Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » How open source changes education: 10 success stories

March 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)

How open source changes education: 10 success stories

TAGS: Open Source

Jimmy Atkinson over at OEDb sent me this story about how open source has changed education. The article goes well beyond open source to highlight open source-inspired or open source-esque projects like Project Gutenberg, MIT's OpenCourseWare work, Wikipedia, and others.

All of these things have changed the way I do my own personal "continuing education." I use Wikipedia a lot, despite its flaws. I use Project Gutenberg a lot, and wish more were there (our stupid near-perpetual copyright system keeps it confined to the classics, which is fine, except it keeps more recent classics like Steinbeck off the list).

In fact, I was helping one of my neighbors with his high school English paper, and it was surprising to me how we were doing research, compared to when I did my undergraduate work (early 90s). All of our sources were online. There was almost no need to open a "real book" at all. (And yes, he wrote the entire thing with OpenOffice, so we didn't even have to use tangible media to install a word processing application. :-)

The times', they are a'changin'. With the youth of the world growing up on open source and open source practices, what does this mean for proprietary software?

Posted by Matt Asay on March 4, 2007 09:11 PM

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