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This is the wrong perspective. The perspective should be on governments taking that role and use educational funds to generate commons. There are several issues

This is the wrong perspective. The perspective should be on governments taking that role and use educational funds to generate commons. There are several issues around making all this work, but the key issue is scale: an individual school has no capacity to decide or handle that, they can only choose what works. It's at regional or national level that there's sufficient scale. At the same time can an education system set up software etc that rivals the effectiveness of professional and smooth software? Sometimes easier than contract than to try and create/adapt aomehtknf yourself

StillBored 6y ago
I came here to say much the same about textbooks. In the case of textbooks not much has changed with middle school algebra in the past 100+ years, but we are still paying >$100 a textbook (these days ebooks!) for books which can be found with a google search. In many cases because the free books are missing some fine tuning an individual state wants to make. In the us we have "common core" in a lot of states, and if there is a problem with a free e-book, they should have hired someone to fix it rather than paying the big publishing books orders of magnitude more money for book rentals. Similarly with software, maybe the commercial offerings are better this year, but we should be _investing_ in open solutions rather than paying rent to large corporations only interested in profiteering in the education sector. But those companies, and the lack of widespread political will makes it generally infeasable for any single school district to create a "google classroom" (or whatever). A few states getting together and putting wording in the procurement process that say that commercial offerings which are based on free software are preferred, and where solutions fall short, a small fraction of the payment to the commercial offering needs to be redirected as investment in open software. The goal is to create Redhat type organizations that improve and support free software offerings, rather than proprietary solutions which cannot be afforded by the smaller or economically disadvantaged districts.

StillBored 6y ago

I came here to say much the same about textbooks. In the case of textbooks not much has changed with middle school algebra in the past 100+ years, but we are still paying >$100 a textbook (these days ebooks!) for books which can be found with a google search. In many cases because the free books are missing some fine tuning an individual state wants to make. In the us we have "common core" in a lot of states, and if there is a problem with a free e-book, they should have hired someone to fix it rather than paying the big publishing books orders of magnitude more money for book rentals. Similarly with software, maybe the commercial offerings are better this year, but we should be _investing_ in open solutions rather than paying rent to large corporations only interested in profiteering in the education sector. But those companies, and the lack of widespread political will makes it generally infeasable for any single school district to create a "google classroom" (or whatever). A few states getting together and putting wording in the procurement process that say that commercial offerings which are based on free software are preferred, and where solutions fall short, a small fraction of the payment to the commercial offering needs to be redirected as investment in open software. The goal is to create Redhat type organizations that improve and support free software offerings, rather than proprietary solutions which cannot be afforded by the smaller or economically disadvantaged districts.