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."
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http://www.nyteknik.se/pub/ipsart.asp?art_id=4041
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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.
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If kids get used to using OpenOffice.org, etc at school, then they're going to go home and tell their parents about it at home, who might decide to go for it on their next computer. When those kids get their own computer, they also might decide to try OpenOffice over MS Office. Same for teachers who get used to it at work - if they start saving their files in OOo's format, they want to be able to open them when they get home, etc.
Especially when it comes to what the students are using, most schools only have a couple dozen computers for all the students to use. So by giving away 30 or so copies of MS Office, MS could be preventing a couple hundred kids from telling their parents about OOo.
Re:Discount (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know where you're from, so I'll let you off, but in the UK most schools don't have "a couple of dozen computers" - I worked in a primary school doing IT support for a while, and for the 5-8 age range there was a machine in every room, 5 support machines for staff, and a suite with another 10 in it.
And I've been saying what this article has been ever since I started working there
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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.
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Well... sometimes it works, anyway. We in my CS dept are still using win2000, apparently because MS hasn't given us XP and we have no intention of paying for it. The tactic hasn't worked for us yet... but then, it doesn't really harm us either.
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.)
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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.
Re:bollocks (Score:4, Insightful)
Furthermore, Linux doesn't have the same diverse hardware issues when dealing with images that windows does. Think Knoppix as an example of how this works.
Bottom, line is that this is NOT a "clearly false" argument as you claim. It may be false SOME places, not not ALL places.
Linux hardware? (Score:3, Insightful)
I used to think this was true until I found out that a $499 RAID controller that's only a couple years old was a *bitch* to get working under Linux. (MegaRAID Enterprise 1500, Series 467)
Seems that support for "older" megaraid cards was silently dropped, screwing over lots of people with older (and not even *that* old) Dell, IBM, and HP hardware that
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It's called economics. There is no moral reason for a company to price at what its product is "actually worth." It is appropriate for the pricing to be that which brings the company the most profit. If the price is such that the deal is unfair to the consumer, then he can buy a competing product. They exist.
Great opportunity for OSS (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Great opportunity for OSS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great opportunity for OSS (Score:2)
dupe..... (Score:5, Informative)
Does it all come down to money (Score:4, Insightful)
Is our school's education all related to money? do we just want to make it cheaper?
Or make it truly better. As much as I don't like Microsoft maybe there are situations where their software is best.
Just saying to dump them because of cost to save 24% sounds appealing at a first glance, but then replacing teachers with babysitters at half the wages would save 50%.
But it's not doing much good for the kids. Maybe a less broad "Microsoft is 100% evil" attitude would help the kids. Their the ones learning
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:3, Funny)
multiplication tables?
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:3)
Started off right (Score:2, Insightful)
-how well does it facilitate people learning?
-does it provide an environment that is open to advancements and does not lock you in?
Of course there are basic requirements like being able to perform the required tasks, and cost related issues, but aside from these issues, open source beats MS on all fronts.
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:2, Insightful)
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 wa
Well, judging from my own schooling in computers.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Office suites have long sinced passed the barrier where it is your skills that is the limit, not the application. Most children I know couldn't wield the full power of OpenOffice or GIMP than they could with MS Office and Photoshop.
And by skills, I don't mean knowing which keyboard shortcuts to push, but to understand
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:5, Insightful)
The report says to dump microsoft. What happens when microsoft do make the best tool for the job? It seems too broad to me.
Maybe linux is good for 80% of things and MS good for 20%. maybe the other way around or some other combination. Is it certain that open source software is always the best use for our kids? always? without fail and no MS ever again?
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:3, Funny)
What happens when microsoft do make the best tool for the job?
Hell freezes over.
Or they buy it.. :( (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Or they buy it.. :( (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Or they buy it.. :( (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:3, Interesting)
best tool for job. (Score:2)
If the target is to make the student to prepare to work for business you might want to consider having Ms-word on you skill's list. You can use O.source software to do a lot of jobs, but you don't find it in regualr business a lot.
Big company are still using windows NT4 (banks even use some OS/2). It will take some time before open software becomes mainstraim.
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:2, Insightful)
The report says to dump microsoft. What happens when microsoft do make the best tool for the job? It seems too broad to me.
How about this:
Dump Microsoft OS, and if Microsoft comes out with any good tools that are really the best tool possible for something the school needs, to buy the software once Microsoft makes it available for the OS the school is using? Sounds fine to me.
Saying "we must keep buying new windows operating systems, because what if in the future microsoft comes out with that killer
Well, as an educational software developer. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
The real trick is in the tools market. Educational software is a special class of software. It's very different from say engineering or scientific software. It's not like networking applications or graphics or text editors. Those are all software applications, but in the bbrave new world of edutainment you tend to think of the software in terms of "titles" or at least in subject matter categories because subject matter or content is the emphasis rather than usage or applicaton.
Most adults who don't have kids in school simply rely on their memories and think that computers in school are about teaching typing or perhaps even programming or maybe using the Net. Well, that' certainly can still be the case, but in the 90s, things changed and software pervaded education in a way that it never did before and a lot of people aren't aware of the extent to which that happened. In many schools entire curricula are computer based and a very small set of companies has a major chunk of that market.
The major tools providers in this market create tools for "non-programmers" because they're meant to be used by "content specialists" and specifically that means teachers. This class of development tool is not a popular one among open source enthusiasts particularly because they build their applications around runtime applications that are guaranteed to lock-in the products.
THis is the reason I have long insisted that education will ironically be the last bastion of closed source. It's a systemic issue with roots in the tools market.
The one thing that could change this sad situation is precisely the sort of thing being proposed here. That is, with a bit of encouragement of this sort, companies like Macromedia with an elephant's presence in educational software might be more likely to release Linux runtimes which would allow existing projects to be re-packaged as Linux native apps.
And, since Adobe has recently purchased Macromedia, perhaps such a change might be even more likely as Adobe proceeds to "enter new markets" as they have stated they plan to do.
Luckily, it's not that urgent either way because most of those eudcational apps built with Macromedia tools like Director and Authorware can already be run under Wine.
Then coming back to your point about "best tool for the job" it is really just about OS's rather than the apps since, with the help of Wine, the apps tend to work both ways. And with some pressure, a native Linux run-time could change those apps into native Linux apps at the click of a button as long as the original project files were saved and typically a big project gets archived.
So, it's really about what OS to use simply to hold the content. If you seriously think Windows is a better tool in this case then I would simply say that if it's my tax dollars you're dealing with, you're wrong.
or say text editors or , tends to be very heavy on repetitive GUI interaction with an emphasis on displaying multimedia content and creating easy-to-use interactions that make use of moving graphics and animations and the like. The goals of educational software are very different from most software applications.
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.
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, how much "Microsoft Experience" did *you* need to be able to say "Do you want fries with that?"
Re:Does it all come down to money (Score:3, Informative)
I am going to do my GCSE (14-16) ICT exam in a month or so. It has taken up several hours a week, every schoolweek, for two years.
Questions include:
"What are the parts of a processor?" (multiple choice. correct answer: AMU, ALU, something else. understanding of what *exactly* these do, how they fit together, etc is not necessary)
"Dave is experiencing back pain/RSI. What should he do?" (multiple choice. answers include "stapler" and "copy holder")
"Name and describe two files [i.e. tables]
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.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Schools should, in theory, be pushing what is best for the pupil, not what is cheapest. So whilst there is an argument for using free software to teach, for example, programming, a course which teachs pupils spreadsheets or word processing could, arguably be using the most widespread software.
Oh and the article title isn't exactly truthful. "Told to Dump Microsoft" makes it sound like it's an order from on high; it's not. It's a recommendation, not a government mandate.
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
So whilst there is an argument for using free software to teach, for example, programming, a course which teachs pupils spreadsheets or word processing could, arguably be using the most widespread software.
Why? They should teach a generic use of a word processor, I doubt the goal it's about becoming an expert in an especific product. Then why should they teach expensive programs that students possibly can not afford to use at home legally or share between them?
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
By the time these children have to "work" whatever version of software they learned their skills on will be outdated. Schools should learn general skills, not specific software or versions.
Re:Good (Score:2, Insightful)
Because OpenOffice.org writer, KWord, Abiword and others all have the typing keys laid out totally different from MS Word, don't they?! And OpenOffice.org calc, KSpread and Gnumeric not only have the number keys in completely different places from MS Excel, but use different symbols for the common m
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this works when it's a country wide thing. The other thing we should remember is how corporations have seduced school systems by making systems cheaper *cough* Appl
Re:Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Fiscal geek writes... (Score:3, Informative)
Except we don't quite - only about 25% of UK school funding comes from council tax via local education authorities, and much less than that in some parts of the UK such as Wales (about 15%+). The rest comes from general taxation via central government. But one way or the other the taxpayer ends up sending big cheques to MS, so your point is valid.
Chicken or the Egg? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Chicken or the Egg? (Score:2)
Well, I would hope they would answer "No, but I've got experience with blah, blah and blah." To which a reasonable employer would say "Hey, that's good general computing experience." If the job involved a lot of Microsoft Office, he might add "Can you take an evening course over at $(LOCALCOLLEGE)?
Yes, I know it's a little naive. :) Still, I got my job without spending a minute in Microsoft Office before.
Re:Chicken or the Egg? (Score:2)
Gee, I wonder if you are on the MS side or the OSS side?
Re:Chicken or the Egg? (Score:3, Insightful)
The chicken and the egg thing doesn't really matter, what matters is that some party is going open source, and more should follow.
Re:Chicken or the Egg? (Score:2, Funny)
>what will they do when their prospective employer asks
I'd go for "Are you fucking kidding?"
Chicken on face? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have this exact problem. In school we were only given LUMOCOLOR pens. Now when I look for work and they ask me if I know how to use Blic pens I just break down and cry. I blame my education for my inability to adapt to change. I think schools should do something about this!!
Re:Chicken or the Egg? (Score:3, Insightful)
Computers are utterly arbitrary machines.. software only works when people agree on the way software should work, and then use it.
For schools to be shifting focus from Microsft to OSS is a good thing, because it highlights, yet again, the reality of computers, in that they are only as good as the things you use them for.
I for one welcome our future generations of compu
Dupe (Score:2, Informative)
[insert witty remark about slashdot editors, education and OSS]
erm, no it doesn't (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ahem, how about reading the article? (Score:2)
Re:Ahem, how about reading the article? (Score:2)
Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
However, don't overlook the wider politics of the matter. To some degree, what employers want is a trained workforce (as opposed to an educated one), and in that case it makes lots of sense to train them with the exact same tools they will be expected to use in employment. Which means Windows, MS Office, etc.
Also, don't forget that it will surely be so much in Microsoft's interest to get those youngsters to equate software with Microsoft that they will provide exceptionally deep discounts to education purchasers - probably as far as giving the stuff away.
It will take some principled political leadership to enforce an OSS policy on education in UK, and I really can't see much prospect of that coming from the current government.
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
I was taught DOS when I was in elementary school. When I graduated and got a job, what use did I have for my knowledge in DOS?
This argument you have is absolutely moot since the landscape of operating systems are changeing so fast.
Re:Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Kids these days do not know the difference between a program and a file. Double clicking on a file is "starting the program", they often don't know where exactly on the filesystem they have saved their file, they don't know what a file type is (Text file? That must be Word, right?) and I could rave on. I see this every day, and it is absolutely maddening.
Re:Obvious (Score:5, 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:Into the minds of the young (Score:2)
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. :-((
Only in case of equivalent quality (Score:5, Insightful)
Excellent news, but replacements for s/w? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are there OSS equivalents for titles like The Way Things Work, or science lab programs, astronomy simulations, or all those Director based multimedia titles, etc?
OSS is great at replacing an office suite, email program, graphics editor, etc.
But are there a lot of OSS educational programs out there, or educators going to rely on web site content?
Just curious.
Re:Excellent news, but replacements for s/w? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 acc
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Saving Money (Score:4, Informative)
IT'S NOT. Schools (in the UK at least) have a very limited budget to spend, which doesn't just cover software - it has to manage teachers (of whom we currently have a shortage due to the abysmal wage they get), school dinners, visits and trips - even things like the bus to school in some places. Now, if this was aimed at the government as some "magic tax-saving measure" (get OSS for schools, save £1-2Bn tax) then I'd be worried. However, as it's aimed at schools, it means that they can free up sizable chunks of their budget to concentrate on other areas (Teachers for instance) - other areas which, in all honesty, probably do more for a childs education than M$ Super-dooper-text-ed-2025++ edition OR Open-tux-GNU-codehacker-6000.
rapid response (Score:2)
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:What about the staff training? (Score:2)
Focus on whats really important (Score:3, Informative)
Try to focus on the principles that are important - it might actually make sense to choose a commercial company to develop the software as long as the software adhere to the principles.
For example the principles in the bill that Peru introduced on the states use of software. The bill set forward some principles that all suppliers of software must follow:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/peru_and_ms.php [opensource.org]
Microsoft of course tried to fight this bill since they don't want to follow these principles, but that's their business descision. The bill does not ban Microsoft or any other supplier for developing and delivering software to Peru.
It would really be nice if all other countries tried to follow this approach.
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.
Old-think to worry about Microsoft training (Score:5, Insightful)
It is only people who lack much experience with a diversity of technology who think you need to be trained how to use each specific task keystroke by keystroke.
Young people who have grown up in a technological enviroment have much more powerful mental paradigms relating to computers. Truly proficient computer users do not need to know specific details about what menu to use or what button to press. They have a higher level understanding of the general design of user interfaces and can jump with little effort from windows to mac to linux to xbox to ps2 to nokia to motorola and so on.
Increasing exposure to more types of technology is in the end a better education than intensive study on one particular (soon to be obselescent) technology.
Please let this happen (Score:3, Insightful)
Genuinely teaching kids how to use information communication technologies and not Microsoft Office is one of my pet peeves. A kid that is taught the fundamentals of GUI and CLI use and is exposed to several different implemetations is going to be significantly better off as with any luck they'll absorb the concept of usage metaphores.
Rather than teaching a child how to use Outlook to send emails, I'd rather they were taught how emails fit in to their toolkit of applications. When to send an email not a letter, when to send an email not make a phone call, not: Press Start, Program files, Outlook Express compose new email. If nothing else it future proofs their knowledge.
What kids need is as much exposure to different technologies as is possible and genuine disscusion on when that technology is appropriate, that means using proprietary and OSS solutions.
The problem here is making sure that the teachers understand this and the curriculum reflects this. The scary thing is even IT professionals don't seem to understand.
I used to do support... (Score:3, Informative)
It isn't just the quality of the tool, it's how well you can use it. We need to educate the educators more, regardless of which technology they end up using...
shock horror. no microsoft didnt do me harm! (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Another Dupe (Score:2)
Doh!
Correct dupe link [slashdot.org]
Re:Another Dupe (Score:2)
Re:Not so easy to dump M$ (Score:2, Insightful)
What's preventing them from installing the same program they use at school on these home PCs ?
You know, OpenOffice run on windows also
Re:I work in a School (Score:3, Insightful)
If you hire some cocaine addict off the street [e.g. my college] who doesn't know HTML or anything about W3C to teach a tech class about web pages
Of course my high school went the other way at first. Buying all Apple bullshit. Of course we were doing video processing on them back when PC
Re:I work in a School (Score:3, Informative)
And actually, at age 12 I was writing a BBS in Pascal. Age 13 I started teaching myself how to "code" in C [neither of which I'd say I was professional at but at least I was learning it].
As for "not every kid does"
Re:Save money now!!! See what happens later. (Score:4, Insightful)
That way, the students are equipped to move from os to os, platform to platform without prejudice.
It's how your user who has never seen anything other than MS products can move from XP to OSX or KDE with little difficulty without complaining about the missing start button and throwing up their hands in horror.
It's how they can deduce how to browse the web, write a letter or send an email based on experiences in other systems.
Platform independence comes naturally once you understand the underlying concepts. This is what should be concentrated on rather than "product X".
That schools may be using OSS is not the point and it shouldn't be championed on that aspect alone. Get a mix in there, let the kids see all sorts.