Microsoft Teaches Pupils About Lock-in

I'm amazed Microsoft hasn't done this before:

Microsoft's Education Labs launched a new project this afternoon and it's better on trees and the environment. The group just announced a new Math Worksheet Generator where teachers can generate math problems and email them in paperless Word format to their students. In addition to Math Worksheet Generator, the group also announced plans for two additional projects to be released in the Fall.

Hard-pressed teachers will love this - and won't even notice that they are being turned into a vector for lock-in to Word (not that they aren't already). I predict we'll be seeing much more of this content-driven approach, whereby Microsoft makes people offers they can't refuse...provide they take King Billy's shilling.

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Open Source Schools

I've often lamented the lack of uptake of open source in schools. Here's a site that's trying to do something about it, called, logically enough, Open Source Schools:

The Schools Open Source Project is an initiative to help schools with awareness, adoption, deployment, use and ongoing development of Open Source Software (OSS). A number of schools are already realising the benefits of OSS within their ICT strategy. This project will work to share their experiences along with good OSS practice from other sectors with the wider community of educational practitioners, including teachers, decision makers and IT specialists.

(Via SolidOffice.)

Open Source Education

The Guardian has a story entitled "The open source approach to education". It's about a report on the same from Futurelab, and while there's nothing really new there, it's nonetheless good to see the usual memes being spread about a bit in new contexts:

It is also possible to conceive of young people or teachers working together as programmers to create new resources and tools that are of relevance to them in supporting their own learning. These approaches go beyond the traditional distinction between 'users' and 'producers' of educational resources, instead, they offer models of innovation in which these communities are intermingled, the notion of ownership is changed and the economical model of cost and reward is reworked. These new hybrid models of innovation that FLOSS exemplifies require us to ask what models of ownership we might need to develop; what mechanisms might need to be put in place to encourage exchange between sectors; what role users of educational resources might play in the creation of resources; and what business models would need developing to allow further exploration in this area.

One Laptop Per Child: Pedagogically Suspect?

I've been a little dismissive of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, but having read LWN.net's fascinating interview with Jim Getty, the Vice President of Software, I have become more impressed with what it is trying to do, and how it is trying to do it.

Unfortunately, it seems that the Indian Ministry of Education does not share my new-found enthusiasm. According to Heise Online:

The Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD), the country's ministry of education, has rejected the suggestion made by the country's Planning Commission to take part in the "One Laptop per Child" (OLPC) program. In a letter sent to the Planning Commission last month Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee of the Ministry of Human Resource Development stated that the case for giving a computer to every single child was "pedagogically suspect." This the Indian daily The Hindu reports. "It may actually be detrimental to the growth of creative and analytical abilities of the child," the secretary added. Classrooms and teachers were more urgently needed than "fancy tools," the Education Secretary went on to say.

It's a fair point, and a concern that research will need to show is unfounded when the first deliveries of the laptops take place next year (assuming they do).