UK Schools Told to Dump Microsoft 646
kubla2000 writes "The current issue of the Times Educational Supplement is running an article in which they cite a report by the British Educational Communications and Technology Association telling primary and secondary schools in the UK to dump Microsoft Operating systems and products in order to save millions. In a report to be published next week, obtained by The TES, Becta will highlight schools which have turned to free software instead of the market leader's products. Becta does not name Microsoft in its analysis. But almost all schools use some of the company's products. Their conclusion? Schools running OSS are saving 24% on average per pc versus those running proprietary systems."
Great opportunity for OSS (Score:4, Interesting)
Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Schools should not be Microsoft training centres anyway. We pay for schools with our Council Tax, and this particular Council Tax payer resents having my hard-earned spent on consolidating a foreign monopoly.
Chicken or the Egg? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Discount (Score:4, Interesting)
This report does NOT matter (Score:2, Interesting)
Into the minds of the young (Score:5, Interesting)
Computer is PC and PC is Windows.
This is actually a really bad sign, since one tends to like what you are used to. If you learn on the one OS and get into computers only on this road, than everything else you cross by later will only be 'Not as you know it.'
We hear that argument ever so often, especially in the context of Office programs. People dislike OpenOffice not because it does not do the job for them, but because '...it is not like MS-Office'.
'In Word I can do this and that...'
Using MS Products in schools cements their Monopoly in a way that no other marketing campain could achieve.
-jsl
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Not so easy to dump M$ (Score:0, Interesting)
1. There are a lot of computers to reconfigure. A high school has more workstations than the average small business and far fewer sysadmins per machine. The cost in time of switching all the machines to Linux or BSD would be vast.
2. Her school has special software for controlling access to resources. You need this in a school full of inventive and downright evil kids. The current s/w, which is rather good at its job, is build on M$ protocols and would have to be replaced. Doubtless you could build something similar on Linux for zero capital cost, but it would take ages and you'd only make it secure after the kids had exploited all the initial loopholes.
3. UK business want shool leavers trained explicitly in Windows and M$ Office tools as that's what the businesses use. Schools used to use non-M$ computers, and employers found that school leavers couldn't handle the real-world norm.
4. Schools _teach_ ICT. If the ICT curriculum says "teach them M$", then, duh, you have to have enough Windows boxes around to do that. If the school has the liberty to teach use of OSS systems instead, then the change has to be phased in so that students part-way through school aren't disrupted.
5. The students do their homework on home PCs which are almost always Windows. If the school has Linux or BSD machines, then the work and the files needs to be perfectly portable between M$ and OSS. That simply isn't the case (yet) and no amount of OSS evangelism chances that fact. In fact, schools are a good metric for when OSS and M$ become _really_ interchangeable.
It's about time! (Score:4, Interesting)
What this really does do, though, is break the lock step routine that has been going on for a while -- the schools teach MS specifics because Business uses MS, while Business says they use MS because that's what new hires know, so the new hires won't waste a lot of time having to learn new tricks.
I hope to see more of this, because for too long MS has been "locking" students into their way of thinking and of doing things. Bravo for the folks with enough courage to stand up to the MS juggernaut!
Linux for Schools Project (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.lfsp.org/ [lfsp.org]
It offers a little free utility called "createusers" that I wrote for adding and removing user accounts en-masse. As well as basic login accounts, createusers optionally also sets up corresponding Apache personal webspace in the home directory, Samba account, MySQL or PostgreSQL personal database and per-user disk quota.
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:3, Interesting)
Your post should be given full merit but... a lot of jobs today require computers unlike in the past. You didn't suggest it, but I think computer use should be scaled back alltogether, used sparingly and not thrown around as though it will solve all of educations problems. I'm at college and even there we have to do it the old fashioned way before we touch the various rooms full of lovely powermacs, macs, emacs and various scanners or even the college network. The understanding is that you must be able to perform without a computer first, though it is simply a tool just like a paintbrush or T-square, abeit more complicated however.
If they teach this at A-level (but I do a Art and Design course) then that thinking should be carried down to secondary and primary schools as well.
Re:Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, my point is that the university seems to be doing a good job training technical people (programmers, physics, oh and I used some Unix True 64 (whatever that is) dumb X terminals in a maths unit...again using MATLAB
I think most of that was just random babble...meh, I'm too drunk to care
What about the staff training? (Score:5, Interesting)
The report may well be perfectly valid, but I'm a little suspicious of it without further information, if only because the main cost normally hyped for Open Source Software tends to be the training cost. (I'll welcome being corrected.) From the article:
It's difficult to judge this because the report hasn't been released and the article isn't very specific. I'd be interested, however, to know what kinds of prior skills the people at the 15 OSS schools had before they began, versus those at the 33 Microsoft schools. For all we know from the article, these 15 schools had the only 15 staff who are at all familiar with open source software in the entire UK education system. This is unlikely, but my intended point is that the actual cost could be dependent on what skills are available to the school within their existing staff.
If the IT staff at the OSS schools were already confident with installing, configuring and maintaining OSS software, it may be that it was no problem and they could have the low-cost benefits of free software. For all we know, however, the staff at the Microsoft schools might have been regular teachers with more important teaching responsibilities than how to administer the computers. Using Microsoft software would clearly cost more, but what matters is how it'd compare with training all the necessary staff to use OSS.
Staff at Microsoft schools may have had little or no OSS experience, and almost no hope of successfully setting up or administering an open source system without some serious help from an expert. This would be compared with plugging in a pre-installed Microsoft PC similar to their home PC, and running a few setup programs for various educational software, that is.
What's the current status of random people being able to randomly install and use open source software in useful ways? Without having had to go through an installation from that point of view for some time, it's hard for me to know.
Anyway, this isn't to say that the OSS installation and configuration issues couldn't be bypassed in some other way that might still work out to be cheaper. Perhaps it's still not too expensive to simply train people. Alternatively, depending on how serious the curriculum was, an education department might offer a service to configure computers for schools, and perhaps even administer them remotely.
Re:Excellent news, but replacements for s/w? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Into the minds of the young (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly, and it goes much deeper than that. My girlfriend (there goes my slashdot reputation) was absolutely amazed that I had something non-Windows. (I run: Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and also Windows 2000). Before she knew me she bought a (much too expensive) Windows machine for her needs. She only got trouble with it. She was absolutely amazed at what my iBook could do. Needless to say that she was pretty much pissed that she didn't know about Apple. Why didn't she know? Simple: she schooling she had was Windows-only. Even though some teachers told her to get a Mac, it didn't stick with her. (After all she never saw one before meeting me).
So when the time came to buy a computer, she looked at the advertisements. The only thing you see there were... you got it: Windows machines. She bought that (and upon the advice of her former boyfriend, she bought the most expensive one that was sold at the time). For the same price she could have gotten a fully loaded Apple. She doesn't need much: she's a kindergarden teacher and has to write the occasional letter to parents and surf the web and email. The machine she had (before buying her new computer) would have been more than adequate with some added RAM. (The old machine now is used by her mom after I added RAM and reinstalled it... It works *just fine*)
Only after I cleaned her new machine and secured it (which took a lot of time) her machine is now usable. I already tried to convince her to buy a Mac Mini to replace her P-IV machine, but she doesn't want to spend money on new computer hardware anymore. Very understandable.
As for Microsoft in education. I am an (apprentice-)teacher since january this year. Everything I (have) to teach is 100% Microsoft. The school-programme itself never mentions "Microsoft" per se, but if you read the programme and know what software is installed on the machines, you know exactly what is meant. Up until now, I managed to survive with my own Office 97 copy to prepare courses. Alas, I now have to do databases, which means "Access". I found out the hard way that Access 2003 (what the school runs) is incompatible with Access 97. Today I asked the computer-department to get a copy of Office 2003 in order to upgrade my own machine. (Note: this is completely legal in the context of their contract). It absolutely sucks. Personally I write all my stuff (courses, tests, etc...) in OpenOffice, but course preparation without the software that is run at school is pretty much impossible. I fear that Office 2003 is going to a dog on my P-III 600Mhz laptop that I have dedicated for schoolwork.
Of course, schooling in this country is completely sold to Microsoft. :-( I'd rather teach the kids the basics, but as I understood, the school programmes are written by asking companies what they want from people that have a certain diploma. The companies obviously want Microsoft, because that will give them people that are nearly immediately productive. It's sad... Perhaps some day this will change, but for now I'm stuck with that kind of mentality.
Makes me wonder why I actually wanted to become a teacher. :-((
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:3, Interesting)
Ditching MS software would enable them to hire one or two more teachers. This will give the kids smaller class sizes and get better teaching as a result.
Also their parents wouldn't have to fork over a load of cash for OS + AV + Net Nanny + antispyware + office software + drawing software and so on.
With MS you get the OS and not much else, with any decent Linux distro you get everything you need.
My kids (8 + 4) can use MS and Mandriva with ease (I set it up that way and it didn't take much) They can use Openoffice and MSOffice interchangeably. They both prefer Mandriva, which suits me just fine - less work to look after the setup.
Kids need to learn word processing and spreadsheets not Word or Excel, there's a world of difference between the two.
Oh and my kids have to handwrite their stuff first, and it has to be spelt correctly, with good grammar before they go near the word processor, and they are not allowed to use calculators (or phones for that matter). Some of you Slashdotters need spelling lessons more than the kids at school.
a step in the right direction (Score:5, Interesting)
only one of the windows machines is covered by their office licence, and their other licences for educational software. the other two windows machines were pretty useless until i installed abiword on them.
the SuSE machines are definately the most popular amongst the kids (aged 10-11); partially due to the selection of games that came with the distro, but mostly because its something new and different. this effect will obviously ware off after a couple of months but it will be interesting to see which machines they favour in the long run.
The worst that can happen is that they'll know that non-MS operating systems exist.
I work in a School (Score:2, Interesting)
But when teachers use Frontpage (regardless of the best tool for the job) to teach the basics of web design, then it stops being just an issue of what's on the desktop, and now a job of retraining to use whatever would replace it, and also a relacement of 30 x "front page and the web" books.
There are numerous educational programs that do not run on anything other than Windows, there may be alternatives - but re-training, resources and purchasing of new sftware will quite easily eat that 24% saving.
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:But should we be dump it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Word or other data-entry related skills are then used by those providing cheap and basic data-entry and burger-flipping services for my kids.
I do think it is very good that the western world is dumbing down the education system. Very good indeed, the more people are trained to do basic data-entry instead of real work the less competition my kids will have.
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:5, Interesting)
For Linux there are educational distributions (in Germany for instance ask Schulen ans Netz e.V. [schulen-ans-netz.de]), which take care of the special problems of educational computer labs. You can create workable computer images with ease, and without violating the license agreements that came with the software. You have a very good set of computer work related tools already within every distribution, so there is no cost for additional software.
And: for a school it could be very important: You keep a lot of computer players out of the lab and thus are freeing seats for people who might actually do their homework or class projects after regular hours.
shock horror. no microsoft didnt do me harm! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Great opportunity for OSS (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Discount (Score:5, Interesting)
MS WANTS it's software in education so that Windows and MS Office are the only things young people entering the workforce know. Apple's educational programs are really the only thing that kept them alive all these years (although OS X has finally given them a true technological edge over MS so it's not Quite as important, but is still important. Pre-OS X MacOS was truely horrible.)
bollocks (Score:5, Interesting)
These come with a client licence for XP as well.
Bash MS all you want, suggest schools use Linux/Open Source, but don't set up a straw man argument that's clearly false.
Well.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Then you have individual boroughs who will ONLY supply/support RM stuff, so you're fighting a losing battle.
The borough I work in has no non-MS schools to my knowledge, there are no borough tech's supporting non-MS stuff (in fact, support for any non-RM stuff is almost nonexistent hence my employment). Borough support has been effectively removed for any school which dares go non-RM (I kid you not).
Schools with even just plain Windows 2000/XP setups are abandoned and have to employ people like me to do silly things like add printers, block websites, fix paper jams, etc. as well as keeping the network going in all weathers.
Convincing a school in such a borough to go non-RM (and therefore possibly non-MS) means possibly removing any sort of borough support, having to coexist machines (the borough I work for can do finances, classlists etc. **only** via a piece of arcane Windows/DOS software), replacing every piece of software and all their paid-for expensive site licenses with an equivalent via Linux, or getting Wine to work with programs that cause no end of trouble even in Windows-only environments.
Training of staff/students is a minor matter, despite some posts on here, because most primary school teachers are nowhere near proficient on computers (I've met 2 or 3 across 6 different schools, and that's using a definition of "can install printer on standalone Windows PC by self given instruction manual and driver disks"). Some staff I know have cheat-sheets for almost every action from saving to printing to logging in.
Change the OS, change the cheat-sheet, the teachers still fumbles along without too many problems. You can actually watch them and see just how quickly they relearn how to work when you go from standalone to networked, PC to laptop, 95/98 to XP/2000. This happens almost every year for a decently-funded school.
The problem is 90% political, 10% technical. Convincing a school to go against the grain is hard. Cost savings are easily countered by hiring of technicians to replace lost support, previous expenditure on software and licenses. School's have little to no interest in moving to a "unheard-of", non-popular, finnicky, incompatible, new operating system with no "groundbreaking" features for themselves.
Existing software is pretty much Windows-only, even with Wine, and hardware is very below-par (some schools still have PC's with 233MHz or less). But most hardware is Linux-supported, even down to things like SmartBoards, microscopes, printers etc.
Teachers know nothing about software compatibility and will expect to be able to pick up Rainbow Fish/Barnaby Bear/Tweenies etc. and just plug it in the network for it to work. This will not happen with Linux. It barely happens with Windows.
No major educational software distributor that I am aware of supports Linux in any way, shape or form.
Saying that, I have slipped a Linux machine or two into schools but as kiosk-style machines for things like the Intel QX3 microscopes, exotic printers without XP drivers, etc. but these are expected to run pretty much unattended and unserviced for years and, when they stop working, it's no great loss to throw them away.
In short, get rid of RM, make boroughs and those higher-up in educational terms learn what an ass RM are making of them, encourage most educational software creators to support Linux, let ICT Co-ordinators/Heads/Governors know that this "Linux" thing exists and THEN try for a push.
Re:Discount (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, even if you get MS software for free, you still have the costs associated with mitigation and damage control for the zillions of exploits that will dog your network.
I hate to admit it... (Score:2, Interesting)
i put down Word.
i put down Excel.
i put down Powerpoint.
I had to do "skill testing", which included a typing test for speed/accuracy on some other app, making a chart in excel, and EXACTLY copying a letter from a printed page to word.
Suffice is to say, i got the job, but i havn't used Word/Excel for a few years now. On all my applications i still write down Word/Excel/Powerpoint. When the landscape of office applications changes, i will switch my 'expertise' to the current wordprocessor/spreadsheet/presentation software of the day.
I have beaten the system. I suggest you do the same if you have confidence in your skills.
Re:Discount (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Discount (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not arguing against schools going for OSS, I'm just saying that it wouldn't be such a bad deal for MS to give away their software in this instance.