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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.
It's a great solution if by "internet" you mean ftp, news, mail, gopher, WAIS, etc. But if you mean "the web", you get...poor plug-in availability, instant lockout from loads of sites due to outdated flash plugin...
Nice to see public schools moving towards a non-proprietary alternative to current software. Of course the reason for this now is budgetary concerns, but I can see a greater result--increased computer literacy.
Its been my experience (as a web development instructor with a private post-secondary school) that teens these days, despite the stereotypes, actually posess less computer literacy than geeks of my generation.
I learned DOS and UNIX on the command line. Windows and Mac will stunt your understanding of how a computer works, and make you think only of pushing around cute little icons. WIMP interfaces make people dumb. They can't understand how the computer works, so they end up relying on 'geeks' to fix their problems.
Teach programming to everyone (Thanks to GvR) and teach kids a command line in school. Make them understand the technology that they'll use every day of their lives. Let our kids develop some computer savy and brains.
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
And for what schools use computers for - primarily the Internet, it's a great solution.
If that includes web browsing, I disagree. Sadly, most of the technical benefits of Linux are cancelled out of the horrible web browsing software available for it. The Linux kernel beats Windows in any test imaginable, but in browser tests IE 5 walks over everthing else by a wide margin. Sure, you *can* browse with Opera or Navigator, but only if you're willing to accept that you won't be able to view a good number of sites correctly. (You can take the idealistic "I don't want to see those sites anyway" road, but not everyone does.
Most colleges use a UNIX environment (especially for CS and engineering). Putting a UNIX environment in high/elementary schools is the next step. And you know how school boards love to save money.
Solution? Linux.
It isn't very surprising to me, other than the need to have a good *NIX network administrator in your local school (seems odd, doesn't it?).
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
For every one story we read abotu a school adopting Linux, theres a few hundred schools that buy Windows.
This is a fascinating story, honest, it's just buried in an avalanche of MS boxen.
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...
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
Linux is making an impression upon school kids now. Great! Now all we need to do is fix the biggest problem with Linux distros these days. They are all designed to be servers!
/usr/local/bin myself!
In order for Linux to really make a good desktop OS, a distro must be designed with that goal in mind. Namely, get userspace programs out of the RPMs!! Nothing ticks me off more than having to search through a list of installed system RPMs just so that I can uninstall an old copy of mozilla. We really need to get a separate installer for applications, and get it distro immune. This way, people can start making professional looking install packages for their apps so non-geeks will take them seriously. (Sorry, but I don't know any grandmas out there who believe that source code is the best way to distribute applications. We need to start statically linking apps, and using a generic installer/uninstaller sort of like the Add/Remove programs in Windows.)
Secondly, I haven't seen a gui application yet that I religiously envoke from the command prompt. Get gui applications out of the $PATH! If I wanted to run xcdroast from the command line every time, I would put a symbolic link in
There are other issues that I'm SURE will get me modded down (like X11 no longer being an efficient display method), but the two biggest problems that I see are the two I listed. There are other obvious issues (like the need for autoruns), but most of these have been taken care of. We really just need a desktop inclined distro, and a way to keep system packages separate from user installed packages.
Okay moderators, down we go.....
Is it really a sterotype if that's what she wants to do? Does everyone have to follow what you think their life should be? Isn't the point of "breaking sterotypes" just to be yourself? What if that's what she, or even he, wants?
Hell, I've love to be a stay-home dad, myself. I wouldn't mind at all. Is that not ambitious enough for you? Should I go to the top just because I could? Or should I just be happy?
Whatever makes you happy, and for some, that means a fairly mentally trivial job. That requires training, usually in MS Word and Excel. That will no longer be provided.
I've been using StarOffice to submit my weekly status reports to my boss. The difference is imperceptible. In fact, we recently discussed the possibility of putting Linux on our corporate workstations, just as an in-the-back-pocket concept, and we spent about two hours creating a test workstation that would do everything our users needed to do. smbmount and smbumount made attaching to the Windows NT network easy. Mapped drives, created word documents, etc. The fundamental lesson I learned from this was that no matter what was running underneath, if the user interface was kept consistent the end-user need not know the difference.
Good money decision, but really bad in the long run.
Aside from your misunderstanding of what constitutes an "education", exactly why is this bad in the long run?
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
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.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
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).
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The worst offenders are commercial sites of all places.
But if they use their Internet connection for mainly educational purposes then I cannot see them having that many issues, if any at all. In fact most sites run perfectly well (never had Flash lock me out due to it being old! Had it lock out on some werid 3D stuff though).
In fact some IE sites may just lock you out based upon the fact you're not running IE, even though Konqueror/Mozilla may well render the page correctly.
Really your issues are purely FUD and are hardly based in the real world to any large extent. Right now I am using Konqueror.
This is great that a school has done this. Hopefully more will follow, then finally the owners and designers will have to think about providing support for Linux. Support for Linux basically means good web design anyway.
StarTux
Not only is this a blow for Microsoft in terms of market share, but in PR as well.
Yes, it damages Microsoft's image, making them out to be a greedy Goliath. Yes, I think it's a great single instance of Linux getting some perception coup. However...
One, if you use proprietary/closed/commercial software, then you must pay for it and be licensed. If the schools are not in compliance, then they owe the software makers the money. When students see teachers cloning disks to work around "budget shortcomings," is there any wonder why kids think everything digital is free for the taking?
Two, if you choose libre/open/gratis software, that's a reasonable alternatve, but only if it serves the needs. It's not a hobby, but a job, so choose the right tools for the job and be prepared to pay for them if they're not free. Personally, I hope this just improves the free tools to where they fit the needs of the job.
Three, why are the schools strapped for cash? Because people don't want to pass school bond measures when they see it's going to affect their property taxes. Elderly people don't vote for schools, and homeowners don't vote for schools. Lotteries "give" proceeds to schools, but that just makes the legislature shortchange the schools even more.
Making Microsoft into the bully here misses the main arguments here. Microsoft chose a business model and is sticking to it. If you're going to do business with someone ethically, then you have to respect their business model. If we can't expect ethics from our schools, then we surely can't expect ethics from the next generation of graduates. Find alternatives that are functional, sustainable, and ethical, so you don't find yourself on the wrong end of the gun.
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Now we're going to have third graders screaming their heads off at each other about the merits of emacs vs. vi and Gnome vs. KDE!
/. accounts!
If you thought the arguments were juvenile and immature before, just wait until those first graders get
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
You have it wrong. The guy said to teach without the GUI. I'll tell you a story which might change your mind...
While working on a grant at SDSU, I heard of an instructor in Maryland who found that her students who used a DOS-based PC to write english papers received better grades then did the Apple Mac counterparts. A 2 year study found that she was correct in that the DOS-based PC users used larger words, had a higher wordcount per sentance, and used more complete sentence structures. The students were enrolled in an English class because they didn't fail the entrance exam but also weren't good enough to bypass the English requirements altogether. The English department at the university didn't determine exactly what was going on but figured it was because at a DOS-prompt, you have to think about what you need to do next. In a GUI, you are prompted.
The DOS-based users has the DOS prompt staring at them and THEY had to figure out what the next step was. When they got to the wordprocessor they were already in a higer thinking mode then when ICONS lead you thru the task.
Once you're well versed and trained in the skills the computer is HELPING you with, you don't need to have such a bare-bones interface to get to what you want to do. Teach kids how to think and they will take off from there.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
It's like $30 per seat
It's like $30 per seat every two years and that is just the OS. That doesn't include the $300 student version of Office and any other applications that you usually have to pay for. Coupled with the fact that the security is swiss cheese and you have to buy additional security software, the $30 is just the hook. You end up spending ten times that just to defend your initial investment and make it workable.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.