Open Source Technologies in Education
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Recent Researches in Educational Technologies Open source technologies in education MARTIN FOLTIN, PETER FODREK, MICHAL BLAHO, JÁN MURGAŠ Institute of control and industrial informatics Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology Slovak University of Technology Ilkovičova 3, 812 19 Bratislava SLOVAK REPUBLIC [email protected], [email protected] Abstract: Every modern university of technology used widely in education computing today. A key decision is usually the choice of software used. This step is necessary to thoroughly analyse and think, because the decision may affect a whole generation of students. In most cases, universities still rely on proprietary software. Often choose by the habit of the Windows operating system. Such an approach is unnecessary increase in funding for IT and in addition prevents the freedom of choice as operating system, as well as software. We have decided to include as the main software package programs from the family of open source at Faculty of Electrical and Information Technology STU - Department of Information and communication systems. The advantage is to reduce the cost of license and possibility of choosing the operating system. Key-Words: - Open source, education, university, productivity suites, development tools, image editors, webservers, costs, document formats 1 Introduction like KDE have subprojects that are interested in Open source philosophy is based on idea that all education programs [2,3]. Opposite to history these software may be used freely and for free at least for programs are targeted to K12 education not for personal use and at least for general usage programs tertiary education. This is one of three main faults like operating systems and productivity suites. To of open source management. Open source makes ensure freedom of such programs there is need to shift to more commercial then philosophical use open formats. Freedom in the meaning of the approach today. There are companies that sell open sources is granted in four main freedoms: software that grants open source rights but they add services to the classical open source. These • Freedom 0 - to use program for any companies are financing source for open source. purpose Another source of financing of OSS is selling prepaid subscription to the Linux weekly news. This • Freedom 1 - to study how program works and to modify program to better-fit user news page has more than 70,000 subscriptions at requirements main cost of 7 USD/month. They pay 200 USD/paper to the novice authors and more for well- • Freedom 2 - to let friend to use program known and respected authors. Authors are mainly legally Linux hackers so this is way to finance open source Freedom 3 - to distribute modified version • development. when granting same rights as you have These freedoms are based of academic freedoms. This is case that most of open source users are based 2 Open source at our department inside of academic community. It is because most of Department of information and communication the open source developers came for academic systems is using family of open source software community. Another group of open source users is products in no small range. We are able to cover based in industry experts. most needs resulted from the activities of our Basics of open source were established in hacker department with open source programs. Programs culture on Artificial Intelligence lab at could be divided into the following groups: Massachusetts Institute of technology at Cambridge, MA. Artificial Intelligence Lab is now part of • Operating systems Computer Science and Artificial intelligence lab [1]. • Productivity suites Many of programs in the large open source projects • Development environments ISBN: 978-1-61804-021-3 131 Recent Researches in Educational Technologies • Image editors (vector and raster) • Web servers Usage of open source programs at the department brings several advantages. GPL licensed programs are freely redistributable. There is no need of complicated license management and license server at all. Students have free access to all programs we used and they can legally install them on their computers with no additional cost. This allows them to continue work at home or in study hall or the hostel. The programs we use are mostly free so we save considerable resources to buy another software. Incompatibility of data files is not a problem when Fig.1 OpenOffice.org – Writer [4] open formats are used. Convert from one format to another is much easier using open source programs. 4.1 Writer Conversion does not require protected licensed OpenOffice.org contains modern word processor proprietary formats. A substantial advantage is called Writer, which looks like Microsoft Office platform independence. Open source programs are Word 2003. With Writer you can write documents, often available for all major operating systems include pictures, tables and other objects. The style (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X). Staff and students of output documents can be for example letter, are not restricted to the choice of their computers newspaper, invitations or notes. OpenOffice.org mainly in software case. Our department focuses on uses ODT format (part of ISO 26300) natively but it platform-independence. Therefore courses provided can work with Microsoft Office Word format as by our staff are based on the use of open source well. Standard functions of Writer are AutoCorrect, programs. All documents are available in open AutoComplete, Styles, Formatting and other useful formats and even lectures are prepared in open features. Students can use Writer in individual source programs. projects or thesis (bachelor, master, PhD). Export to PDF format contains only two clicks from user. 3 Operating systems 4.2 Calc Although vast majority of the computers in Slovak For making spreadsheets OpenOffice.org offers education system runs Microsoft Windows Calc. Calc offers working with data in tables, operating system some of the students like to learn analyze and prepare them for presentation. Calc can other operating systems as well. Our department also work with Microsoft Office Excel files. It also uses and teaches several operating systems like has build in wizards for fast formulas editing and Apple Mac OS X based on open source kernel data manipulation. You can also arrange and filter named Darwin or other Unix or Unix like operating data. Sheets can contain charts that are adapting to systems (Ubuntu, Slackware, openSuse). These data changes in tables. Calc uses ODS format (also operating systems are not used only for computer part of ISO 26300). Export of the data can be made programming courses but as well for another. in different formats. 4.3 Impress OpenOffice.org has tool for making multimedia 4 Productivity suites presentations. You can include text, pictures, charts, Productivity suites are most used applications ever sounds or video into presentation. For more because they deal any office activities of any user. professional feeling you can use animations and Teachers use this type of tools almost every day for special effects. Impress can read Microsoft Office documents, data processing or lecture presentations. PowerPoint presentations. For easier usage Impress Main advantages of open source productivity suites contains many templates. Impress uses ODP format [4] do not force students to buy certain program (also part of ISO 26300). Presentation can be saved from certain vendor. They provide document also in PDF, flash or html format. formats that are readable almost everywhere. ISBN: 978-1-61804-021-3 132 Recent Researches in Educational Technologies 4.4 Draw Current version NetBeans IDE 7.0 is modern Tool for making pictures or diagrams in integrated development environment for several OpenOffice.org is called Draw. Pictures are created programming languages like Java JDK7, C/C++, with lines and curves. This means that all images are PHP and many others. NetBeans has a large vectors. We can work in 2D or 3D plane and setup ecosystem of the community developers. They help the position of lights. Intelligent connectors, grids or another people dealing with this IDE. It is very edge lines make connections between objects. Draw suitable for novice programmers for its simplicity of contains image gallery with many pictures, usage. animations, sounds that can be used in your paintings. Draw uses ODG format (also part of ISO 5.2 Eclipse 26300). Support for standard formats like bmp, jpg, Eclipse [6] is Integrated Development Environment gif or png is certainty. a tool that integrates all of last three tools and much more it eases development of the application. We do 4.5 Base not use this IDE because we use much less OpenOffice.org has tool for manipulating database complicated and not so much powerful IDE data. Base support file databases (dBASE) or NetBeans. It is more suitable than Eclipse during external relational databases like MySQL or Oracle. education process but not so used in the commercial We can create and modify database tables, forms, practice. Our students use Eclipse in the individual queries and outputs with built-in HSQL database projects as well as team projects. engine. Base has also many wizards for easy usage for beginners and also advanced users. 5.3 PsPad Parallel to complex performing development 4.6 Math environments such as Eclipse or NetBeans there are Math is special tool for making formulas and successfully used simple text editors like PSPad. It symbols. It contains many operators, functions and is one of a number of open source editors, which are formatting assistants. All this is in window on which suitable for creating simple programs using different can easy click by mouse. Equation can be written by programming languages or creating web pages using internal command also but you must know them. HTML. Editor has syntax highlighting keywords for They are very similar to TeX commands. Equations many languages. Of course there are C, C + +, Java, can be saved in standard format and also in special HTML, PHP, Java, Javacsript and many others XML format for formulas MathML.