Interview with Vedran Vucic
De Musix
Contenido |
Spanish version (español)
Haz clic aquí para la versión en español / click here for the spanish version.
Photo from bbrv.blogspot.com
English Version
Hi Vedran, these interviews are aimed at learning more about Free Software and education. It would be nice to introduce yourself to our readers. Can you talk us about your interests, studies, job and your relationship with Free Software and education?
I worked with GNU/Linux since approx 12 -13 years. I am involved in various ways in civic movements in the last 18 years. I think that it is essential that free software is present in schools because knowledge gained in freedom may guarantee further development of freedom. If opposite, I can say, prospects may be rather dark. It was thought provoking and striking when kids did not believe that there is free software since they thought that Microsoft's way of treating the software is the only way to understand the use of software.
One student of music school could not believe that there is free software so he wrote one short "readme" file and placed it on a Fedora Core 7 desktop, reading: "Our guest told us that there is so powerful software like CSound and he told us that it is free. That is not possible". That is a typical example about how the restrictive licensing done by Microsoft may have detrimental effects on education and approach to software for the youth.
The kids in schools started to use free software with great enthusiasm and even I can say that they learn to use it much faster than I expected. We created a site in Joomla on which we post ideas and news relevant to use of free software in music education.
An excellent example is a secondary school (high school) in the city of Novi Sad and teacher of computer science Mrs. Ksenija Piljevic who is very enthusiastic about use of free software in curriculum. She use free software a lot in her classes and I am going often to help her to install GNU/Linux, learn to use applications and present to the kids how to use free software. It was very interesting when they saw the source of MIDI modules and realised that someone knows to write text that set computers to communicate with MIDI devices and that such a knowledgeable person(s) allow everyone to see the code.
--Is there another organisation like GNU/Linux Centar in Europe? Did you took the idea from another place?
There are other organisations too, but I think that we have to cooperate more. To be honest, Linux guys from USA and Canada were more open for cooperation. The brilliant example of openness are people in Extremadura (Spain). I am planning to go there in April and to offer cooperation and support from us. It will be my pleasure to help them and present their model here in Serbia.
--Why do you do all these social activities? I mean, you maybe could be comfortable at any other site, doing only "personal" works.
I am aware that words such as comfort, personal, individual became perverted and they turned to be luxury-as-power, selfish, ignorant. I tend to stick with original meanings of those words so my personal satisfaction is much higher when I hear from the teacher when she says with obvious excitement: "I succeeded to record successfully two clarinets and one piano with two mics in the Audacity that you installed". It is great when you see kids growing with more knowledge, ability to do many great things and that they develop sense for justice. That is so encouraging, refreshing, inspiring for me and I cannot see now something that will be more "important" for me. I have seen a lot of people in misery and with injuries on their souls due to hardships we have had during the last 15 years. But, when you see joy and hope on their faces that is the most important.
Serbia was affected with split off of Yugoslavia and there were ethnic wars and victims and destruction in the region.
-- How do you see the current situation of the implementation of Free Software in education at Serbia?
Government should be more decisive and take additional efforts to create concise policy which will guarantee that teachers and kids should be supported and supplied with manuals, software. Thus, the effort of Linux Center is not sufficient, since we are creating models of work, but real work should be done in implementation of those models nationwide in all schools. However, some ministries are open for testing of implementation of free software in a variety of projects that may help development of better education system, inclusive society...
-- I know that GNU/Linux Centar have gone all around Serbia, wired up the schools, taught the teachers and students how to use GNU/Linux, taught the teachers and students how to use various on-line educational resources ranging from blogs to ATutor... The serbian state has no computing projects for education?
There are pretty rare uses of Moodle in some cases (Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, some professors at the Faculty of Medicine) and some faculties are using proprietary software packages. However, distance learning will become fashion and more and more people will use it. But, our idea is that it should be free software and accessible for people with disabilities. It is not necessary to have two persons with shoes of 1000 US$ and the rest with bare foot. Our approach is based on need that everybody should have shoes to walk on the path of learning, science in freedom. I am currently writing a manual about how to install ATutor, MediaWiki, TikiWiki, Joomla, B2evolution, phpBB3, phpList and Coppermine as education web based tools with aim to help teachers to improve their teaching toolkit and introduce new methods.
--Are you trying to convince the politicians at the government about using Free Software at the schools, or the only way for this goal is to work from non governmental organisations, from " outside"?
Actually, some ministries are becoming more open to free software, but still there is not a well designed implementation strategy. One of the reasons for that is that still many "democratic" politicians think that everything should be purchased. Some state institutions are more and more open to listen about free software whereas some others are completely ignorant. Thus, I can say that the situation is very much heterogeneous. On one side there is a person in the Ministry of Education that informed some journalists about our work while there are others that are really ignorant and clueless. Still, there is a lot of work to be done and I think that leadership of Extremadura may serve as an excellent example about what results may be achieved when someone is brave and clever enough to make a good decision.
-- Does another GNU/Linux user groups participate in promoting Free Software at Serbian's schools?
There are some groups that are willing to help schools, but I think that "helping schools" is a very much complex thing. Actually, it is needed to train teachers to use (free) software, to completely change their philosophy of understanding freedom and technology, to help them to develop manuals with detailed descriptions about how to use certain software, distributions, create support for, etc. That is a very demanding work and it cannot be done only by saying: "free software is good for you". Thus, multidisciplinary work is needed and it is necessary that donors, ministries and NGOs understand the complexity of that effort and prepare themselves accordingly.
--Do you know about examples from other countries such as Venezuela (the pilot plan with the ClassMate PC and RXART) or Spain (the example of Extremadura)? (It would be interesting for this research to get in touch with people from many other countries)
I am informed on those examples, but I would rather be consequent to the idea of free software and offer open hardware solutions to those countries and let them do what they want. Here we have this situation: for some schools with approx 400 students there are just a couple of personal computers. On the other side there are primary schools in which kids learn to type on machines with 3GHz CPUs and 512 megs of RAM. Companies such as Genesi deserve better treatment from many governments and inter-governmental agencies. Open hardware solutions, free software, science and edu-blogs and open access repositories are, from my point of view, essential points for freedom of development for many people in the world.
-- What could be the best model at Serbia: OLPC, Classmate PC, thin clients? I mean: the model for teaching computer 1 to 1 appears very experimental and expensive...
OLPC is great and I support that idea very much, but I think that all solutions for all countries should be based on open hardware approach and that open hardware should be given a greater opportunity to test itself in fostering development.
-- Do you think that, necessarily, an educational establishment which implements Free Software should change their organisational forms to a more horizontal and / or participatory way?
Absolutely. It is interesting to mention that I help these days some NGOs to use free software in creating communication channels that should be accessible to people with disabilities and that as far as they go more deep in practise and use of software they understand more and more that free software is not yet another technology. It is a social paradigm too.
That change is not fast and that is the reason why I said that introducing free software is not so easy and fast. The real genuine changes take place a bit later and a lot of work need to be done to gain real results. Otherwise, free software will be yet another tool which is not in accordance with idea of free software.
-- The years have passed and we are facing a considerable growth in adoption and development of free software worldwide. For example all schools in Russia will migrate their Windows systems to GNU / Linux, . Do you think that your country and others can do something like this?
I think that my country can do it. But, still some ministers are surrounded by incompetent and clueless advisers. In addition, software vendors are bribe prone which jeopardise democratic developments. Thus, introduction of free software should be based on the idea that the country should be developed from within and that people should be masters of their destiny.
-- What are the most important applications to be used on schools, and in which sectors/courses? (For instance: OpenOffice at administration, etc.)
I think that openOffice, GIMP, Firefox are more and more present. However, our work in music school shows that many applications such as Audacity, Rosegarden, Rezound, Ardour may be used with very satisfactory results.
-- How do you evaluate the GNU/Linux Centar's work till now? Also, do you have some remarkable anecdote?
Evaluation of our work shows that we are over-worked people. I asked one teacher that lives 300km from Belgrade about the idea that I can come to her city by train that leaves Belgrade at 3AM in the morning and arrives at her city at 7AM. She said: Will you sleep only 3-4 hours and wake up at 2AM?" I answered: No, I will work until 2.30AM, get on train, have some sleep in train and work with you the whole day in order to be sure that my help is efficient". She said: You Linux geeks are crazy. You do not sleep at all!" ha ha ha. that is fun. Yes, we work a lot. The Internet is our country. We do not accept frontiers and we support each other generously 24 hours a day. When I recently met one guy whom I trained to use free software:" What is your job now after the school?" He said: "Everything that I learnt in school fell apart except free software which is a living thing. Without free software I cannot imagine my work."
-- If there is something else you want to add, come on.
We are working a lot on web accessibility projects here and use of free software in schools. We like Musix GNU+Linux a lot and kids are using it with joy.
Related Links
http://bbrv.blogspot.com/2007/04/free-as-in-freedom.html
http://e-society.org.mk/portal/component/option,com_rsgallery2/Itemid,19/catid,7/lang,en/
http://www.cityofwomen.org/2006/en/program/vucic
http://muzika.gnulinuxcentar.org
http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2008/02/openness_is_essential_freedom.php
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