Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Tim Berners-Lee is widely known as the inventor of the Internet. Obviously a brilliant man, Berners-Lee is now trumpeting open source and open map technology, which creates an Internet that allows users to contribute worldwide to one source of information.
Sounds pretty simple, right? If not, listen to Berners-Lee in the brief video below, and he'll clear it up far better than I ever could.
So, if open source technology is really this simple, why are we not using it more in education?
We see open source technology in places like Moodle, the downloadable web-based education platform that helps teachers create classroom web sites. If Moodle and similar open source platforms are good examples of this type of Internet technology in education, perhaps a better question might be, Are we doing enough with open source?
As Tim Berners-Lee demonstrates in the video, the open map technology is a remarkably powerful tool that is helping solve court cases on racism and helping bring assistance to troubled places like Haiti.
In the education world, many schools and teachers are making a progressive move, using Web 2.0 and other powerful tools. Sadly, these people often reside in a vacuum. Far too many educators don't know about Web 2.0, much less open source, and are afraid to investigate it.
Maybe your school district is allowing you to use Moodle, giving you a handy classroom web site, but if educators are the innovative people we like to think we are, can't we do much more with open source?
One must wonder, are we doing enough?
