Chipping away at broken doors
Splintered Door by daveknapikTThe obscenity of vendor lock-in is a great issue that we can discuss in our IT classes. I have done this using some of the material and examples published on wikipedia.
Anybody who supports the recent clever abuse of the standards process and the term “open standard” can join the flat earth society along with stooges that follow vague "industrial standard" terms to specify what is good for student learning. With a big spoon, I will slowly mix them into the same pot with those that mandate particular web browsers to view online content.
Our pluralistic world is a better place because of great teachers that deliver a rich curriculum program that is packed with assorted tools such as PHP MySQL, FileMaker Pro, MS Access, Base and yes, even Dbase III. We can say as much for word processing, languages and programming tools.
Our Cambodia students cannot use Vista / Office2007 with Khmer but happily now engage with their language with OpenOffice3.0. When I mentioned this once to a department rep, the remark "Who cares about Cambodia" made my blood boil.
Please, lets not fall into the trap of mandated solutions and centralised school controls on media formatting. We should instead encourage an honest debate about open standards and good practice in our IT profession.