I’ve been ruminating about ISTE 2018. I’ve held off on posting this for a while. Now it’s time.
When I went to ISTE 2018 this year, I had a couple of goals. One goal was to look at Sketchnoting (which I’ve written about). Another goal that I had was to check out some of the Open Source opportunities that exist in education.
Now, I know that ISTE is a conference largely driven by the Sponsors and Vendors. We need sponsors and vendors in education. Districts can’t afford to only be open source. Many districts don’t have the technical background to implement very much open source at all. That is something that I was hoping that ISTE 2018 would be able to help address.
Keep in mind the Vision of ISTE:
Our Vision
ISTE’s vision is that all educators are empowered to harness technology to accelerate innovation in teaching and learning, and inspire learners to reach their greatest potential.
For me, empowering all educators involves open source options as well as the paid, proprietary ones.
Now I was able to attend one (yes, one) session that was an open source session. The session was quite good with lots of resources. However, I would like to see more. Much more.
A Proposal
I would like to see a track or least notation of open source presentations. I little bit of support and acknowledgement could go a long way. There are some open source alternatives that could help empower all educators and students.
This would not be the end of the Sponsors and Vendors. They would still have a role. They would probably have an even bigger role. Vendors could tout how much better and easier to use their product is. They could solve issues and provide opportunities that open source just wouldn’t.
There is currently a push to incorporate OER (Open Education Resources) into curriculum. This has taken a long time. It still has a long way to go. But, at least that push has started.
ISTE has a lot of educational leaders attending. (This is always interesting to me. I always expect more teachers to be in attendance. There seem to be a lot of Technology Directors/Coordinators and Technology Coaches in attendance). These groups should be leading the way for knowing our options. Not just the “shiny” ones, but all of them.
I would like to throw down the gauntlet to the wonderful ISTE leaders to use their influence and power to make open source truly part of the educational process. This will truly help EMPOWER all educators.
Troy, I totally agree. Years ago there was a big Open Source showing at FETC (Future of Education Technology Conference, formerly Florida Educational Technology Conference). They had an Open Source lab as well as a fair number of sessions. During 12 years as a Director of Technology in Independent Schools, I survived on Open Source. I could not have pulled off the innovations I did with technology funding without Open Source. Nearly 13 years ago I pitched a proposal for Linux thin-clients ( http://www.ltsp.org) to a local community foundation and got a brand new server, and it brought life back into old hardware and saved us from Windows 98 and Ad-Ware. Open Source can sound scary, but the reality of it is that it is already in use in many places that folks don’t realize. There are so many different levels of Open Source, from the very mature and stable (like Moodle, GIMP, or TuxPaint), to undocumented utilities. It doesn’t mean you have to go all Linux, Open Source software runs across all platforms.