Linux Win In Schools

Xaleth Nuada wrote to us about a Wired article that talks a school in Colorado choosing Linux over the traditional choices. The reason? Prohibitive costs for licensing, of course. The school's network is maintained by parental volunteers, and thanks to Linux, can be easily maintained remotely. And for what schools use computers for - primarily the Internet, it's a great solution.

Comments

Only because they volunteer...

[pogle]

Honestly, they're volunteering so they're taking time to do things right the first time around. My old high school (which i keep tabs on, as I was the sole computer expert there for years) is horrendous with computers. Using the easily circumventedd security program known as Fortress, they wondered how everyone still played games. And the crappy cyber patrol software would block search engines and leave www.lotsofsexforyou.com open for anyone. For a county with more than 25 schools, all of them running through a single shared T1 (roughly), its pretty bad. Linux could fix a lot of it. The current problem is version differences, they've switched about half the staff over to Windows 2000 servers, leaving the other half on Novell. Thus, no one can access anything as the servers dont have access to the databases any more because the techs are ID10Ts. Rather than pouring money that should be going to teacher payraises and better books, they just upgrade windows again and break more stuff.

Sorry, ranting a little there...but the computer mishaps that my poor HS goes through really bothers me, as it has a negative impact on perceptions of computers and the internet...

Re:Wheee!!! Money rules again!

[jimhill]

I think you're missing the point. There are many purposes for computers in a school system.

Unrelated to the actual teaching mission, computers provide database capabilities for tracking the students' progress and special needs, if any. Grades, attendance, counselor or faculty notes, all can and should be retained electronically. Computers provide communication via messaging or email between administrators and faculty who are likely in widely-separated buildings and often widely-separated towns. They permit rapid production of mind-numbing statistics and colored charts that are so in vogue with top-level edubosses.

Within the educational mission, though, there are a lot of things computers can be used for. For the schools fortunate/large enough to offer computer-focused classes, does the operating system matter? Well, if you're learning C or C++ or Java or Python or whatever, then not really. If you're in a class teaching computer basics (what's a CPU, what's RAM, etc.) then again no. If you're in a lab and using a computer to interface with a data-taking gadget, once more we find the OS to be irrelevant. Foreign language tutorial? Electronic arithmetic flash cards?

There _is_ a role to be played by Windows, though, and you've hit on it. Students who intend to pursue clerical jobs should be exposed through their vocational classes to Windows and Office. Those, as you point out, are the standard tools and it's reasonable to expect that the students will need to know them. However, even these students should be exposed to alternative office suites on alternative operating systems to prepare them for the fact that they might end up in (for example) a Macs-only office. Exposing them to concepts that span a single product makes the difference between teaching and training.

A bad 12 months for Microsoft...

[maroberts]

I think that a number of events may conspire to give Linux a possibility of entering the mainstream market over the next few years, the most prominent events events being...

a) MS tightening up on casual user piracy by actively preventing multiple user installs.

b) added cost of licensing MS products under the new scheme, this will mean that companies will think twice about paying for MS when a similar amount of bucks buys you a single RH Linux disk and a fairly hefty admin staff.

c) some (currently small) demonstrations that Linux now has the capability to function in school and public service environments

d) KDE and Gnome genuinely appear to offer almost everything on the desktop that Windows does (OK the Office suite for KDE is not there yet, but real progress has been made).