Technology is not your enemy

Knowledge is power. Or rather, knowledge is a way to get through life and society, make informed decisions, be a judge of our environment, be a responsible citizen.

Some children still don’t have access to education. Proper schooling education, or parental education, or other forms. And therefore they are not equipped with the basics that would allow them to build up necessary knowledge.

I’d like to believe that, especially in a country such as Australia, Education becomes available and free for everyone. That’s where technologies such as the Internet come into play, bringing together students and teachers from remote areas.

Of course though, computers never have nor ever will be free, so they are not the only solution to bring education to everyone. But let’s come to the second point of this discussion. There is one thing that we, as teachers, have control upon, to reduce the costs of education: Software. Most people use licensed software, mainly Microsoft, without realising that they pay huge sums of money for things they barely need. There is an alternative to that, and it’s called GPL software: General Public Licence. Essentially it means that these software are free and will remain so until the end of times. Linux is one operating system under this licence, and comes with softwares such as OpenOffice.org (the equivalent of Microsoft Office), thunderbird (e-mail organiser), Mozilla Firefox (a web browser), etc.

If teachers and schools, and more generally, public administrations showed the way and used these software, the public could then be using them in turn, and the general savings would be drastic… therefore generalising the use of computers even more, and probably come to my first point: Spread knowledge !

Filed under: Politics, Technology and tagged Computers, Free sowtware, GPL