Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

The Greater Paris Regional Council will give out 175,000 USB sticks to students at the start of the next academic year according to Yahoo news. The sticks will contain a range of open source software which will allow them to access their email and other documents on computers at school, home, a friend’s house or in an internet cafe. Unlike other initiatives to reduce the digital divide, the regional council consider this much more effective than providing laptops for all, or computers in homes.

Although the contract to supply the sticks has not been awarded yet, the contract requires the software bundle to be open source. It is expected that they will contain Firefox 2, Thunderbird e-mail client and OpenOffice 2.

The technical issues are of course not trivial, including the prospect of countering the spread of viruses. Although not open source, one solution would be to provide sticks using U3 technology. U3 is a specification for deploying software from a USB flash drive on Windows. Applications are allowed to write files or registry information to the host computer, but this information must be removed when the flash drive is ejected. Software available for these sticks include most major open source applications as well as McAfee VirusScan.

It will be interesting to compare this initiative with others around Europe, not only with regard to its ability to digitally enfranchise, but also its potential to  grow the use of open source software in education.

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