Educating to Free Software, with Free Software: For a democratic and emancipatory education
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7346/-fei-XXI-01-23_10Keywords:
Free Software, Emancipatory Education, Hacker Pedagogy, Platformisation of Education, Digital sovereigntyAbstract
This article aims to highlight the educational implications of a central issue regarding digital technologies: that relating to the type of control that the creators of a program exercise over it, which is expressed by the distinction between Free Software and proprietary software. In the first part of the article, the history of the birth of proprietary and free software will be retraced, also highlighting the distinction between Free Software and Open Source. Starting from this historical retrospective, the second part of the article will consider the educational dimension of the issue, showing how the Free Software approach appears to be consistent with the objectives of an emancipatory education, while that of proprietary software risks instead to accentuate the tendency towards a neo-liberal evolution of educational institutions. Then, two complementary directions for promoting Free Software in education will be proposed. The first consists in the adoption of Free Software by public educational institutions, in order to oppose the current tendency to contract out the management of data and digital infrastructures to private multinationals. The second consists in fostering an educational approach to the study and creation of computer programs that is animated by the philosophy of collaboration and sharing that underlies Free Software and hacker pedagogy.
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