John's Gospel part 2: eleutheros (Jn
8:32). Setting
people free in a digital world
ROME: 30th April 2006 -- I make no pretence to
biblical
scholarship, but I'll stand my ground within the area of
communications. First, though, an interesting historical note -
did you know that Martin Luther was actually Martin Luder? After his
conversion experience, he changed his surname to 'Luther' because it
was akin to the word which Paul (and John) used to express the nature
of the freedman, as opposed to the slave - eleutheros.
Centuries later it took someone in the world of
blogging
and just generally being in touch in the cybersphere to point out that
there is a remarkable convergence of thinking between Catholic Social
Teaching and the point of view of someone like Richard Stallman,
professed atheist and founder of the Free Software Movement.
So where does 'eleutheros' come in to
this? I decided to follow up
the person who made the comment about the convergence between CST and
FSM and even though it appeared on an American-based site (Newsforge)
it turns out he lives near Rome! We are subsequently in touch
(his name is Marco Fioretti), and I
suggest you go to www.eleutheros.it where you can
find an English
version as well, to find out more. But of special interest is
their Manifesto - quite possibly they are not aware that he who chose
the name 'Luther' was also for famous for more than one
Manifesto! Marco and his group have a meeting with CEI, the
Italian Episcopal Commission, in October with some serious and useful
suggestions for bringing the Church's practice into line with its
language in such areas as reducing the digital divide by creating
materials which offer broad, non-cost access. I suggest that we
Salesians could think similarly. From here on we bypass John's Gospel
and just get practical.
Have you realised that you can do
just about everything you
normally do on a computer with FLOSS? FLOSS, by the way, means
Free
(Libre) Open Source Software. The 'libre' is there to remind us
that
it is 'eleutheros' (free and open) that we are talking about, not
necessarily free as in beer. But again, being practical, the
material
below is also free as in beer! I leave aside the question of
operating systems. Office: OpenOffice.org
will do everything, almost,
that Microsoft Office will do and at times better. Want to
print a normal portrait-sized document as a booklet, landscape and
correctly collated for pages - OO.o will do it for you simply. Word
processing: you have NO word or even Open Office
available with you
but you have a permanent connection to the internet - go to Ajaxwrite
or
Writely or Thinkfree Office online and you'll find you
can do document production just the
same way, store it, share it with others, save it as .doc, .ppt,
.pdf if you need
to. Antivirus: Why pay annually for
something
when you can use Avast! They will ask you to register but
not to pay. Browser: No
need to convince most people these days that Firefox or Opera
or Safari are sensible free options. Email:
You can't do much better than
Thunderbird. It has few
if any security concerns. Data compression:
Try
7-zip. It opens more files, faster. Graphics:
GIMPshop will do what Photoshop does. PDF:
Sure,
Acrobat reader is free - but it's heavy. Try Foxit - very
fast and
free. Want to create a document as PDF? OpenOffice
first choice. Otherwise, PrimoPDf or PDFCreator.FTP: Silly to pay when you can use SmartFTP
or
a dozen others. HTML editing if you do that sort
of
thing: Nvu. Education online:
now we're into big things - Moodle allows the production and
distribution of
distance education (BoscoWiki is in fact based on the same
principle).
Web conferencing: did you realise this can be done for
free too? It's called WebHuddle. It really could
save some airfares!
Slides: Instead of the best known proprietary software
you can use OO.o Impress. But why not explore one of S5,
Slidy or just use the Opera browser? If you
have ever got your hands dirty with xhtml, css and javascript it's
easy. If you haven't, stick with OO.o Impress.
And I've barely begun: spyware control(Spybot), file
encryption (TrueCrypt), mindmapping (Freemind),
search
and replace (InfoRapid), content analysis
(AnSWR),
desktop publishing (Scribus, LaTex...)....
But the key question is why
we might act in ways described above. Possibly because Communio
et Progressio said " the man who wants information must have access
to the varied means of social communication" or because the Church
and the
Internet said "Church leaders are obliged to use the full potential
of the computer age...". Proprietary formats and protocols
restrict,
lock in or even prevent end-users from full access and potential.
And
we are educators - do we teach the kids just to push buttons or to
understand what they are doing? Can we do something practical to
reduce the digital divide? We can. Exploring some of the
above options is a step in that direction because they are mostly based
on a principle of broad access, and I am talking about the nature of
the technology, not the fact that they are also free. They are,
to put it in a phrase we should recognize, 'David opportunities'.
JBF
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