the world has not achieved a strong foothold in the U.S. If a Moodle implementation can serve 42,000 users successfully, is can provide course management services for over 10,000 U.S. school districts and it is completely free.

Moodle for Windows is distributed in XAMMP, a great package combining Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and PHP, the base components required to run Moodle as well as other open source applications. It has a wizard driven install and a nice control panel like feature that makes for easy management.

Moodle also has a free course exchange where users from all over the world post courses that can be directly imported into Moodle. This truly the desired state of community software and one that is specifically targeted at K-12 education. Moodle has been successful for a number of reasons, but primarily because of the dedication of Martin Dougiamas, the creator of Moodle. Martin's unswerving dedication to Moodle is the reason for its success.

Like most successful open source software, Moodle has a community of developers continually adding modules and plug ins that can be downloaded for free from the Moodle.org site. The continuing growth of the community is ensured by a central organization that continues to support and develop the product. It is an example of how community based software can work.

So, why are you paying all of that money for commercial CMS?

K-12 - An Old Idea Whose Time Has Gone

K-12. A progression through a defined set of grades marking a student's progress towards higher education and eventual entry into the work force as a well educated individual ready to contribute to society. What does 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade mean? Some definition of a level typically associated with age that defines a student's progress. Does grade indicate mastery of content or standards?

Here is a radical idea: Eliminate grades and report progress solely on mastery of standards. Define a set of challenging curriculum standards that all students must master and then measure students on their progress of mastery. Forget grades and forget the defined school year. Facilitate student centered learning and anytime anywhere learning. If children want to advance faster than their peers then let them. If they want to study from home at odd hours, then let them.

Grade levels, high stakes assessments. the traditional school are all "old school" thinking. If I hire someone, I am looking for an individual that demonstrates a set of skills that they have mastered. Kids should learn based on a set of defined "skills aka standards". Progress should be reported as mastery of standards, not grades. High stakes assessments should be replaced with formative and summative assessments that measure progress frequently and in smaller chunks.

The concept of a a school and the process of learning needs to be reexamined. Perhaps K-12 is an idea whose time has gone. Perhaps the future report card will read: "Johnny has mastered 50% of his elementary and secondary education standards and is on track to complete those standards at age 16."

No Child Left Behind - The New Version

A little over 5 years ago, President Bush signed into law the legislative act of No Child Left Behind or NCLB. Arguably, it was a fundamentally flawed piece of legislation from the beginning and doomed to be rewritten, but credit should be given that someone took a stand against a system that is failing many of it students.

What we understand now, and many of us understood then, that the reliance on a single measure of high stakes test results was far too simple. Micahel Pitrelli, former assistant deputy secretary who helped draft the law, recently said the the legislation should be scrapped in favor of multiple variables that measure success. Pitrelli also recommends national standards and a national test in a recent Education Gadfly article. Wow, what an idea, national standards. I have written about standards in many previous posts and am still amazed that people just don't get the power of common standards.

Other things that I don't understand about the US DOE is why don't they push things that really contribute to student achievement? Mastery of Learning, good Instructional System
Design, quality conditions of learning and so on. Thomas Guskey in Implementing Mastery of Learning, clearly outlines a fairly bullet proof approach to ensuring student achievement. It ties in with Benjamin Bloom's theories that all children can learn, just at different paces. Jack Bowsher outlines an approach to sound Instructional System Design in Fix Schools First, an interesting book with some very sound methods. And I never seem to hear much from the US DOE about principles of sound instructional design, an approach that Robert Gagne developed near the end of WWII.

Often times, we look to measure the problem instead of examining why the problem is occurring in the first place. A high stakes assessment measures and reports the success or failure of the classroom. Knowing that the great majority of a student's achievement, or lack of, is determined by the classroom experience, why aren't we focusing on the classroom setting, professional development for teachers, a national standard integrated curriculum, standards for curriculum content, mastery of standards and technologies that are applicable to the way our students learn today?

One thing is for sure, NCLB will change and districts will have to change the way they collect and report data. How flexible are your systems and how easily will you be able to adapt? Software vendors are very hungry for these types of changes because they mean new versions, new license sales and more money. Consider open source and open standard solutions that allow you to control your environment and keep your operational budget dollars to put back into the classroom where learning happens.

Who Should be in Control?

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.

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.

Instructional System Design

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.

Open Standards

There is always talk about open source technologies and how they will become the Microsoft killers.  How Linux will ultimately defeat Windows in the desktop environment as people begin to get the open source concept, the skills develop and the ROI and TCO issues are fully fleshed out.  It may happen; it just isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

I think a better discussion is around open standards.  In the education world, there are many standards bodies that work diligently to create standards of interoperability, classification, taxonomy, etc.  SIF, SCORM, IMS, Dublin Core are examples of standards bodies that have made good progress and actually have fairly mature standards that are open to the general public.

While standards have had a slow go of it, especially in the U.S., recent events suggest that they may be gaining traction.  Language around SIF is being seen in many RFP’s issued by educational agencies.  The USDOE’s national technology plan even calls for it directly. Instructional management systems are aligning to SCORM and IMS as a method to classify and distribute content. Digital learning objects, just in their infancy, are beginning to see standards that are applicable in the Dublin Core and SCORM that make their use a practical reality.

Industry vendors are also showing some surprising moves. Microsoft recently capitulated and opened up its Office document formats.  Microsoft is also aligning its educational software to these recognized standards as well.  Independent vendors providing education solutions and products are jumping on the bandwagon as well.  All are good signs that we are moving towards an environment of a K-12 ecosystem or what many refer to as a services oriented architecture.

Let’s face it: There is no one vendor or system out there that has all of the best products or solutions for the education space.  It is a highly fractured marketplace with many niche vendors providing many different products and solutions that all fit different needs.  Some are open source, many are built on Microsoft technologies and there are some being built in the J2EE environments.  Different operating systems, different architectures and different communication systems all guarantee that we will likely never see true interoperability between vendor applications in my lifetime.

But we should be able to get everyone to agree on a set of standards that all products can adhere to for classification of education data points.  Why should we be able to do that?  It offers real benefits for both education clients and vendors.  It gives clients the ability to build an infrastructure around standards, not proprietary technologies.  It allows clients to choose products and solutions based on their merits, not their technology or fit with existing systems.

For vendors, the competition then focuses on the product or solution itself, not the technology.  The real competition becomes focused on the capabilities of the product, the ease of use, the fit to the needs of the industry, etc.  Vendors make better products and clients get more flexible service oriented architectures and they both win in the end.  An important point here is that the vendor with the best products wins.  When you implement standards, the technology platform becomes a consumer choice.  Who cares if it is open source, Microsoft, Linux or Unix?  It doesn’t matter because the technology uses the standards to talk to other technologies.  The clients will buy according to their needs, their skills and their budgets.  The real battle then comes down to who has the best product that most closely fits the client needs.

So how do we get open standards moving at an accelerated pace?  I don’t think that we can continue to rely on the process in place today. There needs to be some investment and direction from a larger body that can help propel the process forward.  I think that some steps have to be taken to set the stage.  Almost all states and districts are now incorporating curriculum standards into their educational processes.  These standards need to be merged together into a set of national curriculum standards that represent a challenging curriculum for students.

With a national set of standards, standards for the classification and sequencing of digital learning objects can be finalized, standards for the classification of instructional content can be finalized, standards for benchmark assessments can be finalized and a schema based on an open communication standard, such as XML, can be developed and adopted by all.  This isn’t going to happen in today’s environment without some assistance and intervention from national organizations.  ISTE, CoSN, SETDA, CCSSO, national education bodies and the USDOE are all going to have make a rallying cry and begin to demand of vendors that standards be developed and adhered to within their products.  We also will need investment in the form of grants.

Only then will we see progress being made that truly supports our most precious resource, children, and our economic future in the years ahead.

Losing My Laptop and Returning Time to the Classroom

I work in technology, I thrive on technology and more importantly I depend on technology.  I recently had a hard drive crash on my laptop and lost my operating system.  I actually back things up, so I didn’t lose my important documents and items critical to my existence and work functions.

I tried to reinstall Windows but could never get it to boot up and had to get a new hard drive and Windows image.  While I was waiting on that to happen, I installed a Linux image that my company is developing.  With a little trial and error here and there, I managed to get the Linux image installed and up and running.  Everything worked OK for the most part, but I couldn’t get many of my critical needs satisfied for a variety of reasons.

I learned a couple of lessons during this time:

1. Linux and Open Source are not ready for prime time.  By prime time, I mean the average Joe.


2. For all of this talk about Windows and monopoly and poor product development, it functions like it is supposed to the majority of the time I am using it.  That is worth more money to me.


3. There are times when I need to put away my technology for a little while and get back to old fashioned ways.

It is point #3 that I want to talk about.  I am in Education sales for the K-12 market.  I found out that I was not going to die without my laptop.  And then this morning, I read this article on Wired today: The Dark Underbelly of Technology.  Tony Long talks about how technology was supposed to make our lives easier, but instead it seems to make us work more.  Take me as an example of the ever connected, ever working person.  I have a Blackberry cell phone and PDA, I have a laptop with wireless, I have a Wi-Fi card for my laptop and I have a Bluetooth earpiece.  There isn’t anytime during the day that I can’t get connected to the Internet in one way or another.  There also isn’t anytime during the day that someone can’t get in touch with me. Having the earpiece allows me to work while doing other things, like washing dishes, and the mute is a powerful function.  I have washed a lot of clothes and done a great deal of cleaning house during conference calls.

Where I am heading with this is that technology is a tool, not a replacement.  It can’t replace good old fashioned teaching.  The greatest impact on student achievement occurs in the classroom. Technology purchases that apply to and/or affect teachers should fill these basic requisites:

1. They should return time to the classroom by reducing administrative tasks and making a teacher’s life easier


2. They should enable, enhance or assist the instructional process, not replace it or parts of it.


3. Professional development must accompany the new technology to enable the teacher to fully use the technology to accomplish 1 and 2 above.

Don’t get squashed by the dark underbelly of technology.  Make sensible choices that support the classroom teacher and don’t buy the next generation product if it can’t demonstrate positive results that return time to the classroom and help teachers.

And every now and then, put down your technology and go the old fashioned way.  It can be refreshing and release creativity that was held back by dependency on technology…..

Can Data Warehouse be a COTS Solution?

Data-driven decision making has become quite the buzz word in education the past few years. What exactly is a data warehouse? Typically, a data warehouse is a central repository of data that enables longitudinal reporting across a time dimension. Such a repository would be able to answer a question like: "How are my students performing on the CRCT from year to year?" or "Are my district test scores increasing year to year for each of my demographic subgroups?"

Customized off the Shelf (COTS) solutions are just that: Software products that can be customized to meet a client's specific needs or unique characteristics. I don't think that anyone will argue that every district has specific names for things, specific measures of success and specific business rules around data. One thing I don't think that anyone will argue about either, is that for the most parts all districts use the same basic set of data to deliver required reporting to state and federal agencies.

For the longest time, vendors have approached education data warehouse efforts as custom engagements that require a different design every time. But is that really the case? Let's take the case of NCLB reporting as an example. All districts have to report from the same basic set of data to determine Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Districts are required to record and report the progress of different subgroups of students as defined by performance on certain high-stakes tests. This information must be reported at the school level since AYP is a school level measure.

If this is the case, for a specific test, can we not build a solution that uses a pre-defined set of data and deliver that solution to multiple districts? There is some customization that is necessary. Different states have different tests, so customization is necessary as you move from state to state, but that customization is minimal. Different states have a different AYP figure, some for a particular year of a range that must be achieved over a range of years, such as three. So there is another customization, but still we are using the same basic data set: Student, school and test data to deliver the required information.

Test vary greatly you say and this is not a trivial effort. Perhaps not trivial, but not complex either. Tests are primarily criterion reference or norm reference and the general structures are replicable from one test to another. AYP rules are vastly different and would require intense effort you say. Not true either I argue, because for all states there is a measure or a single data point for achievement for a single year or multiple years. There may be multiple data points within a range of years, but it is still a data point.

Granted, there are other customizations that have to occur, but I think that vendors can build and sell an entry level data warehouse solution that is low cost and delivers the functional reporting requirements that most districts have today with minimal customization. I would argue that there are several vendors who can deliver a near off the shelf package today, if districts would buy it. Would they? The fact that there is not a COTS solution out there today suggests that this idea may not be a good one. Or is that the vendors make more money delivering customized proprietary solutions that offer different values to different audiences? The real money is made off of customization. So why wouldn't you create a loss leader that fuels the appetite for information? Give them their basic reporting needs and then let them pay you for district specific reporting needs.

Many districts have reporting needs and wants far beyond the required reporting. Again, most of these reporting needs are dependent upon a set of data that all districts collect in their administrative systems. Vendors in the market have modeled and implemented other areas or reporting as well. All of the major vendors have deployed solutions that report on HR, Finance, Programs and Services, Food and Nutrition, etc. I would again argue that many of these could be transformed into COTS-like solutions with minimal effort.

And why would districts want to host and maintain their own solutions? Let vendors build an on-demand (to borrow IBM's terms) system that allows districts pay a per student or teacher fee to use. Total cost of ownership would be lower for most, if not all districts, and the level of service and availability would likely be better as well.

I am sure my argument has holes, but I think it also has merit. Poke some holes in it for me and let's figure how to deliver real value at a low cost to districts across America. Save them some money and redirect time and money to the classroom where the real impact on student achievement occurs.