The gnu.org website has been enriched with a completely renewed
section on education, at http://www.gnu.org/education.
It all began in December 2008 at the "Free Software Free Society"
International Conference held in Trivandrum, India. During an informal
conversation with Richard Stallman and attendees at the event, the
topic of the role of free software in education was brought up and I
was asked to take up the task of working on the education section of
the Web site. As a free software advocate and a teacher, I always felt
that the GNU Project needed to address the subject specifically and in
depth, for it is in the education field that its ethical principles
find the most fertile ground for achieving the goal of building a
better society.
I joined gnu.org with a desire to do more than maintain the pages or
add schools and free educational programs to the existing lists. I
wanted to build a section structured so as to provide detailed
descriptions of schools that have chosen to include exclusively free
software in their curricula, and of free educational programs and
resources employed in schools. I also saw the need to provide room for
articles that would shed more light on the subject. The articles
within the section would have to be arranged in a clear scheme so as
to make it easy for visitors to find information.
"Case Studies" is the
place where we currently present cases of schools that are
successfully using and teaching free software. We talk about their
experience, the problems they encountered and how they solved them,
their motivations, the benefits they gained, and their involvement in
and contributions to free software. We do not attempt to build an
exhaustive database of schools committed to free software — that is
already being done on other Web sites. Instead, in this initial stage
we focus on schools whose motivations for the use of free software are
on the ethical side rather than centered solely on the technical or
economic advantages. We found a few cases, one of which is a school in
Argentina: an elementary teacher with limited technical skills managed
to get her school to migrate all computers to GNU/Linux by showing
decision makers at the school that the use of nonfree software was
in contrast with the moral values promoted by the
institution.
These cases are part of the data we gather during our observation
work. They serve as material for thought in our search for a method to
be presented as an educational model that will highlight the impact of
free software on society and will be effective to bring its values
into the education field.
We also intend to talk to schools that may not have completely grasped
the importance and the implications of teaching free software and its
ethical principles. We want to support and encourage them in all
possible ways.
"Educational
Resources" contains
educational free software as well as other resources such as free (as
in freedom) printed or digital educational materials, and institutions
that offer degree courses on the various aspects of free software. As
with schools, our aim is not to build exhaustive listings, but to
highlight instructive examples.
For educational free software, we report on specific programs that
show how software freedom benefits the educational process, with an
emphasis on the ethical implications of the use of technology. We base
our work on the philosophical grounds of the GNU Project.
A good example of a free program that we present is the case of Tux
Paint, used by a school in
India to teach students as young as eleven how to put into practice
the four freedoms, including freedom 1 — the freedom to study and
modify the program. This case
alone debunks
the myth that being a developer is a requirement to exercise software
freedom; it provides evidence that software freedom lives not in the
realm of abstract theories but can be exercised by all users,
including children.
In the "Education
Projects" subsection
we mention other groups around the world who are working in the
education field and share the principles of the GNU Project. Among
others, we mention the Free Software Foundation Europe Education
Project and IT@School, the Indian project from the government of
Kerala that migrated more than 2,600 public schools to free software.
The section also contains a FAQ
page, where we answer the
most common issues and questions that we receive; the Education Team
page, in which we present
in detail our goals, our motivations, and our positions; and a Table
of Contents for easy
reference.
On the main page, under the title "In
Depth", there is
a growing list of links to articles that we publish which go deeper
into the subject.
By no means do we consider our work finished. On the contrary, it is a
starting point. What we have done constitutes a solid foundation for
further work. We remain in close contact with people from India since
the work being done there in the education field is significant —
probably the most successful case in the world of free software
implementation on a large scale in schools is found in the state of
Kerala. There is also important progress in Latin America and in some
regions of Spain; we plan to work on those cases soon.
Many people ask us why we think it is important that educational
institutions use and teach free software. They wonder: "What does free
software have to do with education?" It is important to note that one
of the key concepts at the root of the free software movement is that
knowledge is a resource to be shared in freedom so that it can be
spread for the benefit of all. Similarly, the whole educational
process is based on the sharing and dissemination of knowledge; it is
not possible to educate where sharing is forbidden. As Richard
Stallman explains:
The source code and the methods of free software are part of human
knowledge. The mission of every school is to disseminate human
knowledge. Proprietary software is not part of human knowledge. It's
secret, restricted knowledge, which schools are not allowed to
disseminate. (From a speech at the University of Pavia, Italy, in
September 2007, when receiving an honorary degree in Engineering.)
So we would reverse the question: why would a school want to dishonor
its duty by bringing nonfree software to the classroom?
The education section thus tends to emphasize the political importance
of using and teaching free software and its positive impact on
society, a point of view which is shared by all members of the
Education Team:
Matteo Gamba is an Italian student of Mathematics at the University of
Turin. He came in contact with free software at high school during an
awareness program carried out by NGO
Hipatia. With other fellow students at the
school, he founded the group GURI to
promote the principles of the GNU Project and fight against the
growing practice of treating knowledge as property.
Matteo is an active member of Hipatia and currently working to
elaborate an educational method to transmit the social and ethical
values of free software to students. He says, "We need to elaborate a
new educational paradigm to get across to the students the social and
ethical values of free software."
Matias Croce is an Argentine student of Information Technology
Engineering at the National Technological University in the Province
of Mendoza. He first knew about free software at his Faculty and
became involved by joining local free software groups. He later
participated in the foundation of a project based at the
Faculty to promote free software. The
group organizes events in Mendoza, such as the FSD and
FLISoL, the largest free
software event in Latin America. Matias contributed the final
structure of the new section and the layout of its pages.
Leonardo Favario, an Italian student of Information Technology Engineering,
and Raghavendra Selvan, a lecturer in Bangalore who teaches Digital Image
Processing using GNU Octave, help with editing our videos.
I myself am of Italian descent born in Argentina and currently based
in Italy. I hold a BA in Education and a BA in Translation from the
Faculty of Languages of the National University of Córdoba, Argentina.
I also completed part of a course of study in Fine Arts at the same
university.
I had heard about the existence of a free operating system long ago,
but had never paid much attention to it due to my lack of interest in
pure technical matters. It was only in 2006, after watching the video
of a speech by Richard Stallman, that I understood there is actually
much more than just technical issues at the root of the free software
movement. I became aware of the importance of spreading the word about
software freedom and joined AsSoLi
and the Italian GNU Translators Team with that purpose in mind. With a
background in the Humanities and Arts, my interest is focused almost
exclusively on the philosophical and political aspects of free
software.
We invite people who share our goals and our views to join us. We need
help to spot special cases of schools and free programs, write
reports, talk to schools, edit and convert audio visual materials to
free formats, do graphic design, and more. Our contact address is
education@gnu.org.
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