SA govt learning lessons about OSS

A former teacher who finds open source software interesting is investigating its merits for the South Australian government's state school system.

The South Australian Department of Education and Children's Services e-schooling services manager, Dr Kathryn Moyle, maintains regular contact with the full range of providers to government, ranging from small software vendors all the way up to the big players.

Keen to investigate the merits of non-proprietary software, Moyle's proposition is that governments move to include open source solutions "wherever possible" within the education sector. For this to happen successfully, models of possible deployment of OSS need to be determined.

In January she attended the EducationaLinux conference, held just before the Linux.conf.au at the University of Western Australia. Before that, in July last year, Moyle was in Tasmania for the Australian Computers in Education conference presenting a paper titled, Can open source software change the Microsoft story in public schools?

Moyle told Linuxworld that the political reality of bringing about change in government is being able to convince senior key people (including Ministers) of the veracity of the arguments for moving towards open source solutions.

To do this she says: “We have to look at legacy systems, expertise inside and outside of government for supporting OSS solutions, costs and benefits and so on. There is the need to get past the belief that various proprietary software are the only products that can do the jobs they do. This means cultural and organisational change."

Pragmatically Moyle says she is taking a longer term perspective to this, acknowledging she is "only at the beginning of this story" in SA. "I have support from my senior officers to do this sort of work - if you would like to think of that as an indicator of success." Moyle anticipates significant amounts of her time in 2003 will be spent considering the "best strategic points of intervention within the system" on this matter.

Although the reality is that in the foreseeable future the government won’t be ditching its investment in products such as those from Microsoft, Moyle reckons there is no reason why schools can't start adopting free, and sound applications like Linux or FreeBSD for their operating systems; Office suites such as OpenOffice or StarOffice; and The Gimp graphics tool.

Moyle says the reason she cares about the open source cause is because as a teacher "first and foremost I believe we need to provide students with the skills and abilities on leaving school to be able to use computers without necessarily being caught in the cycle of purchasing ever bigger and better computers and software when for most students they will not have the financial capabilities to support such a habit".

"People (like me) want to use computers without knowing how to fix the 'spark plugs' or whatever else is under the 'bonnet'. But knowing where to find help and that there are alternatives to expensive proprietary software I think is a responsible approach to school education. I also think there is a level of confluence between the philosophy that underpins the development of open source software and what in education we refer to as 'communities of practice'.

"Also as a government education department I philosophically think that it is better to put dollars into supporting people's expertise rather than into proprietary software," she said. "I should hasten to point out that this is my private view not a government position."

The Department of Education is investigating the pros and cons of open source learning management systems and looking at small trials with a few schools. Meanwhile, Moyle is schedule to present a paper on OSS at the EduCause 2003 conference in May this year which will see her promote the use of open standards in government architecture developments. More information on EduCause 2003, which will be held at the Adelaide Convention Centre, can be found here.