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A non-stop flow of students interrupts the interview in the Trinity College computer lab. "You can tell it's popular," system administrator and programmer Tim Bell says of the lab. Trinity College, at Melbourne University, threw open the doors to open source in December last year when it discarded its Windows NT network. Educators and technical staff wanted a better, cheaper way to teach the 750 overseas students in its Foundation Studies tertiary bridging course, which introduces Western concepts and computing skills. The old PCs were replaced with Hewlett-Packard e-pcs, referred to as thin clients because they do not not run bulky software on hard disk drives. They boot up with the Debian Linux Free Software operating system either off the network or from flash memory cards. The biggest benefits to educators of open source are cost, simplicity and flexibility, says Trinity ITT manager Richard Wraith. The idea to go with a network-centric open source strategy came to him after spotting Sun Microsystems' Sun Rays at a Canberra conference last year. He says after initial scepticism, students and staff have taken to the network with enthusiasm. "We saw the idea for Sun Rays, although they missed a fundamental point," says Wraith. "The Sun model means you need a high-capacity network and powerful servers." "It needs a gigabit backbone - that's stupid," Bell chimes in. "This makes sense for Sun because they have these big boxes they want to sell but ... it didn't make sense for us because our old fibre backbone will only support 100 Mbps." Although the lab uses Debian with the GNOME desktop environment, Trinity was stuck with its Windows 2000 desktop licences. They sit, unused and unopened, in a cupboard. After being assured the HP clients would run Linux, "we couldn't get through to anyone who could give us boxes without Windows," says Wraith. By booting from the network, desktop administration is streamlined as software is deployed from a central server, saving time and cost. Clients are swapped in and out quickly, and consistent and rigorous security is maintained. The result is a lower total cost of ownership, Bell says. The transition removed the need for Microsoft's Office. Word, Excel and Powerpoint were replaced with open source equivalents AbiWord, GNUmeric, and the Photoshop-like GNU Image ManiPulator (GIMP). Presentation packages are not taught but if they were, KPresenter, part of the free KOffice suite, would be the likely candidate, says Wraith. The team stresses that software selection is not fixed and the easy availability of open source applications means the curriculum can quickly change tack. "We're educating, not training," Bell says. "The argument we're talking about here is: `You have to teach Microsoft Word'. "Why are you teaching people Hamlet? They won't use it in the real world. You can take that argument and put it in another area and it's nonsensical. So why do people insist on using it in computing?," Wraith says. "We do teach them word processing and spreadsheets and GIMP," says Linux guru and computing lecturer Mike Williams, "but we're also teaching the students the concepts behind them." By discovering the concepts, students are less fearful of computers than they might be if they were only narrowly trained to use a program, he says. Williams was brought in by computing lecturer-in-charge Simon Wilkinson, a self-confessed former "Bill Gates man". Wilkinson says his transition from complete ignorance of open source to user and finally evangelist was swift and painless, in part due to his computer science background. "The beauty of open source is we could find applications if we needed to," Wilkinson says. "We can go from one word processor to the next seamlessly. "We're developing a culture where (students) are not afraid to try new things, and that was due particularly because I wasn't scared of anything." Part of that culture is the free, object-oriented programming language, Python. It is the first language to gain wide and growing acceptance since Sun's Java started percolating through businesses and universities. Python's streamlined syntax is well suited to education while its object orientation makes it attractive to commerce. Dutch mathematician Guido van Rossum invented Python in 1990. It evolved from a '80s programming teaching language, ABC, which "subliminally influenced" Python's design, he says. He has lobbied Trinity to release its course materials so other educators can benefit. Code is interpreted so the feedback loop between language and student is not slowed by compiling. This speeds the learning process because mistakes are rapidly corrected and good style immediately reinforced. "Since early 1999, I've been actively lobbying for the use of Python as a teaching language," Van Rossum says. "Before then, I knew that people were teaching Python to beginners succesfully, but it wasn't something that was particularly on my own radar." Python has spread to schools throughout the world. It sports an active e-mail list and Web-based materials to support its spread among educators. Python runs on Windows, UNIX, Linux, DOS, OS/2, Mac, Amiga and hendhelds such as Palm and WindowsCE. Vancouver software tools maker, Active State, is porting Python to Microsoft's .NET initiative. Python exhibits all the hallmarks of a modern language - modules, classes, exceptions, very high level dynamic data types, and dynamic typing - and interfaces to modern windowing systems such as Mac, X11 and Motif. It supports XML for e-commerce and mobile applications. Integrated development environments are widely used. The commercial world has seen the benefits, with Infoseek coding 28,000 lines of its UltraSeek Server search engine in Python. Google, Nortel, ABN Amro, Real Networks, and NASA are among hundreds of commercial and research users. Animators at Industrial Light and Magic used Python to code parts of the new Star Wars trilogy. Disney animators and games designers code multimedia sequences with it. Van Rossum says Python teaches object-oriented programming without the intellectual overhead of other learning languages. "Pascal totally misses the trend of object-oriented programming, which is essential for building or using today's large systems. "BlueJ is Java-based, and the main problem I have with Java as a first language - although it's much better than C++ - is that the students have to memorise a lot of meaningless details in order to do the simplest things. "Every time there's an opportunity to get a weird compilation error due to a missing or misplaced semicolon, teacher and student time is wasted finding, explaining and correcting the problem that could be better spent learning the fundamental concepts of programming and algorithms." "We don't have to deal with vendors or licenses. From a management perspective it's so compelling," says Trinity's Wraith. "We'd rather have skills in-house and invest money in our own people rather than other companies' people. If you're tied to a vendor it takes the control out of your hands." LINKS
trinity.unimelb.edu.au
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