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Live CDs: icebreakers to open sourcing Indian Education

Sangeeta Naik argues that live CDs can make a significant difference to education in India.

The intersection of technological advances and social protocols has evolved into a new socio-economic paradigm symbolically referred to as ‘flattening of the world’ as envisaged by the three times Pulitzer prize winner New York Time columnist Thomas Friedman through his book ‘The World Is Flat - A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century’ (2005).

A flattened world is considered as a phenomenon wherein every individual or company across the globe empowered with technology is offered a level playing field- free of barriers of any kind. The flattening process is believed to be guiding the process of globalisation through a phase wherein everyone is offered an equal chance to come on par with everyone else socially and economically by deploying suitable technologies. Open sourcing is considered as one amongst the top ten forces that are responsible for this flattening process.

In open source software also known as free software, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), Free and Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) or just Libre Software the code is freely available for studying, making changes and passing those changes to others thus giving the users both ethical and practical benefits.

Most importantly the structure of the GPL license under which the open source software’s are released ensure that free copying and improvement to the software would make prices become more affordable compared to highly priced proprietary software.

After considerable initial apprehensions the corporate world has slowly risen to appreciate and leverage the benefits of open sourcing. Education systems for which the movement offers enormous benefits are expected to be the next in line to leverage the advantages accrued through the movement.

Significance of open sourcing for India

Open sourcing throws open a plethora of opportunities for a country like India where intellectual resources abound in unison with scarcity of monetary and material resources. A UNESCO report on ‘The role of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and their application in India’ effectively sums up the reasons why open sourcing ought to be considered best fit strategy for a developing nation like ours. Affordability of open source to a large section of the Indian population is the key plus point. The next significant factor is that this software can be localised as per our needs and requirements. Thirdly due to low entry barriers a wide range of developers can venture into the software creation and deployment arena. This is where our large intellectual capital can make a difference. And last but not the least sharing of ideas over mailing lists, working collectively over geographical distances and the openness of this approach makes it possible to achieve much more than what would be possible in a proprietary copyright controlled environment. Open sourcing would effectively facilitate building of solutions for the benefit of the entire society by collaborative contributions from the community itself.

As President of India Dr. Abdul Kalam consistently advocated there is a dire need for “open source code software to come and stay in India in a big way for the benefit of our billion people.”

Open sourcing in Indian Education

India has the second largest education system in the world comprising of over 888,000 educational institutions, over 179 million students and more than 2.9 million teachers. To modernise this vast system by empowering it with appropriate technology tools ensuring that equal access to technology is granted to all the components of the system is a huge task. If proprietary software is looked at as the only way out in reaching to this goal we will have to wait and wait till such time that we are ready to make a huge economic commitment for the cause. And this wait can surely be an indefinite one, further widening the digital divide and affecting all the developmental dynamics of this country. To ensure that this does not happen, empowerment of the system as a whole is essential.

The magnitude of this task of modernising the Indian education system warrants the deployment of innovative thinking and radically new approaches. If the next generations of Indian are to be equipped for knowledge economy they will have to be geared to be active producers of information rather than passive consumers. And this is possible with the help of open source as an educational resource. The model inherently provides an ideal framework for the process of interdisciplinary collaboration of educationists and technologist. Such collaborations on an all encompassing scale are the need of the hour of our education system and will go a long way in offering the system a sound holding.

For the Indian education system this approach of creating and disseminating knowledge through a community driven and collaborative process as opposed to the one monopolised by a few individuals or a company it will prove to be an ideal one.

Since anything developed under the open source model can be shared freely it can help in rapid dissemination of educational materials to India’s vast population of students. FLOSS licensing has already presented a wealth of adaptable software. With localisation and enhancements this can drive technology adoption in the education system. This alone will help the country save a huge amount that would otherwise be spent on proprietary operating systems, software and content. Eventually the system can graduate from this role of being primarily a consumer to that of being an active producer of authentic open source content for the global community.

The hitch

Despite the win all situation which the open sourcing philosophy has on offer we have to accept the hard fact that free and open source technologies are still far from realising a relevant position in the comfort zone of a common Indian user. The reasons for this could be many. First and foremost it is considered tough to install and deploy the open source environment in toto. The installation process is viewed as cryptic. Compatibility with commonly used proprietary software’s is another issue which also gets raised. More significantly the absence of contractual guarantee of performance in many an open source products introduces an unnecessary uneasiness in their use. For many the open source environment doesn’t seem to match with what one is used to seeing around in terms of the commonly used proprietary software.

Yet another hindrance is that the learning curve is assumed by many to be a steep one. It is widely accepted that the people in the free software community usually do a lot of self learning, acquire and exchange knowledge through discussion forums, by visiting Web pages etc. However not many teachers or students feel comfortable with this learning model and are discouraged to try free software.

The apprehension is in shifting from the comfortable and familiar looking realm of proprietary software to that of an unfamiliar open source one. But experiences of open source users worldwide have proven the effectiveness of the philosophy. It has also been observed that the toughest barrier in exposing users to the power of open sourcing is the initial icebreaking. Once the initial apprehension is taken care of and confidence is built in things could be comparatively easier. In fact for many it becomes a way of life. Live CDs is one such technology which can be used to offer this icebreaking advantage.

Live CDs

A “Live CD” is a bootable CD, which contains pre-configured software that allows a user to be productive without accessing any other hard drives (unless the user wants to store information). They range from emergency rescue and system diagnostics CDs to domain specific projects. Each of these projects has a unique feature, a merit and a niche to fill ranging from demonstrating the power of Linux to unsuspecting users of other operating systems to very highly specialised domain specific applications.

Live CDs in Education

In the education realm Live CDs can be looked at through two different perspectives. One they would act as powerful ice breakers to expose teachers and students to the open source concept without bringing in any uneasiness. This will help pull those on the verge into the open source bandwagon. Secondly sharable contents across disciplines can be created in a more or less technology neutral form through the medium of Live CDs and disseminated across the system.

An important group of CDs is aimed at the education sector. To cater specific domains such as education, Live CDs replace or augment general applications with collections of specialist software, including those for scientific computing, astronomy, bioinformatics etc allowing students and scientists to carry around a dedicated workstation on a CD.

The freedom on which the free software community is based has allowed the creation of an ever-expanding selection of live CDs. Here’s a quick review of some of application specific as well as generic live CDs.

Education Specific Live CDs

• VigyaanCD - Vigyaan is an electronic workbench for bioinformatics, computational biology and computational chemistry. It has been designed to meet the needs of both beginners and experts. VigyaanCD is a live Linux CD containing all the required software to boot the computer with ready to use modelling software. VigyaanCD v1.0 is based on KNOPPIX v3.7. You can directly run VigyaanCD by booting the computer from CD-ROM without installing anything on your hard-disk. When done, simply remove the VigyaanCD and reboot the computer. Your computer will boot normally.
• Quantian - This Live CD is a math-intensive Linux distribution for Intel-based systems. Quantian offers its users a Scientific Computing Environment. Quantian consists of a large number of programs of interest to applied or theoretical workers in quantitative or data-driven fields. There are some quantitative, numerical or scientific programs comprising of computer-algebra systems , bioinformatics tools, quantitative finance library, Grass a geographic information system; some data visualisation systems etc.
• Bioknoppix – This Live CD consists of applications targeted for the molecular biologist. Besides using some RAM, Bioknoppix doesn’t touch the host computer, being ideal for demonstrations, molecular biology students, workshops, etc. The Bioknoppix live CD consists of a host of tools such as Artemis a genome viewer. EMBOSS a suite where you will find around 100 programs (applications) covering areas such as Sequence alignment, Rapid database searching with sequence patterns, protein motif identification, including domain analysis , Nucleotide sequence pattern analysis etc.
• Linux Genealogy – This Live CD of the GRAMPS project contains bootable Live Linux environment and added Linux Genealogical software.
• Dyne:bolic – This Live CD is developed to meet the “needs of media activists, artists and creative people as a practical tool for multimedia production”. With this live CD, you’re able to both manipulate and broadcast audio and video over the Internet. You will be able to record, edit, encode and stream audio and video using the devices normally installed in modern computers. Dyne:bolic recognizes the hardware devices (sound, video, firewire, and USB) and offers a vast range of software for multimedia production, streaming, 3D modelling, photo, peer-to-peer filesharing, web browsing and publishing, word processing, email, encryption, and networking. Dyne:bolic includes lots of software, result of the great work being done by the GNU/Linux free software community thru the past 15 years.
• Freeduc Primary – A live CD for primary schools.

The list of live CDs touched upon in the preceding discussion is just the tip of the iceberg. For motivated and enthusiastic educators as well as learners there is a treasure trove of resources spread across the globe ready to be innovatively utilised. For the technically inclined it throws open an opportunity of collaboratively generating digital content for the benefit of the educational community irrespective of the platform. There are easy to use tutorials and guidelines on how to go about creating a live CD with minimal efforts and technical know how.

If used innovatively Live CDs can aid in a big way in exposing our teachers and students to the advantages of this unique phenomenon of open sourcing. This in turn will initiate a more informed choice on their part.

If our education system manages to graduate to a phase wherein open sourcing is welcome with open arms it is bound to offer a significant advantage to the Indian society. There is an unparalleled advantage of ushering in a new value system in the society of building communities by creating and sharing wealth and knowledge.

The author is a Faculty in Computer Science, ASC- Goa University.
sangeeta1_in@yahoo.com