What can K-12 districts gain in knowing about Open Source? At the recent 2007 National School Board Association Teaching and Learning Conference, held in October in Nashville, Tennessee, a group of school board leaders, technology administrators, and teachers gathered in a Mini-Academy session to delve into the subject of Open Source for their own schools. The conference was featuring Open Source as one of six major themes facing education. The intention of the in-depth session was to broaden participants’ definition of open source by understanding current trends worldwide and to provide a case study of how one district is taking the strides to embrace open source systems and software.

People generally understand Open Source to refer to software collaboratively created and offered back freely to the public and the development community for use and modification. The Gnu Free Documentation License instantiates this legal freedom, moving away from the copyright, “all rights reserved” tradition, to allow adaptation while giving credit to creators. On Wikipedia, Open Source is defined as a “set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge”. Building on the shoulders of the Open Source movement and as well open cultural trends in music, photo, and video sharing, the open education movement is developing both tools and content to make learning freely available, and by extension, customizable to the needs of the learner. Like the open source software phenomenon, open education has the potential to birth new economic models and empower new contributors.

I presented about these trends and showed examples of the use of open educational resources (OER) worldwide and our work with OER Commons,  http://www.oercommons.org in particular. Next, a school district in Wisconsin, the D.C. Everest Area, http://www.dce.k12.wi.us/ described their approach to bring the entire district onto Open Source platforms. Marie Wardall, in charge of libraries and coordinating the effort with Cory Jaeger, head of technology for the district, sited the example of giving away free CDs with Open Source software programs to students. The students can now work in the same software environment at home and at school, removing the challenges around versions and compatibility between in-school and at-home work. The district has shown considerable financial savings in this effort and has been able to use that savings to put new technologies into every classroom to augment sharing and connectivity services that are saving teachers and staff time and enhancing learning.