Review, Reconsider, Reallocate!

A comment came in via the audience during the second panel yesterday afternoon at the Social Tech and Ed conference. The gentleman made the comment that it would be foolish to try to tell our admins and higher-ups that open source is free. Bandwidth, hardware, and connectivity after all are all cost-heavy infrastructure components that have to be in place before a school can even think about open source.

And that’s true. But it’s not the whole story.

The fact of the matter is that schools have all of the money they need to supply classrooms with projectors, students with netbooks, and schools with big bandwidth. It’s all a matter of the allocation of resources.

How much money does your school spend on paper and copiers? How about software licenses? Local servers? Machine contracts? Books? Encyclopediae? Wall mounted maps? Globes? Chalk? Dry-erase markers? Dirt for the ballfields?

Add it up. And then tell me you can’t afford $300 per kid plus a decent wireless system.

Don’t spend good money on crappy operating systems. Don’t spend a dime on office and presentation software. It’s all available in stable and effective formats for free.

Because sometimes ‘free’ is ‘free’.

But that’s not the end of the story. Because there is another resource that we are going out of our way to foolishly neglect: the technology that our students already have.

In our attempts perhaps to try to maintain a ‘level’ playing field, we are in fact cutting off our collective nose to spite our collective face by not allowing students to bring their own laptops, netbooks, and smartphones into class. I spoke with two teachers yesterday -- one from Massachusetts and the other from California -- who both told me that their schools have explicit policies that prohibit students from bringing their own tech to school.

This in spite of the fact that -- at least in the case of the Massachusetts teacher -- an overwhelming number of students had laptops and mobile devices at home.

Why are we doing this to ourselves?

Why are we forcing students to use the software we’re spending thousands of dollars to license when they could just bring their own machines and work off the Cloud?

I understand that not all students will have the family resources to afford computers or mobile devices. Which is why we’ll use all of that money we saved to get good devices into their hands.

Come on people, let’s think differently about this. Review, Reconsider, Reallocate. We can get this thing done!