Becta meeting at Coventry Technocentre, 31st May 2006
From Schoolforge-UK
Please use this page to publish further notes about the Becta meeting.
The meeting Agenda can be downloaded here (PDF)
The meeting was attended by some 45-50 participants, representing Becta, Schoolforge-UK, Open Source Consortium, Open Forum Europe, OSS Watch and UKUUG.
Ian Lynch's White Paper prepared for this meeting can be downloaded from here (PDF).
Iain Roberts of the Open Source Consortium has prepared a 4-page summary of Ian's paper. (PDF)
Miles Berry has written some notes about the day on his blog.
Discussions have been taking place on the Schoolforge-UK Discussion Group and the OSC's Membership list about support for schools considering Moodle. In fact Schoolforge already has a number of Resources that address suggestions made at the meeting.
Contents |
Introduction
The meeting was opened by Dr Stephen Lucey, Becta's Executive Director for Educational Technology, who stressed the importance being given to FLOSS by the Becta's Chairman, Andrew Pinder. There followed a brief review of the structure of Becta's Functional Specifications. For me, the most telling statement was quite bluntly: "A step change is needed because the present situation is unsustainable".
Stephen Lucey's presence throughout the day, along with a number of Becta's senior staff, indicated the importance they now place upon FLOSS
Each representative of the other organisations atttending the meeting then spoke for 15 minutes or so. Mark Taylor outlined how companies forming the Open Source Consortium are placed to support FLOSS. Mike Banahan of Open Forum Europe mentioned some of large IT businesses that work through OFE.
Ian Lynch introduced his White Paper (see above) and stressed it is a collaborative "work in progress" with input from a number of people.
Sustainability of FLOSS
There followed a wide-ranging discussion with contributions from many participants.
A valuable contribution was made by the head teacher of a school that is adopting FLOSS, who said that, while the initial impetus for change had been financial, the real benefits are found to be (in order of importance):
- Provision of good educational opportunities
- Delivery of efficient systems with high quality technical support
- Value for money
Niel McClean of Becta pointed out that, whether we like it or not, those now running education see things in terms of markets, so FLOSS can only make headway by engaging in the educational market place. This goes a long way to explain why Becta and the DfES don't appear to "get" what Open Source is all about.
Lunch
Lunch provided an opportunity for participants to mingle together and talk less formally.
Practical strategies to develop the use of FLOSS
After lunch, each table was joined by a member of Becta's staff who facilitated the separate discussions on practical steps for developing the use of FLOSS in schools.
Table 1
I was fortunate in being at the table with the head teacher mentioned above, along with Mark Taylor and other representatives from Schoolforge-UK and OSC. Our discussion was facilitated by Niel McClean. We agreed that change requires three components: 1) Dissatisfaction with the status quo, 2) a vision of what could be, and 3) practical resources for achieving the vision.
Dissatisfaction is evident from Stephen Lucy's opening remarks, as well as the state of IT in many schools. It was explained how the technologies of Linux thin clients and Virtualisation enable both proprietary and free operating systems to run on student workstations "at the flick of a switch", with substantially lower costs.
Vision is provided by the evidence of the head teacher's remarks. mentioned above. For example, adopting FLOSS provided opportunities to fulfil the obligatory 5 days that secondary pupils must spend on "Enterprise and Work-Related Learning". Our discussion showed clearly how these opportunities follow directly from the "Four Freedoms" of Open Source:
- the freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
- the freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
- the freedom to redistribute copies
- the freedom to improve the program, and release improvements so that the whole community benefits
Resources - we listed several ways in which knowledge of Open Source could be disseminated for relatively little cost, through Becta's web site and "Live CD's" with educational software. Case studies and a Catalogue of Open Source software (such as we have on this site) are of value.
Each table presented a summary of their discussion, but I felt that our discussion had most clearly articulated the rationale for adopting FLOSS.
Table 2
Table 2 came up with three themes for progressing OSS in the education arena: spreading the word; levelling the playing field; and establishing collaborative working initiatives.
Spreading the word about what open source and freeware are:
a. This could be achieved through the use of case studies to show successful systems. These would need to carefully describe the value added by OSS and also what the implementation means to the different users/stakeholders e.g. pupil, teacher, administrator, manager, governor.
b. Create a central place to record research – a “community of practice” – so that discussions can take place as well as simply seeing the outcomes. This would support other schools/agencies taking the first step.
Level the playing field – but be careful of the definition of what this means and to whom:
a. This discussion centred on getting OSS promoted through a set of core features of software that schools really need and listing all software that presents these to the school – so that schools can make fair comparisons between solutions they want.
b. Possible accreditation/approval by Becta of software to achieve the principles above and/or Becta evaluation service of good software.
Collaborative working initiatives
These could be led by regional sponsored models e.g. SSAT ICT register schools to enable pupils to work together. Participants in the discussion were keen on the national and international potential of this model. This would also support the citizenship agenda, enhance entrepreneurial skills, IT skills and the ethos of the open source community.
Table 3
The discussion from Table 3 focussed on the idea of establishing a working group of community and industry (including SUN, IBM, Microsoft etc.) and led by Becta to look at ways of promoting open source to schools.
This group could examine what is wrong with the current situation and provide examples of where open source can solve existing problems and transform learning and teaching by increasing self-motivation, collaboration, foster community and aid regeneration.
A number of practical strategies were then discussed that could be used to progress take-up of OSS in education:
a. Learn from other countries, e.g. Extremadura
b. Share best practice by publishing case studies etc.
c. Produce a simple get started plan to instil confidence in users by changing in incremental steps: introduce Firefox, then Open Office, then other applications as confidence grows.
d. Launch an awareness raising PR campaign. Garner support from Mozilla and SUN etc. Have a 3 month consistent push including TES and BBC click online coverage.
e. Publish a best of breed software catalogue.
f. Distribute the OpenCD and encourage schools to give to pupils to take home.
g. Engage an established publisher, such as O’Reilly, to publish a ‘Linux for Education’ book.
h. Engage with Mark Shuttleworth on the Edubuntu Linux distribution.
Table 4
The three main points discussed by Table 4 were: clarity of messages; the need for a policy change; and the bringing together of communities.
Schools need a clear message as to what open standards and open source are, what the benefits are and the alternatives to closed/proprietary software.
a. This message could be delivered through: SLICT, GovernorNet, Becta’s View documents etc.
b. Possibility to pick on a particular example to give audience something to ‘grasp’ e.g. .odf
c. Discussion included using common vocabulary to get message across and possible first stage would be aligning the benefits with school vision and need for collaboration between learners and educators
There needs to be a policy change towards open source
a. Need to look at and address anywhere where government is actively supporting proprietary over open source software
b. National testing (KS3 in particular) – need to explore technologies that will allow this to happen in open standards world
c. All future software backed by policy needs to be client agnostic and software developed must be open source
Becta should aid bringing communities together
a. In this way schools could feel supported in their choice of open source over closed source by means of independent body (Becta) being high profile within the community. Communities could be Schoolforge, OSC etc., schools and government.
b. Classify/categorise products so that people know what is available. Possibly useful to classify against National Curriculum targets. Where nothing is available then there is the opportunity to build open source products - potentially sponsored by Becta/government.
c. Classify and categorise those using open source software (e.g. categorise by LA) meaning that one authority could seek advice on software (and of course share it) for a particular task/function/subject.
Table 5
The key issues emerging from Table 5 were:
a. Try to find opportunities for Open Source in "expanding areas" such as facilitating home school access etc.
b. Make available a easy to use online catalogue of Open Source software that can be used in schools
c. Moodle could be a defacto standard for VLE functionality and interoperability.
d. On "pre-installing" OSS software such as OpenOffice.org – the view is that this would be more symbolic than anything – giving a message of "acceptability" re OSS products.
e. Becta to move quickly to promote .odf type file formats on its website
f. Software provided by Schoolforge-UK to be valued on a par with Microsoft Software for SST type sponsorship.
g. Opportunities for a BETT type award for the best use of OSS products or services.
Summary & Close
Stephen Lucey promised to review the results of the meeting with Becta's new Chairman, Andrew Pinder. He is willing to take Ian Lynch's White Paper to the DfES if it can be condensed to, say, four pages,
Suitable Schoolforge Resources
We have a number of resources that start to address the practical ideas suggested in the meeting. As Schoolforge is a open community edited resource you can expect these to improve and to realistically reflect the experiences of practitioners using FLOSS in education.
- Annual FLOSSIE conference & exhibition, 20/21 July 06 provides an opportunity to find out more and to try FLOSS programs yourself.
- Case Studies from many schools aready using FLOSS.
- Directory of FLOSS Programs that are particularly useful for education.
- Try FLOSS Now lists a number of low risk ways to explore FLOSS application in education.
- Linux for Education provides details on using the Linux operating systems for infrastructure and desktops.
- Sections for Support (including Moodle), Training and Activities including MIS and Administration systems and Accessibility and Assistive Technology for SEN.
- Mailing lists provide lively community discussion and support on general topics and MIS.
