This week, I read an article “The emergence of Open-Sources software in China” published by Pan Guohua and Bonk Curtis J. which studies the open educational resources in China. It’s an interesting article, because we usually read articles related to western countries and this is one which specifically related to Asian country.
According to the article, the initial driving force for developing open educational resources in China is the financial concern. Because individual schools can only have a limited budget, some schools decided to cooperate together. They collect their budget and adopted open sources software designed by western countries. Though through the use of open sources software, the financial problem solved, they decided to localize the open-source software systems from western countries. In other words, Chinese scholars want to customization the western open-sources software into Chinese (Pan & Bonk 2007). Different from other western countries, the development of open sources software is supported by government organization in china. They develop Red Flag Linux, and plan to adopted this system national wide.
The development of open source software brings a lot of benefits to students. In the traditional setting students can only use their own school resources, but now they are able to get the access to more resources from other schools or institutions. In addition, the huge population of China also means that more talents can participate in open source software development and create more educational resources. This is now the society of “Give & Take” not “Hide & seek”
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2 comments:
I appreciate your viewpoint regarding open educational resources. Those of us that grew up in the U.S. are so brainwashed by the Microsoft machine that we often don't think about other ways of doing things, or the financial burden that purchasing expensive software can place on school and companies less prosperous areas.
I do have the same feeling as yours. Since I started using computer, the interface I know about was Mircrosoft. No till I came to USA, I have the chance to know MAC. Sometimes, I feel we live in a mainstream society, and easily ignore somethings outside the mainstream.
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