Several months ago, I wrote how to make activity designers happy by making it easier to create simple learning activities using popular software development tools, particularly for the Sugar learning environment. Back then, I concluded that Adobe's Flash player and Flex libraries were the proper tools for this purpose. I was wrong.

Adobe's flash and flex are great tools but they will never form the basis of a thriving ecosystem of open-source educational software. This is because Adobe's flash files are distributed in binary format, an immediate disincentive to sharing the source code.

By contrast, you download the source automatically when you load a javascript + html application. The newest version of HTML, HTML 5, now has feature parity with virtually all of flash's multimedia functionality. Combine this with the exponential growth of javascript user interface tools, continued performance enhancement, ubiquitous run-time and we have a toolset that can transform the world of educational software.

Everybody is reinventing the Wheel . . . Again and Again

I didn't intend to become an open-source educational software publisher, it just happened that way. I got involved in the OLPC project roughly 3 years ago to this date and one of the first requests I heard from kids, parents, teachers, government officials, etc. was for localized learning content tied to the national curriculum.

My colleagues and I at OLE Nepal embarked on a long, tortured odyssey into the world of software development. We landed in the current spot where we develop our learning activities in Flash despite many grievances and I am looking into the distance at Javascript + html5.

At first we were a bunch of volunteers trying to create open-source learning activities, then two full-time programmers, and now a team of 10 full-time staff that includes 6 programmers, 2 graphic designers, and 2 educators. We create our own images, our own layout for presenting activities, our own audio files, and our own work process. Whew! That was a lot of work. We wanted to reuse the work of others but found that there are incredibly few open-source resources available for education and among the great projects that exist, such as Etoys and Gcompris, the communities are small and documentation limited.

Now multiply our little effort times 100 and you have what is happening right now in the world of those creating educational software both proprietary and open-source. Think about all that waste! All that duplication of effort! The ones that really lose here are the learners.

The Big Picture

Educational software would really benefit from broadly adopting tools and practices that enable and facilitate sharing and the openness of content. Using javascript + html5 for learning activities is the first step to creating a healthy ecosystem of activity development. Then we can see the explosion of education-specific tools that will drive the dynamism of educational software just like django, ruby-on-rails, dojo, jquery, etc. have done for the wider web.

A World of Walled Gardens

All these proprietary educational apps and open-source educational packages with extensive system dependencies are in essence "walled gardens." This is because they are only functional under a set of very constrained circumstances and there is very little sharing of tools and knowledge between them. This is true of the closed-source applications because they have no interest in sharing and in the open-source tools because they lack the community resources to maintain extensive documentation and often have extensive software dependencies that hinder sharing component libraries.

We need to bust open this walled-garden by utilizing the universal application run-time, the browser, and using an application toolset that makes it hard not to share your code. That is not say that learning begins and ends in the browser. Rather, I advocate a framework that has basic functionality in a regular browser but can also bind to Sugar's sharing features, the Journal, and run completely offline. Activity developers shouldn't have to choose between Mac OS X, Windows, Gnome, KDE, or Sugar. They should be able to create basic activities and then be able to extend them for a particular environment.

Sugar is not impressive until you witness a large # of people using it together, that is where collaboration and sharing facilities really shine. It is unfair to judge Sugar based on a single-user experience. But this makes it promote Sugar to government officials and school officials since they won't see the wonders of Sugar until after they have committed to it. This also hard to sell it to the handful of under-financed groups creating open-source education activities. They want their content to reach the widest audience possible per their limited resources. For that reason also I promote js + html5. Activities created w/ it can run anywhere but can conceivably do much more interesting things in the Sugar environment.

Keep it Simple and Open

Often when I talk with activity developers, the discussion invariably progresses from creating simple activities to creating complex, immersive environments. Kids and adults don't require immersive 3D environments for learning. Combine very simple animation, audio, and interaction and you can teach/learn almost anything. Most learning activities don't need alot of power and advanced functionality. Grammar games, math exercises, simple animations to demonstrate photosynthesis and cartesian geometry. I advocate a "composition of simple tools" philosophy over complex and inflexible environments.

Simple activities are powerful

I am not saying that javascript and html5 are the only tools you should use to create learning activities. Many activity developers are creating powerful activities with great tools such as Squeak and Pygame. I am simply advocating javascript + html5 as the toolset with the lowest barrier to entry for developers and one with tremendous potential.

There are open-source Flash and flex projects but they pale in comparison to the breadth and dynamism of the javascript community, despite the fact that Flash has been around for a long time. This is because Adobe distributes its flash code in binary swf files that are hard to reverse engineer. In contrast, you get the javascript source by default. It is hard to hide your
javascript code!

Think about how many websites like nytimes, bbc, google have to publish their front-end code (if not back-end) for the world to see if they have no desire to share it! This creates a virtuous circle of innovation in javascript libraries. The same is not true of Adobe Flash and Flex. Please note that I am referring to html5, the newest html standard. Prior to html5, it was difficult to create integrate animation and audio into an html document.

This summer I will start working on a particular framework using javascript and html5 for educational activities, well-integrated w/ Sugar, that I call Karma. In the fall I hope to start working on it full-time depending on my personal resources. If you know of an existing javascript framework for education, please let me know. I would love to collaborate.

Bryan W. Berry is the CTO of OLE Nepal and co-editor of OLPC News.