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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.
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.
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.
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.....
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
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