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Has Free Software Saved Any Schools?
morcego asks: "I think
everyone remembers the case of PCs
for Kids, the Australian group that donates computers for the
poor children, when Microsoft asked them lots of money for the software
on the computers they donated. I am trying to convince schools to start
using free software, and I have heard arguments like 'all free software
initiatives in public schools around the world have failed.' I know this
is not true, but I need cases to show them. So, do you know of any school
(public or not), or other educational institution that has been saved from
paying large amounts of money (and closing its doors) by free
software?" For those interested in this topic, you'll probably
want to read up on the latest salvo in the Microsoft
private
antitrust settlement. It sounds like education, and Open Source, may
now have an official relationship, and things are now getting kicked
into high gear. While it's good to hear about the "SchoolForge" coalition
(no relation to SourceForge or
NewsForge), what educational resources
are currently available to schools from the Open Source arena?
I think it would be interesting to hear what schools in other countries have done about this. Not because I doubt that American schools have done it, but because it would show how universal an Open Source solution could be.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
Where? Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada.
For those of you who don't know MJ is a city of about 30,000. My girlfriend's little sister (gr 3. I think), needed to write a letter one day when she was over visiting. I said I don't have Office, but I have staroffice which is pretty much the same. "Don't worry that is what we are learning in school". I was shocked and thrilled.
I am 99% sure that they were using a windows version of StarOffice, but it is still free.
~S
Set them up with the StarOffice 6.0 beta for windows machines. Once they get used to that (shouldn't take long) then tell them the _same_ interface is used in Linux, then start on the money angle.
Skivvy Niner? Email me!
HEY! Look left just ONE MORE TIME!
One of the arguments (which I consider fallacious) against Macs in the schools is that kids need to be prepared for the "real world," one that involves a Microsoft OS and Microsoft applications. As Linux has yet to be embraced on the desktop to a great extent in the business world (still largely relegated to server duties), does Open Source hinder their abilities to function in the business world? Furthermore, are the support people in these schools equipped to deal with the support issues of a new platform? Linux may indeed be easier to support than its windows counterpart, but without the appropriate training (which is always hard to come by when delaing with public school funding) it may be difficult.
Ideally, schools would shift their software budget to a training budget to bring their support gurus up to speed. And the children would gain a comfort level with technology, though not necessarily the technology they will be using in the real world. Unfortunately, I have more questions than answers here.
I'd be interested in hearing a reasoned response to my questions. Dogmatic zealots need not apply.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
This is the wrong question. The right question is why computers in school.
Learning is universial, not applied. You need to learn to reading writing, and arithmatic. There is no need for comptuers in that. Sure there are some good computer programs to help there, and typing is a skill that needs to be learned, but computers are the implimentation detail, not the meat. Until you have something to do with the comptuer there is no point in having one. Young kids need to learn to write things out by hand.
Yes computers are important to the world today, but comptuers change fast. when I first started with computers wordStar was the big program in industry. In High school they braged that we were learning the latest word processor that industry is using, wordPerfect 5.1 for dos. And at the time it was the biggest, but today everyone is using Word 2000, and looking at an upgrade to that. Teach the kids to think with whatever tool is avaiable, and you will be fine, but teach them that the tool currently in vogue is the only one to use and you do them a disservice.
Yes I know industry has a lot of obsolete, but fast enough comptuers they would love to donate to any charity that will take them, but that doesn't mean you have to take them. A computer is a means to many good ends, but do not allow a computer to become the end itself.
The success of our web server allowed us to push for a perl/apache/linux-based attendance system that let us get rid of scan-tron sheets to be filled in every morning. Now, our teachers open up their web browsers in the morning, log in, and they check off their absent students 1st period. In the afternoon, they can check who was here and who wasn't, and it saves us about a ream of paper per day, since we don't have to print out attendance bulletins any more. Most of the work for the attendance program was done by one of my students who was learning perl on the fly.
I also teach a class for A+ and Network+ certifications, but we cover Linux both semesters (especially when we do network security in Network+). I'm hoping that next semester, we'll be able to use Linux as the primary desktop OS for most of the networking stuff, but we'll have to see what happens.
There are two major problems, in my opinion: businesses want students who are proficient with Windows and Office, and schools don't have the resources to hire people who are competent Linux admins. If the demand for Linux users starts going up, then maybe the number of computers running Linux in schools will increase, but for now, it's probably limited to servers.
One funny tidbit - earlier this school year, Code Red and Nimda running on local districts' NT/2000 IIS web servers took down the WAN access for most of the schools in Southwest Ohio. Seems that the servers weren't patched or maintained as well as they should have been. Web servers running Apache, of course, didn't have this problem.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -Ghandi
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
The more difficult it is to use bootleg commercial software, the easier it is to see the value of free stuff.
This is an important point. Most of the grade school teachers I've ever met who deal with computers have the attitude that anything short of organized for-profit software piracy is okay because they're teachers. They *have* to teach students on a limited budjet, are used to stretching any school supply just as far as it will go, and see copying software they've bought for home use, or ordering only one copy of windows to install on every computer in a lab as a necessity.
This is the same thing as making xerox copies out of a book to hand out to their students, as far as most of them are concenred.
Now, I'm personally inclined to agree with the morality of this little ethical short cut. I have a lot of problems with software licenses, and I think it would be a wonderful thing if being a teacher really meant you were exempt from copyright law for educational purposes.
You can bet that Microsoft, Adobe, Corel, and the other members of the BSA don't agree with me, however.
If you start stressing this fact, Free Software just starts seeming like a better and better idea in the classroom.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
My father teaches CS at a small private school, and while they're not by any means struggling financially - they are somewhat apprehensive about Microsoft's new fervor for license enforcement.
They're seriously considering a move from their current student lab environment (Win 9x with Novell Netware) to a Linux thin client environment - what would basically be X terms. This has huge resource allocation advantages and because it's open source - the licensing restrictions are few if any.
This could literally save them millions over the next few years (The hardware life cycle for thin clients is considerable longer, and new server hardware, while expensive, is cheaper than buying several hundred new desktops every few years - not to mention say $100 dollars per system savings against XP Pro licenses)
That millions could keep them afloat in thin times, or could mean that they can provide scholarships to needy students.
See related: K12 Linux Project
\Drew National Data Director, John Edwards for President
We had done this exact same project some years before, and we had managed to replace Windows 98 with Linux on the school's network. We had convinced the administrapo that the network would be secure from viruses like ILOVEYOU and that there would be no software licenses. Everything went well -- for the first three days. Then the support issues started trickling in.
.kwd files. However, KOffice would completely mangle the document once it was saved in HTML, making it virtually unreadable. I don't know if this was a bug in KOffice, but it sure raised a lot of hell.
/bin, /opt, stuff like that. Some were also angry because their Windows programs wouldn't work.
We decided to use KOffice for our standard office suite, and HTML would be the file format standard in which to save in for interopability with the remaining Windows segments of the network -- after all, I didn't see Office 2K have a converter for
Remember the GNOME Usability studies that Sun did? Remember how confused the participants were?
Take that and multiply it by 100, and you have what our school experienced. We had training for the teachers in order to prepare to this switch to Linux, but many of them were confused when confronted with folders like
We scrapped the entire idea after three weeks, and reverted the entire network back to a Windows-based solution. While Linux is a great server OS, its desktop solution leaves something to be desired, and I would not recommend replacing what works for the school.
I know of one school in particular, the school my boss sends her kid to, that has benefited tremendously. My boss is a Microsoft devotee and has scoffed at the Free Software movement, until she went to a school meeting and realized the computer lab that was donated (just the systems and OS nothing else) wasn't up and running yet. The reason was the school didn't have the money for Microsoft Office.
Long story short, she told me, I pointed her to StarOffice and a few other apps that are readily available. It wasn't a difficult sell, because it was the difference between getting use out of the computers or just teaching Windows. The school wouldn't have 'collapsed' without the free software and they would have gotten the money for the applications next year, but now they can use that money to implement a replacement program for the systems they already have.
All of this goes back to the fact that there is a bias against Free licenses on software. My boss always considered them to be amateurish, less reliable, than the NAME BRAND software. Not anymore.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
When you have servers that have uptimes of two years (or more), something tells me that some of those servers are, more or less, a fire-and-forget system. Anybody who sets up a server right WON'T need to maintain it much.
As long as there are no users being added, no programs being added, and you only have a handful of systems, you might be right.
But let's say you have 200 systems, with a mean time between failures of 56,000 hours each.
That's one failure every 12 days, more or less.
A school has dozens or hundreds of systems, with much shorter MTBF on the physical hardware, and has hundreds of students using those machines. They require security monitoring, hardware replacement, software configuration and upgrading; near-constant attention, if it's larger than one server and a handful of clients.
If I take any one of my servers and point at it and base my manpower computations on that server alone, the numbers will look deceptively like I can do it all myself. When I broaden my sights out to all of the several hundred large servers I manage, I instead get a 7-man team rotating on-call duties between 3 production and 5 test projects, and the thought of doing it all myself becomes laughable.
A typical school is somewhere in the middle if you want to use computers for education, instead of (as I said) sticking a few PCs in the physics lab and letting the brightest students do WTF the want with them.
If you just want to stick a file server in the secretary's office and put a PC on each of the administrator's desks, you're probably right. But I'm talking about a school using computers for educating the kids, not a school using computers near the kids.
I'm _nearly_ speechless; but this IS /. after all so here's my piece:
I have heard arguments like 'all free software initiatives in public schools around the world have failed.' I know this is not true, but I need cases to show them.
Is that really their concern or just the excuse they use to avoid having to actually deliver on the promise of "education"?
My first rebuttal would question the validity of such an attitude. If that "lemming" attitude were valid then the horse-n-buggy would never have been replaced by the automobile because it requires a "non-standard" fuel to run amd previous attempts at the internal combustion engine were pooly implemented.
They should really be asking the questions "is it feasible for our organization to do this?" with "how much would it cost versus how much could we save for reinvenstment back into the system?"..
BTW: I applaud your effort to deliver hard fact to dispell their fud. An analysis of the actual numbers should demonstrate that the savings from using *free* versus proprietary equals out even taking into account the added expense of a sys admin specific to *nix. Additionally not being beholden to the schedules and monetary coffers of companies like MS should be priceless from the standpoint of an educational organization.
You'll have better luck looking at schools in Europe, especially Germany, France, and the U.K. The U.S. public school system moves about as quickly as a lowered Honda Civic in an off-road rally race; and, in my experience, most public school IS/IT administrators know less about computers than John Ashcroft does about electron field dynamics. This is why few high schools have local area networks or decent internet access, and why fewer still have classes in things as simple as programming in Basic.
Since U.S. schools aren't adeqately funded by the government, they gobble up as much of the private-sector "technology money" as they can possibly gorge themselves on; a signifigant chunk of which comes in the form of discounted licenses for Microsoft software. Kind of ironic that the school still has to buy the computers to run the software (and keep them updated); but I guess by reducing their profit margin from 99.998% to 98%, Microsoft has done their part. Those computers have to be upgraded pretty regularly, of course, and some of the money for that comes from "less worthwhile" programs -- like English, Art, Music, and History.
We are raising a generation of Americans that won't know the difference between a verb and a posessive pronoun, but they'll be able to use the Word grammar-checker, so it all works out in the end, right?
These, among other reasons, are why the U.S. imports its computer engineers from Europe and southeast Asia.
By contrast, European schools don't get the same deep discounts, and the foreign-language support in Windows is pretty horrible (although W2K has made some signifigant improvements in this area). European schools (at least in the three countries mentioned above) are supported wholly by the state, and as such don't require outside funding. This means that, for the most part, the software and hardware are chosen to fit the needs of the instructors and students, rather than to fit the discounts, freebies, and funding-with-strings requirements assigned by the technology companies.
This is why you'll find SuSE, Mandrake, and Debian pretty heavily used in many European schools (and thus, businesses).
But that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
I can see plenty of problems with implementing Linux in schools, especially when I think about how it would go in my local district.
1. All the teachers know Windows. My bet is that even many of the computer teachers do not know Linux well enough to run it in their labs. They can't teach it if they don't know it and teacher training could be expensive and take a lot of what's probably considered unnecessary time.
2. They would have a lot harder teaching a completely new OS AND classes on how to use the programs than to just teach the programs. You'd probably have to have a intro to Linux class before you could ever teach whichever programs you choose to use - and that's another issue in itself.
3. Students probably have Windows at home. Would they have problems with converting documents between systems? Say you create your report in Word at home, could your bring it school and use it there?
4. The local tech support and computer stores would not be able to help them if something went wrong. 99% of the techs around here don't know anything about anything other than Windows. Who would know enough about Linux to help them??
5. The students would learn programs and OSes that would different with what they would have when they go to college, go to work, etc. Since there are very few offices and colleges using entirely Linux, they would be at a disadvantage right away.
Of course there are a lot of plusses too, but these negatives sprang to mind right away. Of course they are all refutable. I think that the schools would choose easy and expensive over difficult and cheap any day. If they didn't have a choice and were nearly out of money, my guess is they would let the computers sit/
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
So, you're trying to convince schools to start using free software. Why, exactly?
What educational objective are you trying to achieve? How will free software bring you closer to this objective? Which free software in particular? How will this benefit the average student?
Who will train the faculty? Who will support the installations? Will this cost money? What are the advantages to the institution, aside from the lower initial cost?
These are the kinds of questions that any responsible educator should ask, and you have to be prepared with good answers if you expect to make any progress. If you don't have those answers, then maybe you need to rethink your goals. Free software may, in fact, be the solution, or part of the solution. But you can't start from that assumption and expect others to leap on your bandwagon without a second thought. Except on Slashdot, of course.
Considering the plight of public schools in America, and the wonderful job that our politicians have done with the issue, it is the responsiblity of students, parents, and the school itself to solve the problem.
In my high school, the computer network was run by the students. Contrary to what some people thought, when these students were given the power to abuse the network, they reacted in exactly the opposite way. They became very responsible. They took their position seriously and did not abuse it. Perhaps it is time we stopped treating high school students like children.
The school administration accepted the situation because it was the only way they got working computers and an Internet connection. The parents accepted it because it resulted in a better environment for their children.
Some safeguards were put in place, such as no students were allowed to work on the file server. This was to help prevent any students from reading other students email and files, but it was more of a token gesture than real security because real security would have stopped things from getting done.
-sirket
My company provides IT support to a small-medium sized K-12 school district. They have 5 NT servers, and approximatly 250 workstations running Windows2000/Office2000. I can see no scenario where it would make sense to move them to a free software platform (Linux). MS academic software is not that expensive to start with, so there's not much money to be saved here (approx $50 for Win2k and $50 for Office per station.) Most of the software used by the district would not run under Linux anyway. Aside from the webmail app and their web based library system nearly everything else they use is written for Windows. They couldn't run any of their current educational software packages, including those provided by the state! I love Linux and see that it has a place on the server, embedded in devices and running on hobbiests' machines. However considering the realities of IT today, it just doesn't make sense to roll out Linux on the desktops of organizations either commercial or educational.
Commercial, no.
Educational, yes.
I can see no reason that students can't be taught to use a word processor rather than just Microsoft Word -- learning basic concepts instead of "monkey see, monkey click."
Educational software is, for the most part, a complete crock; and, with the exception of grade-keeping software, doesn't belong in schools. Teachers are paid to teach, not to sit a student in front of some so-called "educational" program and baby-sit them. Some of the computer tutorial software, like the programs that teach you to use Word and Excel by visually showing you what to do, are effective; but these aren't the types of things schools are trying to teach.
The hardware costs make it much more expensive to run Windows in a school environment; Windows and Office 2000 require fairly high-powered workstations which cost the school real money to purchase; comparitive systems to run OSes like BSD and Linux are often donated en masse.
Having all of the computer equipment donated to a school by a business that wants the tax write-off can save even a small school tens of thousands of dollars; which, in turn, can go into things like art programs, improving science education, and hell -- even keeping the school in sporting goods. Go and ask a local principal what they would do if they were given an extra $20,000 to spend at the school on anything but salaries or computers.
As far as not being qualified for anything but "hobbiests", what do you think students are? A hobbiest is someone who is interested in learning as much about something as possible; and a student is someone who is supposed to be learning as much about the subject material as possible. Students aren't like employees -- there is no bottom line to watch, and no such thing as wasted time as long as it's spent learning.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
What John didn't mention is that the trial schools were actually dual boot Win/RedHat. The kids preferred the RH (and that cuddly mascot) and simply didn't use the Windows. It was removed as a consequence. ;-)
The potential to reduce tech support is also huge - the kids can't screw things up without some sophisticated knowledge. Can't say the same for Windows boxes! Now the techs can do real work instead of 'clean up' chores