Tuesday, February 20, 2001

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Brian Donohue-Lynch Professor Says Colleges Should Eschew Commercial Software By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK Educational technology costs too much, says Brian Donohue-Lynch. But it doesn't have to -- and it might not, if colleges looked beyond the many commercial products now being marketed. Mr. Donohue-Lynch, an associate professor of anthropology and sociology at Quinebaug Valley Community College, in Connecticut, says institutions could save themselves a lot of money if they took advantage of the many free or low-cost products developed by companies, by educational collaborations, and by programmers active in the open-source software movement. Mr. Donohue-Lynch, who previously worked with a number of community and antipoverty groups, is also one of the founders of the World Association for Online Education, an international consortium of educators. His Web site further explains his ideas and suggestions. Q. You say this is especially important for community colleges. Why? A. We're trying to create environments of higher education that are accessible to people who otherwise -- at least in part -- may not be able to have access to it for whatever reason. We're trying to create a more open higher-education environment that takes away as many barriers as possible. There's a spirit where we've already done things with the brick-and-mortar setup of the places to try to eliminate barriers. ... There is a wonderful connection between that and something like the "open source" software movement, where people are trying to do the exact same kind of thing with the development of software and online tools. Q. You've also noted that this approach fits in with the larger "appropriate technology" movement. What's that? A. I had been aware of that from E.F. Schumacher, who had written several books back in the 60's and 70's on appropriate technology. It was a movement that stemmed out of people working in nonindustrialized countries trying to assist people to help themselves develop technologies that were more fitting of the resources and the skills and the needs of the local environment and the local people. It's a wonderful idea, because it says these things have to relate to your culture, they have to relate to your resources, so that it's not somebody coming in with this wonderful technology that you'll never be able to master, or that may never fit your needs. That's gone on for decades, where people have done that with water-filtration systems and sanitation systems and solar-power systems. Now it has in some ways re-emerged, where people in different parts of the world are doing the same thing with information technology -- they're saying we need to identify from the ground up what the local needs are of the people in a particular area, and then develop the technology that they need. Q. Is another way of saying that, in this context, that every community college doesn't need the same I.T. infrastructure that a major research university has? A. That would be one thing. Even with the University of Connecticut, what's appropriate for them is glaringly inappropriate for us in many ways, because it costs too much. We have to be concerned about that kind of cost. Not to say they don't. But they have less problem justifying it than we do. ... In that kind of context for us, part of being appropriate is something that's going to fit our budget as well as something that is going to fit our actual, practical needs. Q. Does that mean community colleges would always have second-class facilities, compared to UConn? A. They shouldn't. We should never go into it with that approach ourselves. ... We could go a lot farther in offering the quality we need if we used the same kind of community-development, collaborative approach in our choices of software, for example, as we've done in the past in just getting the brick-and-mortar institution together. Q. Can you give an example of what's out there? A. Sure. Nicenet. It started probably in 1995, where a group of educators got together and said, This is going to be an important tool -- this Internet stuff -- and it should be as accessible to as many people as possible. ... You go into Nicenet and you can set up your class -- you can set up an online course. Q. So is this an alternative to something like Blackboard or WebCT? A. Exactly. Here you had a group of people who got together and said, We need this -- how do we do it? There's not a bit of advertising on it. And it's free. If community colleges could think in those terms -- and think across state boundaries . . . and across the typical political boundaries that we operate in. If colleges and community colleges said together, We're going to form an association that does this, you wouldn't need more than initially a couple of people who said, OK, we're going to find a couple of servers, we'll mirror the site that we're creating on several servers, and we'll put together a course-management package that anybody can use. You could do that collaboratively at no cost or low cost. ... We're already, in our system, dealing with issues of property rights. If I create an online course, it's most likely I'm not going to own that course when it's done. Anyway I'm not going to be able to make any money on the product itself, because it will be the property of the community-college system. So ownership in that regard still is a real screwy situation to begin with. Q. You seem to be arguing that we should go back to a precommercial age, even as teaching itself has become more commercial. A. Right. If you look back at the promise of the Internet when it was first starting to emerge for people -- in education, certainly -- the promise of it was that it was going to take a lot of the stuff that has gotten so commercial, like the cost of textbooks, [and] take it out of that realm and allow people to have more equal access. If you think of it in a more global perspective, if we do this and it's available as a resource for the people in the United States, at the same exact time it becomes an equal resource for people anywhere in the world who have access to the Internet. ... The knowledge that we're trying to share, the learning that we're trying to share, becomes the collaborative property of everybody, not the commercial property of the people who have been able to be the first to corner the market. Q. How do you get this message out there? The two big education groups that deal with I.T. -- Educause and the League for Innovation in the Community College -- have a great deal of corporate support. A. It's tough because there is that level where it is locked in. ... I'm an anthropologist, and I came into the technology part because I saw the way it was going to be a good resource for people. We have a number of people like that who are able to work with the I.T. people and say, Here's what an educational environment should have. Very often, that's not there. You've got people doing their tech stuff, and you've got people doing their educational stuff, and they don't even know how to ask the right questions of each other. ... It's like two different cultures trying to communicate. ... There is almost an inertia to keep going with the status quo of the commercial direction of software packages, and locking into those, rather than a real collaborative effort to take this stuff at its promise. We could replace just about every computer in our school with [one that has] a free operating system that is as good-quality as Windows. Why aren't we just looking at that opportunity? Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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