Monday, February 01, 2010

What Greg Learned at the Department of Education

Greg DeKoenigsberg at Open Source for America edu list:

This is definitely a key area of interest for ed.gov. Ideally, what they want to see is an open source version of a cognitive tutor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_tutor) and/or other intelligent tutoring systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_tutoring_system). There's a great deal of frustration with the folks at Carnegie Mellon, who did a lot of the cognitive tutor research with grant money, and then turned around and handed the research to Carnegie Learning, who are now putting intellectual property protections around that work. It might be a bit of an uphill climb to replicate that work as open source, but it's precisely that kind of project that ed.gov hopes to fund with their $500m over 10 years.

Anyway. That was the meat of my conversations. ed.gov likes open source, gets open source, and wants to fund open source to help education. I've encouraged them to articulate *particular* problems they'd like to see solutions for, and will continue to press this angle. The more effectively ed.gov can say "gee, it would be great if we could solve X," the more effectively we will be able to drive the geeks of the world to start working on a solution for X.

I refuse to believe they'll do a damned thing for open source until I see some actual licensed code and content. These foundation types talk a good open source game have no track record -- none whatsoever -- delivering the goods in K-12.

5 comments:

Leroy's Mom said...

I've been meaning to share this bit of edu-gossip with you, and this post seems like a good place. DoE paid a grant to my local County Office of Education (Sacramento) to build a site for English Learners, USA Learns (http://usalearns.org). It's a really great site, and so good that Rosetta Stone sued on the basis that it undermined their market share (which I guess they thought the government should not be doing). They lost. People ask me (because I work a lot of with elementary ELs) and Larry Ferlazzo, a fellow local teacher (because he does the same population in high school), "Hey I've got some bi-lingual money I need to spend, should I get Rosetta Stone?" to which we reply, "No, use USA Learns, it's free!" Your tax money at work...

Tom Hoffman said...

Nice! It would be great if we could get things like this more clearly licensed, too.

Leroy's Mom said...

That does seem to be an issue since I'm not seeing licensing on the site. What would open licensing do with a site like that? Would it be allowing others to update or use parts or modules? Wouldn't that also require that the system/site be designed in a way to allow for easy changing and updating of the source code? In other words, this is a good final product, but maybe not a great open system. Those would be two very different design considerations, right?

Tom Hoffman said...

Yes, you can have a system with a free/open license that isn't actually easy to adapt/modify/improve. Designing a really extensible system and document it is a lot more work. And in particular from the point of view of the original author, if you don't do that work, you're unlikely to get back significant value in outside contributions.

However, on the other hand, in a publicly funded project that public institutions may come to depend on, you aren't necessarily only licensing for open source mojo community goodness. It is also because you just might want to translate something, or change a few random specific things and host your own version, or the original source of the site may go out of business, take it down, replace it with something you don't like, etc. For those reasons, free/open licensing is important.

Leroy's Mom said...

And what should I see recently but this post on the NPR blog about their iPhone app vs. the one for Android. The end is where they make the same point you do. They didn't include all the bells and whistles in the Android app, but instead focused on having tight coding which would make it easier for other developers to pick up and code their own.