Computing Issues at Penn
Today I received an email from the dean of my college, asking:
Dear College Student,
I’m excited to announce the creation of the SAS Computing Student Advisory
Board. The group’s purpose will be to advise SAS Computing and
administration officials on student technology projects and initiatives.
Students on the board will meet monthly, and sometimes ad hoc, with SAS
Computing officials and work closely with the Dean’s Advisory Board to
provide guidance on a variety of technology issues.
…
This is a great opportunity to help the School improve its technology
offerings and better meet the technical needs of its students. I hope you
will consider applying.
So I responded with an application in which I stressed some problems with computing at my university:
There are many computing issues at Penn that I would like to address. Among them are:
Provide a free, powerful office suite (word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software) to all Penn students. Most students at Penn have a pirated copy of Microsoft Office on their personal computers. Students pirate this software because Penn encourages faculty to distribute course materials in Microsoft formats, and students are generally not aware of free alternatives. I have plans to provide all Penn students with a free set of office tools based on international, open standards. This will reduce piracy and give students and faculty more control over their valuable work. It has been Penn’s and other institutions’ policy to combat piracy by threatening students with disciplinary action, or by limiting student freedom with services like Ruckus. This is not a solution. Penn needs to address this issue by giving its students more trust and more freedom, not less of each.
Make Van Pelt library a more valuable resource for everyone. Van Pelt is an extremely valuable resource for students, and I have plans to make Van Pelt more valuable to non-SAS students. For example, last year I started a project in a computer lab in Moore. When I needed to reference a book that was on reserve in Rosengarden, I went to Van Pelt only to find that Van Pelt computers did not have the software I needed to make progress on my project. The only solution other than walking back and forth between Moore and Van Pelt (and it was raining) was to buy a laptop. I should not have had to spend $1,300 just because Van Pelt computers did not have the free software I needed to use.
By creating an atmosphere that fosters all kinds of learning by giving all kinds of students the computing tools they need, Van Pelt could become a place where students of every discipline interact, collaborate, and learn from each other.
On a final note, I would like to emphasize why computing is such an important issue for me. Penn is too focused on relatively insignificant distinctions like Windows versus Mac, Ruckus versus iTunes, or Gmail versus Microsoft Live. For me, there is only one distinction to be made: Penn will either provide tools that put no artificial constraints on students’ learning and growing, or Penn will fail to do this. Penn is failing and I am confident that I can do something about it.
Your move, Quaker.
4 Comments
September 20th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Hey buddy,
Microsoft Office Ultimate edition now costs $60 for students. Believe it or not, it DOES have lots of cool things that none of the free office packages have (try OneNote).
I agree with you that Penn computing could do a lot better. But I think your mixing better computing with free computing. I feel that using software, and getting practice on packages that are used in corporations that will be hiring Penn students is quite important. Anyone looking for a Finance job and isn’t proficient in excel is in as bad a position as anyone looking for a CS job without having experience using a command line interface.
October 16th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Danish misses the point. “Free computing” — computing with freedom — IS better computing. When the University is asking how it can improve its computing policies, talking about freedom is a relevant answer.
Users ought to be free to use OpenOffice or MS Office. They are not free to do so if the University’s policies and practices encourage people to use proprietary formats. To do so is to promote, however inadvertently, a particular suite of software, which is a step backward.
If, on the other hand, the University’s policies and practices were such that open standards were the norm, users would be free to choose MS Office or OpenOffice or any other set of software. This is what David is proposing. Anyone who thought they really needed Excel could still learn it and use it. But using Excel documents in classes or for University business forces everyone else to give up their freedom not to use it.
The same goes for the command line, by the way, although Penn has been pretty good about providing CLI access to students and staff for a long time now. Unfortunately, that’s changing, with new SAS Mail accounts being hosted on Microsoft servers, without shell access. I would add to David’s proposals that real shell access for students be maintained, even if not many are using it, and that students be given greater guidance about how to use the command line. Knowing the benefits of a Unix-y environment can give users a perspective that they don’t currently have about how they use their software — and probably get them more interested in software freedom.
December 5th, 2007 at 11:41 am
It seems like the issue being discussed here is primarily monetary (free as in beer, not free as in freedom). I think the strongest point is that students on campus can have a choice between the existing products and other strong/free (as in beer) products through open source software at little cost to the university, which may provide students with more options (or perhaps less illicit options).
It’s important to keep in mind that system maintenance is /not/ free (as in beer), which can make or break these kinds of propositions.
@Richard: I understand that you’re using freedom to mean freedom of the users to choose which software they’d like to use, but that’s not the traditional use of free in “free software” — /that/ free refers to the freedom to modify and redistribute software. The free that you’re referring to seems to me to be more like “freedom to use alternatives to what the university wishes to provide”, which relates back to the system maintenance caveat I touched on above.
@Danish: There are several free (as in freedom /and/ beer) alternatives to OneNote. One which is notably mature is KDE’s Basket: http://basket.kde.org/
For tablet users, Xournal is beginning to incorporate OneNote-like keyboard-based text input fields: http://xournal.sourceforge.net/
January 18th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
This is an important issue. But that’s very little.
Maybe you should send a similar letter not to only one, but to all libraries you can, especially public ones, using (only) windows systems and mocosoft applications (probably only a very restricted set for their fear to viruses).
A guy that’s going to the Finance Dept in a corporation can buy his mocosoft office suite and/or will be so smart as to learn what he needs for his job in two days.
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