Free Libre OpenSource Software implications in computer science education

This article reasons about the positive influence “Free, Libre and OpenSource Software” philosophy has (or should have) on the approach to Computer Science education, it is based on the author’s experience in teaching “Operating Systems” and ”Programming” for quite a few years. The rationale can be summarized by the following: guided Piaget constructivism (human knowledge is continuously and iteratively refined by the interaction between an internal representation of the world and the direct experience of the world itself, helped by a facilitator) is recognized as a good mechanism for learning and should be favored; FLOSS (Free Libre OpenSource Software) is a software philosophy that strongly encourages interaction with the internals of any (free) system; thus a FLOSS attitude (involving both method and subject) should be incorporated in teaching. After a short chronology of “freedom” in the world of software and documentation this article will compare the two main teaching approaches (traditional and constructivist), analyze how FLOSS may help teaching and describe an object model explicitation to help students better understand their learning process.