Case Study: ISISJMKEYNES HIGH SCHOOL
Istituto Statale di Istruzione Superiore J.M. Keynes
(ISISJMKeynes) School, Italy in late 1990s’ implemented the F/LOSS based
ICT and the decision making body for this was composed of teachers, students,
parents as well as the non teaching staffs. ISISJMKeynes School after implementing F/LOSS not
only witnessed the reduced cost but they also experienced the application
customisation based on their specific educative needs. The user’s contribution to F/LOSS has made
them work alongside with the developers and has also strengthened the
relationship between the users themselves, i.e. the relationship between
students and students, teachers and teachers and more importantly the
relationship between teachers and students. The F/LOSS based ICT has helped the
school promote better and interactive learning environment (Lin and Zini,
2008).
Along with F/LOSS ICT,
the use of open content was also engaged for the daily educative purposes (Lin
and Zini, 2008). Open content is a continuous constructed content which usage
rights is expressed by the 4Rs Framework; Reuse, Revise, Remix and
Redistribute.
·
Reuse:
The users have the right to make a backup copy of the content.
·
Revise:
The users also have the right to adapt and adjust the content into their own
language and culture.
· Remix:
Open content gives the users right to create a new content by allowing them to
mix the original or modified content with other contents.
· Redistribute:
Finally the users have the right to share any of the three above kind of
contents (OpenContent, n.d.).
The school started
using the information
and materials from the open content for the teaching and learning purpose. They
also worked on language localisation, translating some of the pages on
Wikipedia and contributed some contents to the online encyclopaedia.
Openoffice.org
which is an office application is one of the most used F/LOSS applications.
OpenOffice didn’t have the Italian thesaurus in 2004. Mrs. Volta, one of the
teachers in the ISISJMKeynes School
planned on contributing to the Italian F/LOSS development team (Lin and Zini,
2008). In 2004, she asked the students from one of her class to write the
synonyms and antonyms as a part of linguistic and lexical skills. She later
provided those modified work to the developers. It was then uploaded to the
Debian operating system which is a GNU/Linux operating system as a software
package. This was a small but a great contribution to the Italian thesaurus. By
taking a direct part in open content and F/LOSS projects, the teachers and
students of ISISJMKeynes High
School got a chance to take part in the design and implementation of the ICT.
This experience has helped them to change their views of the technology usage.
It has also helped shape their teaching and learning process to a more
interactive and interesting from. These contributions that ISISJMKeynes School made were used by people all over the world
for different purpose. They had a hand in this globalised digital period. Other school and people were influenced by
this move that ISISJMKeynes School
made and they also lend a helping hand in contributing to other areas of F/LOSS
and open content.
The
inclusion of users in the design and implementation took another step when ISISJMKeynes School included their students in the moderating team
of the mailing list. Mailing list was publically available, so the students
started building social contacts outside from the school and this also gave
them the experience of being a part of the online community. ISISJMKeynes School also used the weblog to start a digital
literacy system. The reason was to teach how to give and present information in
the World Wide Web and use the internet more effectively. The F/LOSS weblog
combines the entire user’s blog to form a community blog. Users of this weblog
were both the teachers and the students. This application was originally used
by the F/LOSS developers working on the same project to share their ideas,
opinion and updates about the project through the community blog. During teaching one of the ancient Greek
poems, one of the students later posted the song lyric that was inspired by the
poem in the weblog. The teacher discussed the relation between those two in the
next lecture. The weblog has helped in the parallel learning of both students
and teachers, where teacher were able to learn about the new culture and
generation from their students. Learning online community is established where
the users exchange the information and share their knowledge about multiple
topics.
F/LOSS ICT
infrastructure persuades the teacher to use the free contents compared to the
pirated ones. ISISJMKeynes School switched from the
copyright teaching materials to F/LOSS applications. For teaching Pascal
programming language, they switched from Turbo Pascal to Free Pascal, for
teaching mathematical functions; they switched from Derive to Analysis. The
school also used F/LOSS application for other purposes; for instance
OpenOffice.org to write essays instead of Microsoft Word, Firefox to browse
internet instead of Internet Explorer and GIMP for photo editing instead of
Photoshop.
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