Thursday Mar 13, 2008
As you saw from my last post, Sun held its annual Worldwide Education & Research Conference (WWERC) two weeks ago. (Check out some of the coverage in the blogosphere, especially some of the blogs from our Sun Campus Ambassadors.) As I was preparing for my presentation
at the conference, I rediscovered Revolutionary Wealth, a book by two of my favorite authors, Heidi and
Alvin Toffler. Back in the early 1980s, Alvin Toffler first coined the concept of "prosumers": the idea that consumers become involved in the production process. As prescient
as Toffler was, I'm sure even he couldn't have imagined how
open source, community development and social networking technologies make "prosumption" possible on an unprecedented scale. (It irks
me that Donald Tapscott, who wrote Wikinomics, claims to have coined this term and concept, but I digress.)
Anyway, the Tofflers have written a beautiful chapter about
education that everyone should read. Here's an excerpt:
"Mass
education designed for the industrial age meets the needs of neither
the pre-industrial village nor the post-industrial future. Rural
education—indeed , all education—has to be totally
reconceptualized. Today technology offers educators a tool for
customizing education to the diverse cultures and needs of small groups
and even individuals."
We are approaching a time when we will be
able—inexpensively—to put in every village some kind of computer
connected in some way to the outside world. A time when children, given
the chance, can, as we saw in India, teach themselves to access the
Internet. A time when multiplayer gamers can advance their own learning
through distant online mentors.
This time isn't in the future. It's here now. At the ERC last week, I sawit. Aaron Walsh, director of the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative, showed a demo of a virtual world in which students can meet at the Valley of the Kings in Egypt and explore the pyramids instead of just reading about them. They can walk through the tombs, look around, and even fly through the air to see things up close that they couldn't necessarily see in the real world.
The creators of this lesson have figured out how to bring multiple digital media sources together in the same virtual world, thus creating an even more interesting way to learn by accident and discovery instead of rote memorization and regurgitation. This new way of bring the virtual world to the real world—and real worlds to the virtual—may be one of the best examples so far of providing the personalized and individualized learning that the Tofflers talk about in their book.
Organizations like the New Media Consortium are exploring ways to use these new technologies to advance learning. On February 24, NMC announced a $250,000 two-year
collaboration with Sun to launch the Open Virtual Worlds
Project, an effort that is aimed at making it easier to learn, work,
and exchange ideas in virtual space. The project will develop a range
of standards-based, portable open-source educational spaces, content,
and objects, and use them to extend Sun's open source Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland platforms. It's an exciting time to be involved in education, that's for sure.
Wednesday Feb 20, 2008
Sun
has long held that today's student is tomorrow's developer—and in
many cases, today's developer as well. We've put our money where our
mouth is by giving away our software, including the training that
goes with it, to student developers at no charge. More about that in
a moment.
We
understand that such tools and training are an important piece—but
just one piece—of an overall academic program. The field of
computer science isn't about tools alone. Tools change. Languages
change. Java didn't exist 15 years ago. Does that make a Computer
Science degree granted before 1995 invalid? Of course not. So it's
good that Microsoft is making a
first small step
at making their developer tools available to college students at a
subset of universities around the world (although it's too bad that
high school students still have to go through their teachers to get
these tools). It's a good thing, because it better equips students to
compare proprietary development tools with open source alternatives.
It may even result in the improvement of open source development
tools.
But
for the rest of the world—including high school students—Sun is
more than happy to provide our robust set of tools and training for
no cost. We've been offering our Free
and Open Source tools
to developers, including all student developers, for quite
some time now. Our Academic
Developer Program
gives student developers free
downloads
of Sun developer tools like NetBeans, Java Studio Creator, Sun Studio
and Sun's most innovative and popular software products for academic
use. Of particular interest to a generation brought up with video
games, we recently even open sourced the Project
Darkstar environment
for creating massively scalable online games, as well as the Project
Wonderland
toolkit for creating 3D virtual worlds.
We've
been sharing our source code for years. Sun open sourced over 10
million lines of code in 2005 with the OpenSolaris
project. (The Solaris
Operating System
is also supported on over 900 x86
and SPARC platforms.) The
OpenSPARC
project is making the hardware source code of the recently announced
UltraSPARC T1 processor available under an Open Source license. Those
are just a few of the many projects
to which Sun contributes. And of course there's Java,
invented by Sun in 1995. Java has become the essential ingredient of
the digital experience for hundreds of millions of people in all
walks of life, all over the planet. Sun recently released the source
code for Java
Platform Standard Edition,
Java
Platform Micro Edition
and Java
Platform Enterprise Edition
under open source licenses.
Of
course, simply providing tools is not enough. You have to provide
training, too. Through the Sun
Academic Initiative,
schools become authorized to deliver training on Sun technologies to
their faculty, staff, and students. The Sun Academic Initiative also
offers non-profit academic institutions access to free Web-based
training and curricula, including courses in the latest Java and
Solaris technologies. The initiative gives students at more than
3,000 institutions around the world a competitive edge as they enter
the workforce.
Sun
also collaborates with universities throughout the world to bring
open content to market. For example, the Java
Education and Development Initiative (JEDI),
a collaborative project with the University of Philippines, aims to
make high-quality, industry-endorsed IT and computer science course
material available for free.
Sun
collaborated with the University of Kent in the United Kingdom and
Deakin University in Australia to develop BlueJ,
a free Java IDE specifically designed to teach object-oriented
programming with Java. BlueJ recently
celebrated more than 3 million downloads. Project
Greenfoot
is a new development environment aimed at bringing programming into
high schools and university entry courses by making it easy to build
graphical interactive applicaitons such as games and siulations.
Again, it's freely available.
Companies
should not charge students for development tools, training and
community, or make them only available on a limited basis. The
Participation Age calls for inclusion and investment in the next
generations to foster innovation. The open source community and Sun
have been doing this for years. We're glad that other companies, like
Microsoft, are realizing this as well. Free and open source software
is the wave of the future. Kids shouldn't be learning anything
else—certainly not closed, proprietary
technology.
So
maybe Microsoft is taking the first baby steps toward open sourcing
their tools and technology so that developers of all ages can have
access to them. We'd be glad to help.
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