Borasky Research Journal

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By now, you’ve probably seen the reactions to Apple’s “education event” yesterday. My take is that it was 100% Apple marketing and zero “disrupting education.” It was all about selling overpriced tablets to schools that are struggling to keep teachers on the payroll. It was all about forcing authors to buy new Macintosh machines or upgrading existing ones to MacOS X “Lion”. And it was about a restrictive EULA for authors.

Textbooks should be free! That’s one way to disrupt education. And CK12.org provides Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) textbooks for free. These are textbooks developed by educators, not marketers. They work on iPads, Kindles, PDF readers, or you can read them on line in your browser. There are authoring tools on the web site as well. The current CK-12 FlexBooks Library lists 38 mathematics textbooks, 34 in science and 20 in other subjects. Some have both student and teacher editions. Once you have an account, you can access the authoring and reformatting tools. I highly recommend doing this even if you only want to read or teach from the books.

And education software should be free! The most comprehensive collection of free educational software I’ve found is openSUSE Linux for Education – openSUSE:Education-Li-f-e. This is a LiveDVD that will boot on most PC-based hardware with at least 1 GB of RAM.. You don’t even need a hard drive – since it’s a Live DVD, Li-f-e doesn’t touch the hard drive unless you explictly direct it to do so. If you want, you can copy the DVD to a USB drive and boot from that. The directions for that are here.

Li-f-e is an absolutely stunning collection of software. It has the openSUSE 12.1 32-bit Linux operating system, the GNOME 3, KDE 4 and ultra-light IceWM desktops, desktop / productivity software, and a comprehensive collection of educational software for students ranging from pre-school all the way up into graduate school. It also has a complete Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP (LAMP) server stack, a Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) server stack and a complete suite of professional software and web development tools. And the Scratch tools for teaching kids to program are there.

Given that these free tools exist, and have been around since well before the iPad, I don’t see how Apple marketing can claim to be disrupting education. There’s real disruption if you know where to look.