Open System and Students

Keeping the benefit of its students at the center of all technology decisions should be the goal of any public school district's choice between open and closed systems. Open systems present challenges that closed systems do not, but concomitant with those challenges comes flexibility. This flexibility of the open system in addressing student needs at different developmental levels gives a district more choices in providing healthy and appropriate technology education. The Alliance for Childhood (2004) maintains that these choices should be healthy to provide a basis for technology education (Tech, p. 76). If the only tool a closed system provides is not appropriate for a certain age level, the district will feel pressure to stick with devices that may not be in the best interests of the students.

Students Gain Portable Knowledge
An open system can present something of a challenge to a student, at every level. The technology from one level of education to another may vary, more than it would with a closed system. To a certain degree, students will in fact have to learn the tool as well as the content. The trade-off for this time spent on learning the tool, not just the content, is that as a student progresses out of the educational system, they will have a broader grounding in a variety of tools, not just a singular one that they may never use again. What of a student who uses a closed system of Apple products then goes to a college and then a company that uses an open system tool? They will struggle having to learn something they could have had more grounding in earlier in their education. Open systems by nature require that the student learn skills that will be portable to other systems. A student who uses open systems for years then is presented with a closed system can use skills learned in the open system, but a student who only knows a closed system may struggle with the variance of an open system.

Response to Student Needs
The flexibility of an open system enables it to change in response to changing needs in education. As the Editorial Director of THE Journal Therese Mageau says, the iPad was not made with a learning environment in mind, such that those school districts who have chosen this closed system "have to do work-arounds" in order to get the devices to function better for educational purposes (p. 3). While Apple could make changes and could customize their closed system for school districts, they have no incentive to do so; in fact, doing changes like this to suit a specialized client like school districts would run counter to the closed system mentality. The open system, like the Android OS, "is more hospitable to enterprise-level management" (p. 3) and presents much more flexibility and capability to adapt to a school's needs. The closed system demands change of its user to adapt, whereas the open system can change to suit student needs. Google has created a Google Apps for Education that targets schools and enables individual people to create solutions for its OS. A personal case in point of this flexibility in evidence is apparent in something as simple as logging in. Through more than five generations of iPads and several iterations of its iOS, Apple has refused to allow multiple users to use one device. This inability to adapt to several users and Apple's refusal to make this change to suit educational needs contrasts with the open system Android OS, which permits multiple people to log in and fully use the same device.

---

Mageau, T. (2012). Note to tablet companies: Education is an enterprise. T H E Journal, 39(8), 3.

Tech tonic: Towards a new literacy of technology. (2004). Alliance for Childhood: College Park, Maryland.