FOSS study in education

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

Hi,

this will be slighly offtopic, and only relevant for FOSS advocates
interested in IT education at schools, and universities.

I stumbled over an article [1] written by Samps Okholm from Grant High
School in Mt. Gambier, South Australia. He writes:

  "Studies we carried out [...] showed that users' preference for
applications to do specific tasks, is closely related to when in their
education they were introduced to the applications. 

  A concrete example: Half a photography class was subjected to Adobe
Photoshop for image manipulation, the other half was using The Gimp.
Halfway through the term, the students swapped 'weapons'. The study
showed, that the ones who were initially using Photoshop didn't like
Gimp, and the 'Gimp-borne' students thought that Photoshop was crap."
	
Of course, this is something a lot of people suspected. However, this is
the first experiment carried out to prove the hypotheses. Unfortunaly,
it seems to have been carried out informally.

If such a study is done with formal scientific backing, it will
be a wonderful argument for advocates around the world. Using usual 
marketing methods, the difference in attitude or willingness to pay
introduced by education can be made explicit.

If you're wondering why this is relevant think of the headline:
"Study proves: Education increases monopoly power of software vendors."

I've sent this to the list in the hope that someone reads it with
contacts to researchers who could design a proper questionnaire, or
schools willing to redo the experiment, or people interested in funding
such a study.

Cheers, 
Claus


[1] http://unplugd.com/junkyard/?q=node/1