Expanding Digital Equity via Open Source Tools in Education

Brian H. Giza, PhD.
The University of Texas at El Paso
bhgiza@utep.edu

http://www.educationtechnologies.com

Abstract: Active k-12 teachers studying multimedia pedagogy at a major University were provided high quality open source tools for graphics and sound editing. The teachers developed lessons for use with their K-12 pupils at a variety of grade levels and content areas. Preliminary data from ongoing surveys and action-research studies show that the tools have increased access to multimedia technology for individuals who would not normally be able to afford these tools.

Open Source Answers for Educator Needs

Educator needs for high-quality, reliable, standards-based, compatible and low-cost software have greatly increased in recent years. The Internet and computer technologies have penetrated the educational environment in nearly every K-12 school in the nation (Lehnart, et al., 2001). Currently, educators and their pupils are expected, at the very least, to be proficient in the use of word processors and browsing (ISTE, 2002). Presentation tools, graphics tools, and multimedia editing are close behind. For example, The Texas State Board of Educator Certification now requires that all beginning teachers be able to "...identify task requirements, apply search strategies, and use current technology to efficiently acquire, analyze, and evaluate a variety of electronic information" (SBEC, 2005). By implication, this means that an educator must acquire and use software on a regular basis in order to familiarize themselves with it. This presents teachers and their pupils with a dilemma - software, especially office productivity software is expensive (we define office productivity software as tools that include presentation packages, word processors, and spreadsheets). If an educator desires to utilize multimedia editing, (graphics, sound, or video), the tools are even more costly. Providing multimedia production software to K-12 pupils for their use in classroom projects is even more of an issue. Although schools may provide the tools on site, pupils who can afford the tools at home have a distinct advantage over pupils who cannot afford productivity and multimedia production tools. One group, the "haves" can explore and experiment at leisure, increasing their proficiency with the tools, while the other group of pupils, the "have-nots" are limited to school time, with resultant restrictions on time for learning the tools, etc. Although low-cost computers have made greatly expanded access to computing options for educators and their pupils, high multimedia software costs for some of the best known product lines - those of Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft - have limited the ability of many individuals to explore and incorporate multimedia into classroom projects. Even when district or campus software licenses are considered, pupil ability to use the tool at home is often limited. The author of this study, a professor of multimedia technology at a major university in the El Paso (US-Mexico border) region, began to distribute open source software to teachers in the area and incorporated training in its use into several courses at the university. This study reports on the results of a year of use of these tools by teachers in these courses and their pupils. In the context of this paper, "students" will be assumed to mean university students, and "pupils" will be assumed to mean their K-12 pupils.

Open Source Defined

By its very nature, open source software is ideal for the educational environment. It differs from proprietary licensing by requiring that the software be provided at no-cost, and that it is freely alterable, so that it can be adapted or improved as needed. The source code that makes up the software is transparently available along with the software, so that any member of the programming community may examine it for bugs, and improve or adapt it without violating intellectual property rights. The key provisions in this case are:

1. Free Redistribution

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

2. Source Code

The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost-preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed. (OSI, 2005) Two things have occurred with some of the best open source products. First, the software has become freely and easily available, and second, that it is constantly improving at a rapid rate. Using a licensing model developed by individuals such as Richard Stallman (Stallman, 2005), the open source community is driven by a number of project "forges", the best known of which is www.sourceforge.net (OSTG, 2005). In an open source foundry, or forge, open source software projects are developed through a model that often involves volunteer leadership and a number of programmers who contribute to various aspects of the product. The economic model is surprisingly viable. Because the programmer's code is visible, they can be recognized for their contributions, and critiqued by other programmers and users, a recursive procedure that builds the reputation of the contributors and the quality of the product. The economics of the model are explained by Raymond in his online text "the Cathedral and the Bazaar" (Raymond, 2004).

The Population

The population in the metropolitan area under study is 84% Hispanic (UTEP CIERP, 2005). Based upon 2000 Census data, this border region is one of the lowest socio-economic urban areas in the United States. Only nine percent of the residents of the community have a college degree. Teachers in the courses covered by the study are were either degree holders pursuing a Masters in Education with and Instructional Technology specialization (48 individuals) or undergraduate Bachelor of Education students in their last semester of their elementary certification studies (35 students) . The proportion of Hispanic to White college students in these particular courses was approximately 75%. Hispanic to 25% White based upon surnames.

The Study

This longitudinal, qualitative study is still ongoing. There are two research questions:

1. What is the level of use of these tools in the classroom and by the pupils at home?

2. What is the teacher and pupil level of comfort and satisfaction with the use of these tools?

The study is being conducted via the use of surveys, interviews, and collection of teacher and pupil multimedia products developed with these tools. Surveys and products from the first two semesters of the study have been received, and indicate a consistently high level of satisfaction with the tools by the teachers. The study is now being extended to survey pupils and observe the use of the tools in early childhood classrooms involving English Language Learners (ELLs). EC-4 grade level pupil surveys and observations have been approved by the University Institutional Research Review Board and participating schools as of the time of this proposal, and the classroom observations are scheduled for Fall, 2005.

Procedure:

Each teacher in the study was provided a CD that included Microsoft Windows and Apple compatible versions of these Open Source Software products: Gnu Image Manipulation Program "GIMP" version 2 graphics editing software; TuxPaint version 0.9 drawing software, and Audacity 1.0 or 1.1 sound editing software. OpenOffice 1.1 office productivity software was also provided, but was not the subject of the study. During the course of the semester the professor trained the teachers in the use of the software, and provided online tutorials for the products at a course website, as well as at the professor's personal website. The teachers in the courses were required to utilize the software packages in activities with their pupils. In addition, they were encouraged to provide the course CD and its software tools to their pupils so that the pupils could use them at home. The teachers developed lessons that used these multimedia tools in their current classrooms in accordance with professional development models suggested by Loucks-Horsley et al. (1998).

To document their lessons, each teacher was required to develop PowerPoint format presentations that involved input by their pupils. They could either use Microsoft's PowerPoint product, or OpenOffice's presentation package, Impress (Impress will open and create files in Microsoft's PowerPoint 2000 format). The two presentation packages handle common graphic file types equally well, but OpenOffice has a well-known bug in sound file import. This is easily resolved if a user knows that the product has this bug, and OpenOffice was successfully used in many audio file presentations. (The solution requires the user to import sound files as a slide transition effect). The teachers' products demonstrated projects in which their K-12 pupils used TuxPaint, GIMP, or Audacity to acquire, and edit graphic or sound files in popular formats (JPG for the GIMP, PNG graphics and WAV format sounds for TuxPaint, and MP3 or WAV format sounds for Audacity).

The most common approach to utilizing the tools was to have the K-12 pupils acquire images with a scanner or digital camera, edit them in GIMP or TuxPaint, and import them into a presentation (presented using PowerPoint or the open source equivalent, OpenOffice Impress). The pupils would then record a narration with Audacity, editing it and even adding sound effects before importing the narration into their presentations. Many of the projects involved elementary pupils from dual language or sheltered instruction classrooms reading aloud in both English and Spanish. (In the sheltered instruction classroom, students who are not native speakers of English are taught in a separate environment that incorporates content instruction in both their native language and English). Another common use was for elementary-middle school language arts projects in which pupils downloaded public domain texts (e.g.: the OZ books) from the Gutenberg project at http://www.gutenberg.org and added student-generated illustrations and narrations.

Preliminary Results

Based upon teacher projects, the tools were successfully integrated into each project. They were developed a variety of platforms. Although teachers were trained in the use of the Windows versions of the products, the Apple and Linux versions were sometimes used. There is little difference in functionality or interface between versions of the software for the various systems. Initial surveys showed a high level of satisfaction with all versions of the tools by teachers.

Future Research

The strategy of using open source tools to expand the engagement of ELLs through the creation of multilingual audio books provides interesting opportunities for further research.

References

Free Software Foundation (2005). Free Educational Software List. Free Software Foundation, Inc. [Online] Retrieved January 12, 2005 from http://directory.fsf.org/education.

International Society for Technology in Education (2002). Educational Technology Standards and Performance Indicators for All Teachers (NETS*T). [Online] Retrieved July 30, 2005, from http://cnets.iste.org/getdocs.html#teachers.

Lehnart, A., Simon, M., & Graziano, M. (2001). The Internet and Education: Findings of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Washington, DC.

Loucks-Horsley, S., Hewson, P., Love, N., & Stiles, K. (1998). Designing professional development for teachers of science and mathematics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

OSI (2005). The Open Source Definition, Version 1.9. The Open Source Initiative, Inc. [Online] Retrieved January 12, 2005 from http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php.

OSTG (2005). Document A01 - What is SourceForge.net? Open Source Technology Group, Inc. [Online] Retrieved January 12, 2005 from http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=6025&group_id=1.

SBEC. (2005). Technology Applications Standards for All Beginning Educators. The Texas State Board of Educator Certification. [Online] Retrieved January 12, 2005 from http://www.tea.state.tx.us/technology/ta/edstd.html.

Raymond, E. (2004). The Cathedral and the Bazaar. [Online] Retrieved January 12, 2005 from http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar.

Stallman, R. (2005). The GNU Manifesto. [Online] The Electronic Frontier Foundation. Retrieved January 12, 2005 from http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html.

Tux4ids (2005). About Tux4Kids. [Online] Tux4Kids.com, Inc. Retrieved January 12, 2005 from http://ww2.tux4kids.com/tux4kids.

UTEP CIERP (2005). CIERP Fact Sheet. The University of Texas at El Paso Center for Institutional Evaluation, Research, and Planning, El Paso, TX. [Online] Retrieved January 12, 2005 from http://www.cierp.utep.edu.