Open Source in Education Conference

I'm at the Open Source in Education Conference, in Heerlen. The conference was opened this morning by Fred de Vries, who talked about open source moving from research and development oriented projects to deployment oriented projects. He also discussed the fact that while the sceptics see open source as a short-lived bubble of amateurish activity, it allows individuals and institutions to direct their own innovation and for the educational community as a whole to adapt ICT to education, rather than having to adapt education to ICT.

He was followed by Graham Attwell (an ex-historian) who painted open source as an industrial revolution, and noted that education was being as slow to adapt to open source as it had been to previous industrial revolutions. He focused on open source as a tool for pedagogical choice and finished by noting that "If the medium is the message then learners need to be given control of the medium."

Graham was followed by Alexandra Tödt who discussed open source communities as biological systems and spoke of the World Bank's ICT work, which is coming out as very strongly pro open standards.

Next up was Stephen Downes, who I found a little disappointing. As a professional philosopher he probably cannot be blamed for being utopian, but when addressing a gathering of geeks, it was a little disappointing to find his utopia predicated first and foremost on a radically different method of distributing resources in education and only then got to the technically interesting bits. He did hit at least one nail on the head---his insistence that we work with learning content editors rather than mere players.