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An Informal Study Of K12 Classroom Software Costs
PGillingwater writes "Rob Lineweaver has written a concise summary of how much it would cost (and the savings that can be achieved) to set up the (almost) complete infrastructure in the Harrisonburg City Public Schools. He estimates that using commercial packages instead of open source would have cost the K12 schools an extra $27,000 in software license costs.
More interestingly, he states that this is not only about cost. He says: 'This makes it apparent that not all of the benefit of open source software deployment in is the form of cost savings; much of the benefit is in terms of capabilities gained. In other words, through the use of free software, I am able to do more within my budget than I could if I only had commercial solutions available.'"
Cost is one thing, support is another. Did they get support or do they have to pay for it? Will it cost more than $27k?
K12 Linux terminal server.
Problem solved.
For each person? Or for everyone? If that's for each person, WOW, that's a lot. If that's for everyone, WOW, that's not too bad. Either way, that's about how much it costs to send a student to a private college for a year.
plus, it would expose the kiddies to something other than the windows that 98 % of people have at their house. back in school i was always excited to use macs, just for a change of pace.
I believe the students would learn some really valuable skills using Linux and other open-source software. Linux is, IMHO the best development environment and a Linux lab in a school would create a great learning environment.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
How would the kiddies ever use real software like Micro$oft office.
Stick to the Three R's, and Football.
Getting the software for cheaper (free) is one thing, but what kind of "costs" are you going to get for using this software. Sure you may save $27k but what happens when something break? Will you need to hire someone capable of handling open source software and how much will he cost per year? What if something breaks and a service is down for a while, there will be no company to hold up their software and support it, it is now up to you.
While all that he posted is very true, as how they were going to save money if the local redneck tech people could maintain a Linux network at the schools properly, introducting technology was never the point of bringing PCs to every school.
The whole reason we even have PCs in schools in the US is just the fact that it is outright corporate welfare to computer companies such as Gateway, IBM, Dell, and sometimes Apple, due to shady deals with politicians.
Schools simply don't have the programs for technology education, and even in the high schools there is, at best, only a typing and a Microsoft Word class, and if you are extremely lucky and well funded, a class that will teach Q-Basic.
Most computers in schools just sit around in the science room, and are used only once per semester, and sometimes as entertainment devices for a public school system that's nothing more than a communist daycare center anyways.
However, PC companies, with Microsoft behind each one, get rich off our tax dollars, and hence we have PCs in schools. Putting Linux wouldn't ever fly, as it's purposefully $27,000 a year in corporate welfare to Microsoft.
I know of lots of educational software titles for Windows. How many titles are available under Linux? How many of the Windows titles will run under Wine?
Apologies to those who don't like this idea, but it seems like there have been a lot of "we saved x dollars by switch to linux" or "we lost x dollars by using commercial software."
So it seems kinda pointless to keep stating the obvious over and over again.
Just my $.02
neurostarIt's a great idea, but out in the real world, people use commercial software. If kids aren't educated in how to use it, they won't be able to compete. I think introducing free software and its concepts into the education system is a good idea, but we shouldn't forsake the kids' futures for the sake of indoctrination. Teach both, and let the kids decide what's best.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
The title of the report is "Cost savings of open source software in the server room." If you let the kids back there, you might be in trouble.
Of course, this will probably just have the effect of freeing up $27,000 for windows machines in the classroom.
But until Linux has more n00b friendly versions, it's not going to work that well.
until you have to join the working world which is dominated my MS. I call it the "Apple Effect". Those apps may cost the schools less now, but the students will pay for it later when it comes time to find a job and they don't know the software packages that are in common use.
I have to disagree with this generalization. While I agree that many of the PCs in the school system are pretty much a waste of space and time, that doesn't mean they don't have a place.
At my high school (I graduated in '99), I took multiple classes about multimedia design and computer science. In fact, the Computer Science 1 class I took in high school gave me college credit which transferred easily to just about any major university in the state (Colorado).
At the same time however, there were 3 large computer labs at my high school and I recall being herded in there several times only to waste half of the class time learning completely useless software that barely demonstrated what we were supposed to learn. Given that, I think it's fair to say that computers in schools may be overhyped, but that doesn't mean they don't belong there.
Asking Slashdot to stop preaching to the choir is like asking your ass to stop taking a shit.
But not by using open source. No, instead, we use pirated software.
Clearly, this does make it possible for the BSA to close us down, but the fact is, that they will not get anything from us. We're a not for profit organisation. They know that if they sue us they'll suffer from so much bad publicity that it's not worth it. They'll not get any money from us. We have none.
It would be nice if they prosecuted. We would use as our defence that we have a licence since I clicked "I agree" when it was installed. We may then be able to prosecute them if they caused damage. Not that we'll get a lot of money. The BSA is a non-profit.
Isn't another roadblock that Apple, IBM, and Microsoft all offer significant educational discounts? I'm not sure if this is still the case. Maybe someone else can enlighten us on that. Also, isn't another roadblock that principals, administrators, and educators are really clueless about technology and that open-source really seems foreign a concept; ie, the adoption factor is inversely proporational to the fear-factor (tm)?
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
It lets those of us that work in the real world in non-linux-for-life companies explain that open source IS cheaper in the upfront costs, but maintainability and support is the issues you REALLY have to look at.
Why? simple.
1) because it saves time and work in keeping track of windows licenses.
2) because it actually teaches children about computers, rather than just about GUIs and what can be done on them. When all the low-level things are done in the background, its no wonder the average american doesn't know what formatting a hard drive does aside from kill all their data.
3) teaches troubleshooting. Using nothing but windows, you'll never realize how much easier it is to use a command line tool for something simple.
4) provides compilers and development environments for those who are adept enough to care to use them
5) difficult for learning students to bring down the whole computer from a user-class account
6) it's free, and provides alternatives to almost anything that can be done under windows that they'll need to do in anything but very specific areas (which will catch up with time anyway).
7) UNIX is time-tested as a style of environment. Windows is controlled by the whims of the market.
There are others, but that pretty much covers the basics. Anything I missed, besides:
8: PROFIT!!!!
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I saved $0.02 by not posting the same thing neurostar just posted!
I really wish the Commercial Solutions whose costs he estimated for his comparison were listed. For all I can tell, the prices could be totally arbitrary. This takes alot of the impact away from such a comparison. I definitely wouldn't show it to management and expect a response in my favor.
Sig Sig Sputnik
As opposed to closed source vendors who are so prompt and curteous with their support.
I'm a high school student taking a computer repair class at my school, we are currently running linux and windows under vmware on linux. I spear-headed this movement and my teacher supported me fully, we are now in the process of teaching all of the students in the class how to use linux. I think that using linux is great, students are learning that they have a choice in which operating system goes on their computer
why does the porridge bird lay his eggs in the air?
Ms. Osbourne is right in that schools bring in computers to say "look at us, we're in the information age!" Computers in the classroom are glorified typewriters and babysitters. If you really want to edumicate your kids, do it yourself. You choice of OS may vary (see here).
As somebody who has lived close to this area in the past, I must say that Harrisonburg City only has 4000 students TOTAL in only 6 schools (only 1 high school and 1 middle school). So I would think of it less as a city and more as a small rural community. This means there is likely only one or two people that would essentially be setting up and running this network. Perhaps it will indeed save them money when deploying their new infrastructure, but god forbid this guy move out of the area! I also must question some of the software packages and their "amounts" that he has determined. While I am not advocating Windows by any means, Apache, PHP, mySql, analog, and plenty of other packages he has listed run completely fine on a Win32-based system. I would be concerned about how well the teachers/faculty/students will be able to utilize the system efficiently (reminds of yesterday's kids on linux post), and be able to do trivial tasks. I'm just not sure that these costs are in line with the size of their school system, and whether or not the savings are actually going to amount to a better learning experience for the school community.
Dude, I don't know where you are, but when I graduated from high school in 1997, every school in the county had programming classes. The richer schools were using Borland C++, the rest of us had to do with some flavor of UNIX.
These are middle-class towns in Bergen County, New Jersey. Is this a "Northeast Elite" thing?
I just moved the desktops over to Red Hat (I can't remember the version, but the kernel was 2.4.x), and installed free development utilitiies. OpenOffice wasn't really "there" yet, so I used Star Office. With the ability to lock down the machines efficiently (something difficult to impossible to do with Windows), the Novell client licenses were no longer needed. OpenBSD became their server. Voila, absolutely zero dollars were spent on licenses or new hardware. I billed them a measly $475 for my trouble (I used to work there, so I cut them some major slack. Besides, I really wanted to win one for the Linux crowd).
The downside: my pay had to come under the table, because the state was so locked for funds they were not allowed to out source - even though they were still allowed to visit their local MS salesman and blow $30,000. Go figure. In the end, the manager just told the brass that his admin had thought it all up. :)
The kind of money they're talking about is not that much in terms of the total cost of having all the computers. The big costs have nothing to do with Windows licenses. They have to do with network infrastructure, paying people to maintain the hardware and software, and keeping the hardware current.
The other problem is that the faculty and administrators want the machines at work to use the same OS they're used to using at home. That means Windows for 95% of them, and MacOS for 5%. I don't know a single person besides myself on my campus who uses Linux at home. It's hard enough to convince them to support MacOS.
There's also the problem of unavailability of the relevant applications.
Find free books.
They've got these computers scattered all throughout the school, all running linux. The art dept uses gimp for photos, etc. But their core apps are really a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, email & web. The beauty is, their elementry school is connected to the same network. Students get their account & homedir in 4th grade and it follows them until they graduate.
They can do much more interesting things with these networks, offer better classes w/ more technical focuses with everything they have. They don't need to worry about forking out several $k for licenses for certain software just to teach programming concepts, administration, etc...
This is exactly the kind of school I want my kids to grow up in, and if I don't end up homeschooling them, I'll do whatever it takes to get them in this one.
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First and most blatant, the author does not list exactly what these commerical software line items are, he only compares them with what the OS application he is planning on using. Just as a simple example, he lists WU_FTPD and then assigns a cost of $50x3 for the commerical "equivilent". What is this commerical package? Can't he just use WU_FTPD (assuming the "cost" is the same for the Win32 version as the Linux). The ftp server that ships with Win2K doesn't require any licensing fees (though it's feature set is a bit week compared to other packages). Win2k also comes with a dns server and dhcp servers, so what are the costs that he is associating with these? I'm not saying that these are made up, just that his article is basically useless without it.
One other thing, why is Samba listed as an expense? Presumably if you were going with a Windoze solution you wouldn't need it? Do they have other non Windoze boxes that currently don't connect to existing Windoze boxes that going with Windoze with force them to purchase Samba?
All these things call cast into doubt the accuracy of his article. If he'd at least list the "commerical" packages, then one could make a truely educated attempt at determining the "real" cost savings.
Unfortunately, $27,000 is just the software savings and it would be offset by the cost of the extra support staff. Realistically, most of the affected schools are not going to have IT staff capable of supporting all the packages listed whick will require hiring additional people or training those already in place. Nonetheless, using open-source software for back-end applications could pay off in additional system reliability.
Setting up user systems to work with OSS would be another story. As unpleasant as it is, most educators are at least passing familiar with standard m$ products & can use them with minimal effort. Retraining all teachers to use and teach with computer-based Open Source educational products would be much more expensive.
An additional problem is that - unless there is a dramatic shift in OS and office system usage over the next 6-8 years - most of the kids going through that school system will be hired by companies using m$ products. Teaching them to work with systems they may never encounter in Real Life (such as the Apple IIe's in my old school) is a disservice.
I do like the idea of using Open Source systems in our public schools & see it as a great way to diversify & cut costs. However, there are a lot of other issues to consider other than direct savings on software.
We always had at least one geek teacher, and if your geek teachers were anything like mine I'm sure they'd have a good go at fixing the problem, or finding someone online who'd do it for free.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
BS. When I was in highschool as a sophomore we had one PC in the drafting class running AutoCAD. No one used it. I began using it about a month into the class because I was much better with AutoCAD than a t-square and compass. The next year there were probably 15 computers in the drafting class and a plotter. The newpaper class used Macintoshes to produce the newspaper. I think the yearbook was also partially compiled on Macs. There was a Pascal class that used a computer lab. And there was a typing class than used PCs. I graduated in 1993. Hopefully, things have progressed even further since then.
However, as far as Linux and open-source are concerned... it's not there year. They are no where near as easy to use as they need to be to serve an educational function. They need to get out of the way and let the students use the applications they need. Linux is not there yet, and is useless to a K-12 environment. I'm sure the geeks setting it up and running it have fun with it though.
mbbac
I dont know what high school you went to. But I was programming in Pascal in my high school courses. Ok, one year we used Basic, and another was Turing, but the rest was Pascal.
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
Sounds like a slashdotting is going about to happen
Excuse me! I come from a redneck tech area. I now run the IT dept for a Biotech, and I'm damn good at it. The high school I went to had old 386 computers and were peer-2-peered with twisted pair cable running Windows 3.1 when I attended. I learned BASIC, Pascal, AND C++ while attending there and I also maintained the network. We actually had a good computer curriculum and it wasn't because MS or Dell came in and just gave us a bunch of useless machines that weren't going to get used. It was because we had good teachers who were willing to teach us the things we wanted to learn. Tech education is EXACTLY the point of PC's in schools (from the school standpoint) even if the corporate standpoint on it is to gain a tax break. But I think it is deeper than that. I think tech companies are trying to increase what American students learn about computers partially to replace the people who work for them now but wont in the future and partially because many companies are tired of hiring below-par foreign workers and having to sponsor them in this country.
Honesty may be the best policy, but apparently by elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
Could somebody please provide a brief definition of what "k12 schools" are?
This article is about SERVER costs. It is not about switching the computers in the classrooms, that the students actually sit down and use, to linux.
Are you just trolling? This LARGE COST that you speak of is no larger then what you would to have paid for a license for the same product in MS land.
If a user is truely clueless about computers, and can't RTFM, then 9 times out of 10 they are having one of their knowledgable friends do the real work for them anyways.
Uh-huh.
Because you just know that Apple had Congress in their pocket when my school had Turtle Logo and Number Munchers on a bunch of Apple IIe systems back in the early '80s.
Show those fscking politicians "Oregon Trail", and all they saw was dollar signs.
Hell inna handbasket. Liberals! Liberals, I tells ya! And fluoride in the water!
fnord
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
He saved money using free software instead of commercial software? How's that? Can someone explain the math to me? Duh...
It's about a lot more than the up front costs. His pricing is simplistic and the writeup, pardon me for saying, but sophmoric, at best and doesn't apply to a number of other real-life situatins.
How much is support going to cost? Are you going to have in-house experts? How much are they going to cost compared to the people who don't have to be as smart to run the equivalent Windows software?
There are a lot of other fringe areas that need to be considered to come up with a true lifetime cost for software, and this doesn't even scratch the surface.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for Open Source. I love my Open Office and I'm having a blast with Linux. But I'm a geek.
Someone else mentioned the fact that most real-world companies use commercial software and these kids won't have experience with it. Good point.
Sorry, but this is hardly a booster for Open Source. This is like saying, "People save money by shopping during a sale." Not exactly news.
Whaaaa?
In 1986 I took my first computer class in school. I learned how to program in BASIC on an 8086. We later got in several 286 machines, which was awesome. This was in a town of 3000 people, and our computer teacher was about 40 years old at the time. We obviously didn't have a huge budget, and there was no such thing as a network.
Are you telling me that today, in high school, they only use computers to teach typing? I find it extremely hard to believe that computer education has gotten worse in 15 years.
You can be cynical all you want, but don't project it onto the education system.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
".., the web server that served this web page to you is running on an old, retired PC that has been recycled after its lifetime as a Windows desktop has passed.
/. effect.
If you consider a dual MP with 2GB ram outdate I guess this could be true. That's about what it takes to withstand the
Jokes a side. The article fails to mention the anti OSS advocats main argument, TCO. I am a strong support of OSS, but I don't think anyone can claim that OSS has a $0 TCO. The article should have mentioned that keeping a healthy system for someone without a Linux guru or extensive IT dep. requiers outside consultans, and support is always useful. In addition training of personell requires relatively heavy investment. OSS stands out and is by many conceived as harder to learn than software that follow the MS standards that tey're used to. The $27,000 is therefor IMHO a bit to high.
On the other hand I believe this is outweighted by the (almost) $0 upgrade costs - user interfaces and basis funcitonallity rarely change - the more-for-the-money argument and the no-bloated-window-managing-for-servers argument.
A sound discussion on economical benefits of OSS should always include counter arguments. One angled articles are hard to take serious.
Look a monkey!
shouldn't that be WTFM is most cases.
I still can't get my SBLive working PROPERLY and I've RTFM and it's a fucking shit manual.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Cost savings of open source software
in the server room
An informal case study in K-12 education
1. What is open source software?
2. Listing of open source software used
3. Cost savings versus capabilities gained
4. Implicit savings in hardware
5. Other implicit cost savings
1. Security
2. Lower virus vulnerability
3. Upgrade costs
6. The roadblock to using open source software
7. A big thanks to OSS developers
1. What is open source software?
It is often difficult for people to understand that some of the most secure, reliable, and efficient software in the world is not owned by a company but rather is under an open license. Open source software is software that was developed with the source code freely available to the public. Anyone may download and use the software, and make changes to it as necessary, with the hope that any improvements made by individuals will be committed back to the main source tree so that everyone can benefit from the modifications.
While this may sound like a strange way to develop software, it is surprisingly common and effective. For instance, in October 2002, SourceForge.net (a site that offers free hosting for open software development projects) reached the milestone of hosting 50,000 open source projects with over 500,000 registered developers. Many people who, if asked, could only name two operating systems would be staggered to learn how many free and open source complete operating systems exist in the world (and that there are several free OS's that could run on the very hardware you're reading this web page with).
Although few people in my school division know what Linux is, every one of them uses it indirectly every day. Open source software has a particularly appropriate niche in budget-strapped public education institutions. This document aims to describe the benefits that Harrisonburg City Public Schools has reaped from the deployment of open source software in its server rooms.
2. Listing of open source software used
While certainly not comprehensive, the list below contains a large sample of the free software products that we employ in HCPS. I have attempted to estimate the cost of replacing these free software installations with commercial products. It should be noted that in some cases my estimations are really just wild guesses as to the cost of various commercial solutions. As a general rule I have tried to estimate on the conservative side. Another thing to note is that commercial solutions for a number of the products below often come bundled as one product, making it very difficult to assign individual replacement costs to the items. For instance, most commercial mail server solutions bundle an SMTP server and an IMAP server together while the open source community's philosophy is to create one product for each discrete function.
Software Estimated cost of
commercial solution
Linux distributions
Red Hat Linux
Linux distribution for i386 (PC) hardware $150 x 17 = $2550
YellowDog Linux
Linux distribution for PowerPC (Macintosh) hardware $130 x 5 = $650
Web server software
Apache
The most widely used web server on the internet $500 x 6 = $3000
PHP
Server-side web scripting language $700 x 5 = $3500
MySQL
Structured Query Language database server $500 x 3 = $1500
phpMyAdmin
Powerful web-based database administration tool $100 x 3 = $300
DataMiner
User-friendly web-based interface for managing database content $50 x 12 = $600
ht://Dig
WWW Search Engine Software $200 x 1 = $200
Outreach Project Tool
Web-based group project collaboration environment $500 x 1 = $500
Phorum
Web-based forum/message board software $100 x 1 = $100
Mail server software
Sendmail
Internet standard MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) $150 x 1 = $150
UW IMAP
University of Washington IMAP/POP3 mail server $150 x 1 = $150
OpenLDAP
LDAP server for intregrated authentication and directory services $200 x 2 = $400
MailMan
Full-featured mailing list manager $150 x 1 = $150
Horde Groupware
Web-based email, address book, and calendaring software $500 x 1 = $500
Firewalling/Routing software
netfilter/iptables
Stateful IP filtering system $1000 x 2 = $2000
Cross-platform file server software
Samba
File server for Windows clients $800 x 4 = $3200
Netatalk
File server for Macintosh clients $500 x 7 = $3500
Other network server products
ISC BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Daemon)
Internet standard DNS server $100 x 9 = $900
ISC DHCP
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol server $100 x 8 = $800
WU-FTPD
FTP server software $50 x 3 = $150
NTPd
Network Time Protocol server for synchronization of computer clocks $50 x 4 = $200
Squid
HTTP caching proxy server $200 x 2 = $400
rsync
Incremental backup solution $50 x 12 = $600
Network management and monitoring
MRTG (Multi-Router Traffic Grapher)
Monitors traffic on switches and routers a lot x 3 = 3 lots
Nagios
Monitors servers and routers and notifies me of outages via email $300 x 1 = $300
Ethereal
Network analysis and packet sniffing tool $1000 x 1 = $1000
sntop
Monitors network connectivity $30 x 1 = $30
LanLord
Monitors leases on DHCP servers Bundled with
commercial products
Webalizer
Web server statistics reporting tool Bundled with
commercial products
Analog
Web server statistics reporting tool Bundled with
commercial products
The list above comprises about $27,000 of (roughly) estimated cost savings in software purchases for HCPS.
3. Cost savings versus capabilities gained
The commercial replacement cost of the free software that we currently use is obviously very high. However, if I were forced to deploy commercial solutions for all of the above, you could probably guess that I would trim back what we needed to buy significantly. For instance, if it cost me $1000 per web server for the server OS and web server software, you can bet that I wouldn't be running six web servers in my server room like I am now. Rather, I would cut back and only run one or perhaps two web servers. This makes it apparent that not all of the benefit of open source software deployment in is the form of cost savings; much of the benefit is in terms of capabilities gained. In other words, through the use of free software, I am able to do more within my budget than I could if I only had commercial solutions available.
4. Implicit savings in hardware
Linux can do a lot with only a little hardware. Here in HCPS we have a number of Linux servers running on hardware that would be inadequate for commercial server solutions such as Windows 2000 or Mac OS X. For instance, the web server that served this web page to you is running on an old, retired PC that has been recycled after its lifetime as a Windows desktop has passed. If I were to use Microsoft's IIS server software or Apple's Mac OS X, I would not have considered using this piece of hardware as a web server, and I would have needed to buy new hardware. By enabling me to reuse otherwise useless hardware, open source operating systems have saved our school division a considerable amount of money in hardware costs.
To provide a very rough figure on these cost savings, I estimate that I am currently running 11 Linux servers with hardware that would be inadequate for doing the same job with a commercial solution. To replace those servers with new hardware could easily cost well over $25,000.
5. Other implicit cost savings
1. Security
Many companies put a lot of effort into monetary assessments of the liabilities of security risks on their networks. Such cost assessment is not as common in public education but nevertheless the possibilities for such costs exist and should not be ignored. If my installations of open source server software are more secure than a commercial alternative (and I believe they are, although a discussion of security issues is beyond the scope of this document), then we have a lower risk of losing data or productive staff time needed to clean up after a security breach.
2. Lower virus vulnerability
I am not qualified to provide a full analysis of virus vulnerabilities of various server operating systems, but I think everyone would agree that historically open source OS's have fared far better than... ahem... other operating systems. The HCPS technology staff spends a fair amount of valuable time combatting viruses on our client PC's but a virus infection on a network server can be devastating in terms of data loss, down time, and staff time required for reconstruction. Open source servers that are less vulnerable to virus infections provide cost savings in terms of decreased liability in these areas.
3. Upgrade or recurring licensing costs
The cost of a software solution is not merely the purchase price of the software. The usable lifetime of a commercial software product is rarely longer than 4 years, but where server software products are concerned I would contend that the lifetime is even less -- perhaps only 2 years on average. At this point one must purchase a newer product or an upgrade to the existing one. With open source software, updates are continually free, and I am able to keep my servers running the latest software versions without having to worry about whether I can afford the upgrade.
6. The roadblock to using open source software
So you're probably thinking, "If open source software saves people so much money, why isn't everyone using it?" Two words: learning curve. For people who are used to point-and-click administration of their servers, open source software is often bewilderingly complex to install and configure. I'll admit that you have to be somewhat of a geek to even try out an open source operating system such as Linux. The learning curve that must be followed by a first-time Linux user can be very time consuming and frustrating. For many, especially in public education, this difficulty constitutes a roadblock to the deployment of open source solutions in their district.
7. A big thanks to OSS developers
As you have seen from the informal analysis on this page, I (and indeed my school division) owe a huge "thank you" to the thousands of developers and other people involved in open source software projects.
Copyright 2002
Rob Lineweaver
Last Modified: Friday, October 25, 2002 Product names on this page
may be copyrighted by their respective owners
Madness takes its toll. Exact change please.
I have to plug Openchallenge as this is one key part of the message to the schools & teachers: if you have some specific need for educational software - submit it to Openchallenge - maybe it builds enough effort for making that software a reality. I believe there is lots of "niche" software needed in education too - atleast I remember crafting a few pieces of software for my mom who was a teacher - there just was not the software for these purposes, and it was possible for me (with no magic skills) to craft it during a few evenings, when I was around 14-16 years old.
My high school (not a big or fancy one) had a C++ course, a typing course, and a course over basic computer applications. There were also computers in the art lab and the journalism studio. I would say that there are plenty of legitimate uses for computers in schools. Basic typing itself being enough to justify at least one computer lab.
Even if they got everything for free it's not like they will teach anything useful on them. I took a course call "Computer Applications" in high school and all they taught us was how to use MS Word and Excel.
this is absolutely true in the United states....
in technologically advanced countries like Japan... this is very different...
Sorry, but in Japan they are interested in teachin gthe children.... in the US we just want to program them.
I sit in my little /. world wandering if anyone else gives a fuck, I see a story like this posted and I see that others do. I feel content and have more drive in my religion.
I can now say, look other people are doing it, I'm not a freek any more.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Well considering Linux at its roots was for educational purposes I think it is the best OS for the job + it saves the taxpayer (me) money! I sure as heck don't want my school buying a new os every time a company(ex.Microsoft) decides to enforce some odd EULA rule on them.
The average school student can't use windows, not to mention the average school system administrator.
Most schools computer systems are not maintained properly, and they usually just barely work. The cost of training, and expert administration would be rather high.
An entirely open source envirnment is out of the question. I believe a balance can be found. One where you have proprietary software (an absolute must) and you also provide options.
Have a certain percentage of your schools computers be open source. That way you meet your quota of machines and save some money, and eveyone is happy.
Some people need MS Word, but if you want to provide Star Office as an alternative, please by all means, but you still need to have Word.
Actually, schools should research their audience and based on the local feed back assert the issue accordingly.
For a project at my son's school (I ws a parent mystery guest) I demonstrated to the kids how easy it is to install Linux over a Microsoft laden box and what you could do with it.
For the most part the kids loved it, and they were so curious what the software was that could actually replace the great beast. Some of them thought it ran ontop of Windows. BTW - the kids are in 4th grade.
So I left them with the disks for RH7.3 and now they get a kick out of installing RedHat over the XP disks they had paid for, and vice-versa. It's quite funny, but now they're learning how to replace the OSes back forth (for practice I 'spoze). I'm thinking of going in to show them more - dual boots, other things they can do w/ it.
The real funny part is that my son said that a couple of kids got in an argument over what OS was better than the other, available s/w, games - etc. I think it's quite funny. Good think it didn't come to blows!
Is that foreshadowing of a future slashdotting or what??
When you are about 5, you enter kindergarten. This is K. (I believe this may be optional in some states) At 6, you enter 1st grade. And so on, through 12th. "K-12" is a term used to describe the schooling you receive before University level.
I went to college in Harrisonburg. It is the home of James Madison University. JMU's CS curriculum teaches people on the UNIX platform. Most all of the programming assignments are submitted via one of the Sun boxes there. There are a couple programming classes for MS applications but they are by far not the most popular. Also, they teach simple networking based on UNIX and linux as well. So if the city really wanted someone to support the infrastructure they built in the public schools, all they would need to do is form some sort of joint program with the college to have students come over and support it. Maybe give them Internship/CO-OP credits for it. The reality is that if more schools would work with colleges in a format like this then there stands the great possibility of major advancement in technology curriculum on BOTH sides.
Honesty may be the best policy, but apparently by elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
Not a northeast thing, my HS in Provo, UT had a C/C++ Turbo class taught using Borland 3.5 (in 1995) which I was lucky enough to crash as a freshman (it was supposed to be seniors only, but I knew enough BASIC to get the teacher to sign me in). Good thing too, my life took a nose dive from the time I dropped out as a sr through my getting kicked out of the navy. When I finally went back home I got a job at a gamedev company with just the BASIC and C++ knowledge from the HS class. Now I'm 21 and own a condo and shit, good thing they had computers at my highschool, or I'd still be answering phones for a living.
Interesting choice of pejorative statements just because their population density is different that the, obviously backward, town where your school computer was not used in your presance.
I graduated from highschool in 1980, attended 2 different schools in the Knoxville, TN area and both had computers maintained by the students way back then. Not sure what my first school had, since I did not take a computer class until 1977, but it did use punch cards. The machine I was familiar with was a DEC machine hooked to 3 teletype terminals and paper tape memory.
Even years later, rural highschools in the area were using microcomputers to enhance the football coach's play-calling ability and defense coordination. How do I know this? One of the coaches was a helicopter pilot in my National Guard unit and told us about the setup during a bad weather day. BTW, the coaches were the ones setting up the computers and programming them. So much for the stupid hick jock theory.
In the same area, my son received his CCNA through his highschool during his Junior year. All of the equipment and instruction was provided by Cisco, free. The networking cable was surplus and installed by the students in the networking classes. The T-1 line was provided, free, by the local phone company. So much for the the direction of "welfare cashflow".
The only thing holding back computing in schools is people like *you* that assume just because *your* school was full of helpless, clueless dolts that a smaller school *must* have a lesser level of ability, be it their accent that you do not like or some other non-issue.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
+1 funny
In my day we only programmed with ones and zeros. And sometimes they didn't let us use ones! -Wally.
Sleep is for the Weak
Lest you think I'm complaining, I don't think we needed anything more. I don't see why schools are on the upgrade treadmill when the primary applications -- typing, web browsing, basic programming -- can be done perfectly well with old systems. Every time I hear that a school has spent another half-million dollars on computer equipment, I wonder why they don't get to the important stuff first. (Did anyone else attend schools where the same textbooks had been in use for 25 years?)
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
school children are failing at the basics, I say we are spending to much money on computers/software.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I think this also can benifit the question that little Jonny or Jenny might ask. "How does this work?" Now they can literly show them and learn from seeing how the software works on the machine with the source code they get in open source software. They could even copy it and give it to all the students and faculty w/out fear of the BSA breathing down their necks.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Open source software is great, it's free and easily modified. Now that I've given the Open Source movement the usual hurrah, I'm also pretty sure that most real-world companies that use computers use Microsoft products. I'm also reasonably certain that this isn't going to change, due to both monetary and support issues. Even though Linux is free, it isn't free to pay someone to convert your Windows network to a Linux network.
This creates a problem in the public school system in that public education is supposed to teach individuals useful skills. Unfortunately, if kids are taught open source software, they are going to be at a significant disadvantage entering the job market than individuals who have been taught how to use Microsoft products. As nice as it would be to see these individuals converting companies over to Open Source solutions, it's not terribly likely.
So, in my opinion it would be reasonable to teach kids both, but if you're only going to use one type of software, use what The Real World (tm) [No affiliation with MTV] uses. Teaching software, languages, and other things that the average joe never uses in the Real World gives the public school system a bad reputation from the very people who attend it.
If there is a God, you are an authorized representative. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
eSchool News just did a recent story on Linux in schools. Nice read.
For us, we are so locked into MS right now - the licensing fees are unbelievable. Servers, Cals, Office, Mail, etc cost us around 30K per year. In one recent example of price schemes - Office 97 and Pub 97 were separate packages (we didn't get Pub). For Office 2000 MS combined them and you got Pub for free. Office 2002 - they yank Pub back out (nice bait and switch!) and it costs an additional $5 per seat (5x1000+ pcs) We opted out and decided not be jerked around like that. We are a very technologically robust district with a computer at every teacher's desk and 1 to 5 computers in each classroom for student use, plus labs, libraries and tech ed rooms. In addition to the MS licensing, we have a huge investment in educational software and various databases to run the district. Our student pop is around 4000. Our anti-virus alone runs us 10K a year, plus firewall and citrix 10/10. There's more. I am stunned at how much we spend, versus starting with a meager 100K budget for everything, several years ago. We need our enterprise antivirus and firewall. We need our student information database and electronic libraries. But we were sucked into the MS spiral out-of-control licensing. We have invested years of training students and staff and administrators. It is very difficult to switch now. If I were starting fresh, I'd switch to free/open in a heartbeat.
Alright I'll bite.
I went to 10 grade in technical magnet West Virginia. Where deer hunting was more popular than computers. This was back in '86 we had dual disk drives IBM pc's. First year was BASIC second year was pascal. Third year was advanced PASCAL. There were probably 15-20 people in programming class.
My parents moved to New York I went to a elite public HS where the CS classes sucked(CS was a vocation class???) while the engineering classes (yes, pneumatics,etc) and JK Flip-flops were considered the best in the nation(at least the state of New York).
May want to rethink your rant
I work at a community college, which is not that different from K-12.
:P
go get back in yer stinky smelly troll hole
Who do you call when commercial software breaks? Unless you're paying additional monthly or annual maintenance fees, chances are the vendor isn't going to want to talk to you.
Someone pointed out the third "free" is free as in market. With commercial software, only the vendor can support you. You pay their price or you get nothing. With free-as-in-speech software you get free-as-in-market software support: you can pay as much or as little as you'd like, for varying levels of support, and presumably varying levels of expertise.
--
E_NOSIG
The purpose of the general education system is to teach students to think and understand the world we live in. The point of school is not, and has never been, to train our youth to join the ranks of the working. That is the purpose of trade schools. If you teach a child how to learn then they will be able to tackle whatever work most interests them. Same goes for teaching programming languages in schools. Stop trying to teach Java to high school students; instead focus on something like pascal or better yet some kind of functional programming. These may not be used in the "real world" as much, but they sure do make you think.
.plan!! what plan?
is necessarily lower cost than proprietary software. Those who believe otherwise probably thinks that zero times one million is larger than zero times ten.
Just my 0 cents worth...
I went to JMU which is located in the 'Burg and let me tell you this should be good. There's nothing the townies love more than their Walmart and SuperWalmart so this should work out quite well. Kids go to school and use Linux in the classroom. Kids go home and use Linux on their Walmart PC to do their homework.
I'll have to contact the JMU CS department and find out if the students and the LUG had anything to do with this.
1) I work to support the technology infrastructure for a major southern City's school system. I guarantee the machines that are deployed are getting used. The average librarian is supporting a couple dozen machines (typically mixed between Windows and Mac), and they are using them all the time.. have classes lined up waiting to use the resources, for research, etc. To the point where they'd rather we come out and fix them on site (not likely) rather than take it out of service long enough to send it in for repairs. So your comment of Computers in schools being simple corporate welfare doesn't float..
2) In our school system, Cisco has partnered with the high schools, and is teaching networking technology. We're growing the next generation of network saavy folks, today...
3) (and now to address the bait) We're in the south.. None of the Technical team here are rednecks... so bugger off, mate. (and yes, that's southern US, to you globalists).
-I know you think you saw me post this, but I didn't...
-- All That's Evil in the Geek Space
Start up a fund which allows Open Source advocates (or anyone) from all over the world to donate THEIR copy of MS Windows to the school. I'm sure everybody who's been into technology for at least a few years has SEVERAL copies of Windows just laying around. I'd gladly donate, as my PC's are happily running free software, and will continue to do so.
Or slightly better. Microsoft onsite service or other 24/7 support options for Microsoft products likely is more expensive than a RedHat service contract, RHCE, or something else due to the lack of competition.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
My school only had a generic "supercomputing" course that didn't teach anything. I had to teach myself C/C++ from a textbook on my own time. I was fortunate enough, however, to have an independent study for a semester with a unix geek, that was the first time I ever got my feet wet with linux (I think it was caldera desktop...this was around 1996-7).
Personally, I think it's a great idea to try and introduce open source into the classrooms, but it's dangerous to homogenize any learning environment. The reality is that 90% of students that will need to use a computer will only need the basics (web-smarts, word processing), and only the CS types will need to worry about programming or configuring apache (and chances are they already know how on their own). It'll be nice to give those advanced students the chance to play around in a learning environment, but there's no sense in forcing EVERYONE to use something that they don't really need.
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten. -George Carlin
Errmm..I'm all for Linux Advocacy but choosing a school for your kids based solely on its IT infrastructure seems kind of short sighted.
Honestly, an article about an informal study of software costs for k though 12? Has slashdot sunk so low that this is the best they can come up with?
One guy in particular single-handedly killed an implementation of the Linux Terminal Server Project at the high school with a relentless barage of FUD..
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
I have noticed many posts that are claiming Linux will save money, or Windows has better support, or that the kids need to learn reality (Windows-Office), or that kids need to be exposed to all kinds of software. The truth is, regardless of which way a school district goes with their technology, they are likely to get it wrong. If they go with Windows, they may have cheaper support, but still don't bother to support it anyway. Hardware breaks and they cannot get it fixed because they "saved money" by skipping support contracts and doing it themselves with one or two people for 20-30 schools.
In CA in 1997, the state legislature passed a bill to put a computer in every classroom by 2001. Most high schools took advantage of the program only to have the supplemental money for support, training, and licensing (ie: tithes to the church of MS). Of course there are no warranties on the hardware, the support staff has been let go, and nobody has any plans to fix it.
There is nothing wrong with teaching and expecting someone to know more about what makes the tools they use everyday work (and I shudder to think what it would have cost me to get a new booster and master cylinder installed in my truck at a shop - I did it in about 3 hours last Sunday, for the cost of parts - pretty simple job, actually).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
It's a great idea, but out in the real world, people use commercial software. If kids aren't educated in how to use it, they won't be able to compete.
... I doubt a child moving from KDE to Windows or Mac, or visa versa, will be particularly traumatized.
... the kids are neither qualified nor equipped with the knowledge necessary to even begin to make such a decision.
... except in price, and in the opportunity they are afforded, at least theoretically, to look under the hood and see how things really work, and in the variety of different applications (and possibilities) available on a budget. In all these areas a school on a budget gets vastly more return from free software than it ever will from proprietary products, Microsoft spin and corporate politicking, not to mention slashdot astroturfing, aside.
What an utter load of crap.
First, I work in the "real world" and make a very acceptable living doing so. We deal with real money (millions of dollars) in a high risk environment (trading various products on various exchanges), and we cream our competition in no small part because of our use in free software.
So: myth number one - commercial software isn't the only thing used in the "real world" (as your statement disingenuously implies), free software is deployed very widely, and very successfully, throughout the "real" world.
Myth number two - education is only valuable if it precisely mimicks a trade school. It isn't particularly important if kids are tought literacy by reading Mark Twain or by reading A Corporate Yesman's Training Primer (except that the latter may preclude them from ever becoming a functioning human being), what is important is that they learn the skill of reading. Likewise, it makes no difference whether a child is taught Macintosh and OS X, Windows and Microsoft Office, or GNU/Linux and OpenOffice, so long as they learn the basics of computer literacy and how to use basic word processing applications. Indeed, the latter will allow the gifted children to excel beyond anything the proprietary offerings could (for they will be able to look under the hood and see how things work), while the average to challenged student will benefit from learning basic concepts they will have little difficulty applying to a different envoronment.
Indeed, kids once moved from Apple IIe to Atari, to MS DOS, to Macintosh (in any order) with little difficulty
Myth three: kids should decide what is best. Nonsense. Parents and educators should make that decision
Kids should be exposed to computers. The more capabilities they can be exposed to, the better, and the more equipment and software available for them to explore and learn from, the better. It makes little difference whether that is Linux, Windows, or Mac
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If the cost savings in licensing would only be $27k for Harrisburg, it makes me wonder either a: would they then pay for free software or b: why is that cost so low?
If a standard PC has Windows 98/2k ($100), MS Office Educators edition (~$300), Other classroom software ($200-2500). At maximum it would appear that Harrisburg 40-50 computers in their system. That is a big problem in itself. According to a recent article in CACM (not sure wich month), school districts should be shooting for a 1 to 1 pc to child ration but at least a 7 to 1 ratio is effective.
Hopefully the use of free software will allow the Harrisburg school district to reduce the ratio.
On /., the rage is always "Look I can replace this proprietary setup with Linux/OSS/FSF/whatever." While this can be an excellent idea given the right personel, what about a solution that is more feasible for a successor who is not necessarily a Linux guru to maintain. Given the list of what this guy wants/needs, he could get it all set up (other than the x86's) for under $3,000 using Apple hardware and software. For $2,500, a K-12 school can get an XServe that comes with an unlimited client license for OS X Server. All the server software he lists either comes with OS X Server (usually with a nice GUI) or can be compiled under Darwin. For the 5 Macs, he can get OS X for 70 bucks apiece (education discount again) for a total of $350. So aside from whatever he chooses for the x86 desktops, he could have everything else set up for $2,850. So rather than having a setup where it would require someone with a pretty hefty knowledge of Linux to administer, for a few grand more he could have a setup that is able to take advantage of all that open source software while providing a much greater ease of use.
By seeing more places where institutions took the leap to open source/free software, it gives us more references to use when trying to explain to others (e.g., our bosses) why they should consider letting us do the same.
Heck, we should have a repository of success stories for that very purpose. Does such a thing exist?
..Free Live Free...
I was there too. It's amazing at what they've done. (I'm writing a couple of articles on the topic, so quit stealing my thunder!)
how to invest, a novice's guide
Sorry man but I disagree...
/s" that isn't teaching me? It doesn't matter if its pc windows linux mac or nextcube black, if a person doesn't know what formatting is and they nuke their hard drive the OS they're using has no relevance to that. Next point..
1) because it saves time and work in keeping track of windows licenses.
While this may have been true in the pre win2k server days, using group policies you can really keep a handle on both OS and application licenses. Don't want a student installing that warezed copy of photoshop? Make a group policy, Only want the art computers to have photoshop? Make a group policy.
2) because it actually teaches children about computers, rather than just about GUIs and what can be done on them. When all the low-level things are done in the background, its no wonder the average american doesn't know what formatting a hard drive does aside from kill all their data.
So if I use a dos boot disk and type "format c:
3) teaches troubleshooting. Using nothing but windows, you'll never realize how much easier it is to use a command line tool for something simple.
From my experience on the corporate lan, %85 of all trouble tickets go to outlook/exchange issues, %10 to network issues, and the other %5 go to hardware issues. So if you took outlook/exchange out of the loop and just dealt with the other %15 your troubleshooting methods would be the same on a windows machine as they are a linux box.
[on the network]
Open up a shell/dos prompt. Ping that router, ping that nameserver, do a NSlookup.
[hardware]
jiggle that card, make sure that ram is seated correctly, make sure cables are plugged in where they supposed to be, smell for smoke
So basically you learn the same either way. The most basic networking tools exist on both platforms.
4) provides compilers and development environments for those who are adept enough to care to use them
You mean GCC? Here you can get it for windows too http://gcc.gnu.org/install/specific.html#windows
5) difficult for learning students to bring down the whole computer from a user-class account
I'll go back to my first point with group policies on that one.
6) it's free, and provides alternatives to almost anything that can be done under windows that they'll need to do in anything but very specific areas (which will catch up with time anyway).
I spent a month on RH8, i've got to say, it sucked for a desktop. Sure I love using it for a router and the website im in charge of uses it (check my sig) for a desktop it just plain sucks (didn't we have a discussion on this last week?) Sure there is open source alternatives (Read GIMP) but gimp isn't professional grade yet, it doesn't do CYMK seperations. Kids need to learn whats in the real world, real world desktops use windows.
7) UNIX is time-tested as a style of environment. Windows is controlled by the whims of the market.
So unix is like a stubborn child and windows does what the parents want?
Like I said before, i'm not trying to dis linux/unix in any way, but it's still not ready for primetime. If you wanted to give kids an insight into unix, get a bunch of macs with OSX. Then that way you can give them the best of both worlds.
Not every contractor has knowledge of Linux and even so many that do don't INSTALL it. Your average company isn't going to support something like that and someone who does will probably charge more.
Sure, you save $27k/year in licensing, but how much do you spend in training? Most kids and teachers aren't going to be used to mounting drives and troubleshooting hardware when things go awry in linux.
Microsoft-based OS's are just familiar to them, it's easier to use for the most part and something that they can relate to.
Cost savings != efficiency.
Its one thing when you say to your boss "we could save $X by using free software". Its quite another when you point them to a well-done study on the cost benefits of OSS. Chances are there will be plenty of people reading /. that are trying to convince others of the merits of OSS.
How freaking sad
The learning curve that must be followed by a first-time Linux user can be very time consuming and frustrating. For many, especially in public education, this difficulty constitutes a roadblock to the deployment of open source solutions in their district.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
At my high school, we had a Java class, a C++ class, a 3d graphics class, and and Engineering Academy. I learned AutoCAD well enough to get a job with an engineering firm right out of high school. I slept through 5 programming classes in college because I knew the stuff from high school. Plus, we had a novell network, so I tinkered w/ unix. MY high school taught valuable skills, maybe the school you are talking about needs to shape up. BTW, my school is a PUBLIC school. It's in Marin County...hmmm...maybe that's why it was such a good school. Anyways, don't overgeneralize ;-)
People are criticizing the method and means. I have read posts that say "It isn't 'Real World' experience" or "You haven't taken into account the SUPPORT" and several other attacks at what, IMHO, is an OUTSTANDING effort.
To those that say it won't provide "Real World" experience, I argue that NOTHING I work with today existed 4 years ago, much less 8-10 years ago. Yet I have worked with computers for 30 + years. If I had not had the opportunity to use one as a kid, then I would probably not have wanted to make a flounding career out of this obsessive hobby.
To those that say support will be an additional cost...what better way to teach ALL aspects of hardware and software but to instruct the kids on how to maintain the machines themselves
You keep going until you die..."Me".
Heck, we should have a repository of success stories for that very purpose.
A section should be added to /. - money.slashdot.org or something like that. The purpose of which would be to collect stories of people saving money.
neurostarOf course you can do more within a set budget if one or more of those items suddenly becomes free... Switching from Windows to Linux will by definition save the district money and allow them to spend it on other things. Now, will those other things be found in terms of retraining everyone to understand Linux? I mean Windows is pretty simple and that's what 90%+ of the kids with computers use at home. Too bad such cost savings don't get returned as a dividend to the taxpayers. Sheesh....
Jesus. The article is about savings of free software IN THE SERVER ROOM. That's not where kids go to play. It's not about replacing Word, Photoshop or any part of the desktop.
It's not about forcing students to be pro Linux. They won't even know what the servers run on. It's about using the superiority (cost and stability) of Linux as servers for the school.
Actually my computer at home is currently broken after I chose Y to break my RAID array on accident.
whoops. I constantly break my computer. Mostly because I am too dumb to just leave it alone once I get it working. I'm just not afraid to try new things with my hardware, which most people seem to be.
I do think that I probably lost all my mp3s though. Good thing I've still got the original CDs. I just have to rerip them. (sigh)
I break it regardless of the OS that I'm running, IMO all oses are equally bad in that if you don't know exactly what you are doing, you can blow the whole thing up.
Bridgewater College
James Madison University
Eastern Mennonite University(disclosure: I'm trying to transfer into that school)
They also have gee-whiz stuff going on occasionally like the Green Valley Bookfair and JMU sponsors an event called macrock which is a two-day rock festival...
Then there's lovely little joints like the Artful Dodger (neat coffee shop) and The Little Grill (mmmmmmmh yummy)....they're also within range of some great radio....WVTF in Roanoke can reach 'em, WEMC community radio(bluegrass, jazz, and good public affairs programming), and WXJM...good college radio...they're also within range of WNRN in Charlottesville.
So, even though it's a teeny-tiny little community where old order mennonites ride their buggies around...it still has some REALLY neat stuff going on...of course that's just my opinion.
a cosmic event! Wastes of space and time bombarding earth's atmosphere! In you local skies, tonight! News at 11!
If you have to call M$ $upport, you are *fucked*
A friend of mine in high school told me about someone he knew who decided he just HAD to go straight to MS support when something wasn't working. He spent 2 hours (to the order of $99-199) on the phone with MS, and they weren't able to help him a bit.
He later mentioned the problem to my friend. My friend found the solution to the problem.
In 2 minutes.
FROM MICROSOFT'S OWN WEBSITE!
M$ support techs aren't even intelligent enough to search their own damn knowledgebase...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
While all that he posted is very true, as how they were going to save money if the local redneck tech people could maintain a Linux network at the schools properly, introducting technology was never the point of bringing PCs to every school.
ROFLMAO!!! Try looking at a map you backwards fool! Don't you know where Harrisonberg, VA is?
The art dept uses gimp for photos, etc.
I have never heard of any company that would hire a graphic designer who didn't have practical experience in Photoshop. As much as Gimp is similar, you wouldn't get by human resources with Gimp in place of Photoshop on your resume.
:P
I have to agree here. I did a subject which was a perversion of geography where all we did is use programs like SimCity, Carmen san Diego, PC Globe and a few other EduTainment packages. I'm quite serious here. Other subjects were Word Processing and Keyboarding (with electric typewriters though) Only one teacher actually taught a little programming, my year 7 maths teacher, who spent a week at the end of the semester introducing BASIC programming on the Apple IIe's. Now the school has probably spent thousands on PC and actually prides itself on this, but they are in effect, nothing more than expensive to maintain typewriters. This is true for MANY schools and I would imagine that secondary schools that teach programming are in a minority. Most school's do NOT NEED the PC's they have, yet constantly upgrade them to impress the community and to be able to say that they are upto date, progressive, etc. PC's may be usefull for statistical stuff, compiling data and modelling, but schools tend not to do that.
Put your money where your mouth is.
There are lots of companies that do a good job of supporting their products. Too many folks are familiar with the "Big Company" model of support (read: lots of layers between the customer and the person who can fix the problem, designed more to dissuade the consumer from ever calling again). And do it for free. Why? Future business. Unless you're really big, you can't afford to cheese off anyone.
Speaking from the trenches here - I develop software commercially and for open source, and I bend over backwards to support my customer base. Last thing I ever want is one of my customers to think I take their money and run. Most small developers are the same. And I provide free upgrades and fixes (lots of my users are unsophisticated computer users who find the ON button a challenge - if it doesn't work, they're SOL, and since I don't like that, I don't want to put them in that situation.)
If only there was a hypocratic oath for software development. I do believe that most of the open-source community would swear it in a second, as would most small developers. Various large companies would hem and haw (but there are exceptions...)
(I remember an example for a compiler writing company where the author of a text book said that the policy between the developers is that if somebody found a bug in somebody else's code that they would be owed a beer, and that if many large companies made this deal with their customers they would have to buy breweries to keep up with the demand.)
Many people (in the U.S., anyway) don't even know the first thing about taking care of their cars. They may have this vague idea about changing the oil in their cars, but probably only becase Jiffy Lube said so, and that doesn't mean they'll actually do it. They certainly don't know why it's important.
This is a perfect analogy to computers; people don't know about Windows Update, auto-launching email viruses, how to clean up their start menu so that it's not a horrible mass of garbage, not having 80,000 programs running in the systray.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
most educational software sucks. period. it does absolutely nothing for students. it is designed to be sold to teachers too f***in lazy to be worried about whether their kids can read, write, or think. they just say, "golly, look at them on the computers, isn't it wonderful". adminstration grew up without computers so aren't tech savvy, and "we're using technology" sounds great and makes great PR in the school newsletter.
most ed. software teaches the kids to sit blanky and stare at the freakin screen, gaze at some gaudy shockwave/flash GUI, and then print out (maybe) the right answers from a multiple choice quiz. BFD!!!
i teach seventh grade history. what do i do? well, i have had the kids do lots of work, from creating editorial newspapers, researching curent events and doing analysis, creating web pages, and using powerpoint (i know, i know) but not the bells, whistles, and chrome crap, no the two text boxes, compare and contrast, pro and con stuff (so it would show up on tv in class to present). as well as internet research. i also had them get three different web sites on a single topic, evaluate them on content, clarity, and validity. try that with some ed. software.
i have been trying for years to get our district to adopt FOSS solutions. in fact last night, i demonstrated to school site council how to turn 30-40 old pentiums into X clients. in the school library, with parents, teachers, admin, and students, i had a p133/32mb running
GNOME2
OpenOffice writer, impress, calc
GIMP
Mozilla
Gvim (not emacs, he he!!)
Evolution
simultaneously, remotely from my classroom. that is the type of ed. softwares they can use. by the way, principal is very interested. she is clueless tech-wise, but loves the idea. she also loved how my 4 year old box i use in class class has a 55 day uptime. (mandrake 8.2/ximian) now on to the district technidiots!!!
</rant>
in case you think i'm fullof crap, my school's website is Arroyo Seco. don't netcraft it. it's iis. i had no say. and yes, the webmaster's email is mine.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Keep in mind, the teachers and particularly the staff use computers as well. Keeping student records for a whole district could be very expensive with a comercial database.
The author seems to be says that this switch was more than cost savings b/c they got more capability. Isn't that more of a side-effect of cost savings. If I have $10 to buy lunch and I only spend $5, I can either pocket the $5 or else buy a bigger lunch.
It's just silly to say that school must teach your kids any specific software title. School is not supposed to be a 2-month course for computerized clerks. Its goal is to make people educated and literate, including computer literate. Ideally it must give the kids the ability to quickly learn any specific software they may need, by teaching solid fundamentals. Targeting specific software is stupid, because the current version will be long obsolete anyway when the students graduate. From this viewpoint, open source software is better for teaching because it is often fundamentally better designed and allows more freedom in customizations and experimenting.
Have you *been* in a public school? I don't mean some fancy magnet school, but just a regular one. Why would you want to teach kids that it is easier to use the command line to do some things when THEY CAN'T READ, CAN'T DO SIMPLE MATH, OR CAN'T LOCATE THEIR STATE ON A MAP OF THE USA?!?
Sorry... I'm not anti-technology or anything, I just grew up with a lot of talk about having computers in the class room when the teachers in my school were underpaid and were forced to have classes too big to give any sort of individual attention. But we had a Commodore 64 in every classroom. Mind you, the librarian and I were the only ones in the entire school who knew how to use them, so they didn't exactly get a lot of use. But they were there - the school board's constituents could feel all warm and fuzzy.
Sorry. Sore point.
Macs are now infinitely ahead of DOS, which I deamed a better choice back in the day.
My my things have changed as I post this through my Linux proxy server on my Linux iBook.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
My school system switches to Linux. Everyone congratulates them on how much money they saved by not using a closed-source solution with pricy licensing.
My home switches to Linux as well, since it's cheaper for all of us and our kids can use what they use at school too.
My kids graduate, and discover that none of their computer skills are applicable, because the rest of the world is using Windows anyway. Now they have to do everything from scratch again.
Of course, if the rest of the world has moved to Linux by that time, then great, but I just don't see that happening. Windows will still exist on some level, and will probably continue to have sanction in the bloated megacorps(e) that all of us are going to be forced to trudge to work through 15 miles of mud every day for the rest of our lives in the bleak, hopelessly corporate Orwellian future that every CEO with his hand in the RIAA's pocket is trying to dream up for us.
Sorry. Mod me offtopic there, OK?
If you really want to edumicate your kids, do it yourself.
Actually, while I don't know what kind of studies there are for it, the best way of "having a child learn", is when they learn for themselves.
Teachers necessarily can't know how to talk to a brick wall effectively, yet that's exactly what we bring generation after generation up as.
In com sci classes at least, the people that require tutors, generally don't do well; requiring spoon-feeding and "can't you just do my project for me". Those that get deep into the material on their own can often ace at least introductory course-work (com sci can definitely be a mind bender, especially when dealing with number theory).
The key is motivation. If you are unmotivated when you meet a person, you may remember little about them. Names are most famous: Many people (myself included) are already pessimistic about being able to remember hair/eye-color, names, etc. so I don't bother paying much attention when I meet someone.. Sure enough, it's a self fullfilling prophesy.
People going to computer or math classes with such pessimism have little chance of succeeding (regardless of their background deficiencies).
In my life, I've found that having desirable projects that happen to require learning a lot about a given topic affords an ample amount of motivation. In science, I crave sci-fi concepts; I want to understand them so I could possibly invent something new. With computers, I develop overwhelmingly complex goals (on the MRPG scale). Thus virtually every aspect of science, math and computer skills have been on my "I need to know" list.
Conversely, I haven't found such motivators for history, art, music, literature, so I only give those subjects a necessarily passing glance. (Though at some point I developed an appreciation for the story-telling nature of history).
While being totally non scientific (effective sample pool of 1), I still see such trends, and believe that inspiring your children in the single best way to teach them.
The trick is of course, how to inspire. And how do you avoid making a project obviously contrived to the point of frustration.
-Michael
And I in turn don't know that many companies hiring high school students as their graphic designers...
;)
Besides, if you can get pretty things with Gimp, Photoshop should be no problem.
Something you are overlooking is that things like Red Hat Linux and Apache _dont't_ have prices - I don't understand why you said that they cost (X) dollars, but you can download them for free off the net.....
"It was hell!" recalls former child.
I think that this is the big barrier to the use of Linux in K-12 schools. The IT group usually wants to standardize on one desktop OS, and has to choose Windows because that's the OS that Apps for all grade levels will run on. Provide an enabler (such as Lindows) that let's them run the existing commercial Apps on Linux, and Windows will begin to loose it's appeal.
I'm just wondering, among high school students who view this web page, how many of you have students administrate the computer network?
I found this amazing when my friend in LA said she helped administrate their network. At my old high school there was only one administrator there, and she had to administrate the whole network. (She also statically assigned every computer an IP address!) I think it would be great to have students do this because it will cut down costs and actually teach these kids some important stuff.
As for moving school networks to Linux, I think it will not only make it cheaper for the district, but it will be a powerful education tool if they allow the students administrate it.
Regarding all the posts along the lines of "how would the students get jobs when they graduate if they don't have training in Office/Exchange/whatever".
My solution:
0) Learn how to think, read, and learn
1) Go to Borders/Barns&Nobles/Library, get copy of "Become a Power User of MS Office in 21 days"
2) Read book. If you know Open Office you probably have a head start.
3) Put "MS Office" on resume
There are also schools you can pay to teach you Office, or you can buy a copy of Office to play with (splitting the cost with your friends if you like and if its permitted by the EULA)
This also brings up political and philosophical discussions such as "what is the point of education" and "should education be privatized". Those, I have no desire to get involved in.
You make a good point. Like I said in a response to another post, unless the kids are actually learning to use computers as computers, it's nothing but a white elephant appliance. Windows doesn't need to be taught. Real computing does. But that doesn't mean that every kid is going to learn it.
Now that I think about it, specialization at earlier ages needs to happen. I remember being frustrated at how easy everything was in elementary school, and was teaching myself to program by 6th grade. If schools had given me classes in C, Assembly, and so on, I'd have gotten an awful lot more out of junior high school and high school than what little I managed to distill from the politically correct fluff and the trite details of their requirements.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
While I certainly don't believe that class should revolve entirely around a computer approach, I do believe that hands on experience with computers and software is valuable to today's student. Attending elementary school during the heyday of the Apple IIgs I remember looking foward to the days we were allowed into the computer labs. Programs such as "The Oregon Trail" were fun to play but also taught valuable lessons in managing resources and decision making. In high school the computer labs and IT courses were excellent in preparing us for a future of working with data and expressing our thoughts. There is no doubt that computers are a valuable learning tool to students, and that cost can sometimes prevent updates and new software.
Open source products may help reduce cost for development programs, but what about programs such as Lotus Notes, the MS Office Suite, and programs made to help prepare students for exams such as Kaplan's SAT software. Are school systems going to start teach students to use *nix and different GUI's such as KDE, Enlightenmen and Gnome? This hardly helps students adjust to a windows oriented world.
Most software companies produce software with the goal of making a profit, and creating open source software can make this difficult to do. Instead of focusing on trying to outfit with open source, they should take what open source they can use and try to make educational deals with distributors, much like microsoft has an educational discount. In such a case it benefits the distributor to give such discounts as it gets students to grow up using their software, so that when they move on to the adult world, its what they'll want to use.
Windows is simply what their parents are using, it is neither professional nor production quality. Unix is primetime and has been long before Microsoft ever considered making a server OS. Unfortunately MS failed at that and are now struggling to keep their desktop market. Unix runs on everything from the supercomputers scientists will be developing for, the render farms used in film studios, web servers and databases, and pdas and embedded systems, to desktop PCs. GNU software is like a snowball. It starts slow, but as the codebase grows it picks up speed until it reaches that exponential breaking point. We're almost there now, getting closer by the day. See you're not taking into account that the US consists of about 1/18th the world's population, and we are certainly not the brightest 6%. The rest of the world is choosing to use Linux, which means it will be gaining that much extra developement talent. Since it doesn't discriminate against people, treating everyone as if they are capable of being a programmer or engineer, the average Linux user will know more about computers and be able to make use of them better than the average American. I bet many will play with this OS and have fun doing it, learning a lot more than we'll ever know in the process.
I agree with your idea about macs, but that sounds aweful expensive.
Is that really the best for the kids? Let's see we can:
1. Only give them access to Windows so that they become for efficient workers for large corporations.
OR,
2. Give them access to Open Source so that they will have more access to IT resources when the are young (because it is cheaper, or maybe we can use $ to pay for better teachers instead), and they will be able to minimize the costs of their independent businesses when trying to compete with monster corporations.
You know, I am a drone myself, but it will be a long, long time before I forget the importance of the part that small businesses play in America.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
However, as far as Linux and open-source are concerned... it's not there year. They are no where near as easy to use as they need to be to serve an educational function.
Excuse me? When I was in high school, we had Apple IIs to program on, and nobody complained about them being "too hard". Hell, they didn't even have man pages, and we still figured out what to do with them.
By the way, learning to program C on a Unix box is WAY easier than learning to program on a Windows or Mac (pre-X) box, because the concepts of "editor", "compiler", and "executable" are kept separate. If you're going to write a groupware suite, then a GUI IDE might be helpful, but it's just a confusing distraction for a newbie.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Students get their account & homedir in 4th grade and it follows them until they graduate.
I do hope they installed a spam filter if they want this to be the case...
"Brevity is the soul of wit." -Polonius, Hamlet.
We all know that kids rebel against the things that earlier generations try to force on them. For instance, my parents religiously gave be powdered milk, and now I refuse to buy it.
I think possibly the best solution is to encourage people to use Windows in grade school (especially during adolescence). Maybe then they will grow up hating it, and search for something better (like possible... uhh... linux?).
If you're interested in Linux educational software, look at the SEUL/edu Educational Applications Index. There are over 500 applications listed there. They're not all ready for scholastic use, but many are. Your perception that there's little in the way of enterprise educational software is a misperception, I'm afraid.
He saved money using free software instead of commercial software? How's that? Can someone explain the math to me?
You grew up in the American public educational system, didn't you? I can tell.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
> Putting Linux wouldn't ever fly, as it's purposefully $27,000 a year in corporate welfare to Microsoft.
Here (in a South Pacific paradise) schools have had computers for various tasks for 20 years. Originally they had CP/M hand-me-downs and some purchased Acorn BBCs which were _designed_ for school use.
The BBCs had school software that supported science use and addons such as thermometer probes, light detectors, analog input which meant they could be used as lab equipment for monitoring experiments as well as writing up the results.
It seems now that Microsoft wants schools to use computers for one thing only: to learn to be MS consumers. MS thinks that learning to use Word, Excel, etc is all that is required, because then they will always buy MS and will never consider alternates.
Having pre-packaged solutions for computers (just buy and install) in schools is equivalent to having trade schools teach carpentary by assembling flat-pack kitset furniture, or catering schools teaching how to order McDonalds and arrange it on a plate.
One argument for using MS software is that it will train students in skills they can use to get a job: MS usage is what employers want. Well there is no guarantee anymore that in 4 or 5 years when students get a job that MS software will still be in use, or if it is that it will be like what the students use today.
Using open software allows students to learn the inner workings of computers that MS will never allow. Hopefully they will learn from basics and could apply the skills to any system, now or future, rather than just becoming consumers of specific services.
in Harrisonburg, but while they do that, they spend an extra $1 Million on excavation cost with the site they chose to build their new high school.
Ah, I'm glad I live in hicksville in the middle of nowhere here in poor ol' Canada, then. :)
We just spent the last year putting 34 dual-proc Linux servers into each of 34 elementary schools, each with 30 Pentium/P-II computers running as X Terminals. That's nearly 1000 computers all running Linux, 1 full lab in each elementary school.
What is taught in these labs:
- typing
- wordprocessing
- spreadsheeting
- presentations
- graphic arts
- HTML
- critical/deductive thinking
Each of these labs is booked solid with students during the week. We've even had a few Intermediate (gr. 4-7) classes publish books, pamphlets, and flyers using these labs (something they couldn't do before as they couldn't afford the software -- these labs come with the GIMP and Corel PhotoPaint 9, both of which are free).
Even the primary classes are using the labs as there is a tonne of educational free software out there for Linux.
But, the best part, which you rarely ever see listed in articles like this, is that support costs *go down* with Linux servers. How so, you might ask? So long as there is someone there to turn the power back on during a power outage or to reset the router, all administration is done remotely, whether it be via SSH, VNC, or remote X sessions.
Going this route, we were able to eliminate nearly $30,000 CDN in Novell licensing (these server double as Samba servers), another $45,000+ in Windows/Office licensing, several hundred thousand in new computer purchases (these were all donated or purchased used), plus several tens of thousands of dollars in support contracts. Even factoring in the cost of the servers ($5000/per), the switches, the millwork, and the wiring, we still came out ahead. (In fact, they saved enough to hire me on full time to look after it.)
Next up is a pilot with this system in a secondary school to see if there's software to cover the programming (Kylix), accounting (??), CAD (Cycas), and the like. If this works, then we will be able to completely remove Novell and Windows from the school district.
And we're not the only ones. There are several school districts in BC moving this way now (we're just the first), and a couple more in the Portland/Washington area of the US. Finally, schools are moving away from teaching specific software packages in school to teaching skills and abilitie that students can take with them and apply to whatever software they run into in the world.
Just as it should be.
Hmmm, tell that to the 34 elementary schools in our district that are using Linux on the desktop everyday. That's almost 1000 PCs running RedHat Linux 7.1 that students are using for everything from Mr. Potato Head in grade 1 to publishing books and digital/graphics arts in grade 7.
And we're not the only school district going this way. There are several here in BC, Canada going this route, and two in the Oregon/Washington are putting Linux into the high schools (at last count, Portland school district had nearly 2500 secondary PCs running Linux).
wait for it...having more money in the budget.
Um, that's the same thing, dude!
What if something breaks and a service is down for a while, there will be no company to hold up their software and support it, it is now up to you.
Just a thought. Has anyone put together a tutorial or howto on self-supporting Linux? Sure, there's plenty of help out there, but many folks don't know where to turn for help. Many people don't know what Usenet is, much less the correct newsgroup. Many people don't know which Web-based discussion boards to seek out for help on popular Open Source product XYZ.
The problem with all this is that for the people that read /. using open source software is fine, they can figure the problem out themselves or enough of their geek friends are good with linux and will know the answer. They fufill their own prophecy that OSS is cheaper because they can get past the installation issues and and subsequent problems.
But for people who don't know much about computers and really don't want to, or have the time to, is it really cheaper? Do they know how to use a newsgroup? do they know how to use IRC? Are they going to use these resources that for the most part are unstructured and not dependant? The community support for a product is only good if _a lot_ of people use it and _a lot_ of people have a the time to read newsgroups etc... Ever post to one of the CVS newsgroups? A lot of questions go unanswered, and it's not alone.
I'm all for OSS, but no one thing is an end all. OS's, applications, programming languages, etc... are simply tools. Use the one that is best for you, what you need to do, and the resources you have.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
Now you know why HR exist. It's never to get someone hired. It's to keep people from being hired. Why do you think so many "getting a job" books advise you to bypass HR? That applies regardless of what profession your aiming for.
The whole shame is that people are justifying MS solutions based on the fact that they can't get past HR. Remember if your a job seeker, you're really a salesmen for yourself. Use sales tactics.
Don't see no's as a negative experience, but as a positive oppertunity to learn, and improve your chances at your next job oppertunity. Learn that some of the same things that make an effective commercial, also can be applied toward improving your odds of getting a job, for the problem sets are similiar.
You've learned Linux and all the other technologies that Open Source brings to you.
Technologies that apply across OS'es. You've learned something even more important. Skills and experience. How to solve problems. How to persevere in the face of problems. And if you worked on a project in some kind of leadership capacity? That will give you a leg up over someone who's only encounter is via books. Linux and OSS (software & community) lower barriers to self-inprovement, both of the knowledge and experience kind. Use that wisely and both you and anyone who hires you will benifit. The community benifits as well because word gets around that OSS is indeed a good training ground, and a source of capable employees.
Peabrain.
m l
http://www.riverdale.k12.or.us/linux/k12ltsp.ht
http://k12os.org/
How's it feel to be a dinosaur?
Actually, it was more than that. The school was really small, around 150 students total. All the kids looked fairly clean cut. Everything about it just looked nice, comfortable and safe. I wouldn't worry about them getting lost in a sea of 2k+ students, and the odds of violence, gang crap etc... looked very small. The IT infrastructure just let me know the guys in charge were willing to think outside the box.
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
If students are using computers at home, why do we need goddamn classes in it? I mean, its not like we have classes in "Defeating Mother Brain and finding all the missile upgrades." Using windows because its popular at home is self-defeating at best, and insane at worst.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
BSD is so much better as a server that it is not even funny. It's faster and more stable and installing software is so freaking easy. Gentoo is the only thing that ever coem close.
but we should have classes in defeating mother brain and finding all the missile upgrades because that is a skill that you will be able to use over and over. :) I mean getting those metroids frozen is one thing, but firing round after round into that tiny hold where the MotherBrain is while those fire rings are comming after you is hard.
Stuff to think about yo.
You send you children to school, to learn. about things like the world around them and how to communicate etc...
Computers are only tools to aid in this teaching. At my school we have around 60+ Imacs, with a g4 file/print/web server, and 3 other misc servers (DNS router,internet router + others)
now that i have used these (how many of you who have posted mesages above, actualy used a high-school grade computing system in the past 3years? fuck al. i bet...), i can honestly say that it makes no difference to the QUALITY OF EDUCATION i received at a apple based school....
How about we start teaching our children how to read write and add?
Instead of teaching them how to make there poem look fancy on the screen, teach them how to spell the words right in the first place!
thedoublehelix
IE users get what they deserve. Use Phoenix. Phoenix is already better than IE in every way. I was afraid for a while what I was going to do about my old Win95 box. I want it to remain functional as far as the Internet goes, but I'm not stupid enough to install a newer IE just for the ability to look at png files and use some of the newer standards. I wouldn't have installed IE4.0 if Microsoft hadn't packaged some runtime files I needed with it. Phoenix is a lifesaver.
--really! makes sense. Sounds EXACTLY what I was telling all my windows friends over the years as I was surfing and working on my mac classic and they were finding out what happened to their registry (why do you have to register everything/) or why they had bad dll pickles (dlls? why do I need to see that as joe normal user?)or whatever that stuff was. Never understood that, but you state the phenomenon so well. They seemed to equate difficult and easy to break with "cool", but, oh well......that's the tradeoff, really really cheap and customizable also equals real touchy sensitive and easy to fritz it up. Medium expensive is a little less easy to fritz up, sorta kinda easier to use,and still customizable. At the very expensive (joe consumer)level, you get it all, robust, easy to use, customizable, and hard to break unless you go way out of your way to do it.
It works, the "system" works, you get exactly what you pay for.
It's sorta like cars, some guys build hotrods from scratch, most folks drive chevhonolas, then there's mercedes and ferraris and other exotics. The "system" works, you get what ya pay for and want.
I teach and administer in a small independent school in Western Australia (so I can't show you my face), and I have been trying for nearly three years to get some of these issues discussed at the highest level.
For all the hand-waving and rhetoric about modern education, my colleagues are generally very backward when it comes to integrating new ideas into their philosophy. I'm no psychologist, but it seems the failing status of educators, and the resultant lowered requirements to become one, have created a generation of teachers not willing or able to accept change readily. They teach, but they don't do.
My biggest problem in presenting the open-source alternative is the inertia of a body of "professionals" who really don't want to be challenged, no matter what the perceived benefits may be. The interesting thing is that more than half of the students I teach have at least tried open-source (quite a few mozilla junkies have I created).
I have installed Mandrake on a number of PC's as duel boot, and have even converted one of our student imacs - but I get glassy-eyed stares when demonstrating these installations.
I have printed and handed out booklets of case studies, but with no success. As Robert Heinlein said "Never teach a pig to sing, it wastes your time and annoys the pig!"
Maybe we need to trade the pig in for something else?
I have used such "support" packages before. It is now to the point that I;
1. Verify it wasn't a user doing stupid user stuff.
2. Remove, reboot, reinstall the vendors software.
3. Do a clean install of OS and vendors software.
I do all that because, for the most part (there are some rare and few exceptions) that is what they tell you to do anyway. Well, hell I'd be glad to charge my company half what they are paying for such support. Some of these support packages are not cheap.
In some cases they have been able to assist with for example, jockeying around some Oracle dll's becuase there was a requirement to run several versions at the sametime from different vendors. However you can forget about getting any hard core, on the spot, code level fixes from a proprietary vendor.
THAT kind of fix you CAN GET from GPL/opensource. And all it costs you is the time spent doing your homework. In the meantime you limp along just as you would with proprietary support.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
It's a shame your post is far enough down the list that it will barely be read and a shame this one is going to be buried even deeper. Oh well.
I just want to get some facts "on the record" about the state of tech and computers in the US as well. Budgets for tech in U.S. schools are tight and getting tighter. We have about 1500 computers in our district, and like most schools are lucky if we have better than 1 tech per 300 PCs. (Actually many schools are at a 500:1 ratio!)
Most schools can not afford to upgrade their versions of Windows or MS-Office yearly. Maybe we should take up MS on their new licensing scheme? Lets see in our district that would be around $45,000/year for Windows alone (got to count the iMacs because they **could** run Windows so you have to pay for a license!) My.. what a bargain.
Of course, after about 3 years we couldn't run the newest stuff on the existing PCs anyhow because it will require 3Ghz processors with 512Mb RAM minimum. I'm sure some of non-techs or newcomers to support think I'm exaggerating. We upgraded to MS-Office 2000 recently. Did I mention that it cost over $40,000 in licenses and required purchasing an additional $20,000 worth of RAM because some of the older PCs couldn't run it?)
I have to believe that everyone who says "where are you going to get support for open source" is not supporting technology in a school. Just TRY to get support for MS or Novell. Oh, you can do it, but you'll pay as much as $400 per incident and are just as likely to discover the solution yourself while waiting for the 3rd or 4th callback.
I wish my support woes were limited to Linux. My latest support call for Linux was replacing a 100Mhz Pentium web proxy server who's hard drive croaked. Previous uptime was 450 days, a reboot because it was acting flaky and I feared it might crash (it never did) followed by 350 days. Gee.. one reboot in 800 days then a failed hard drive? I wish all my tech problems were so bad.
Hell, I spent less time on that server in over two years AND it's replacement than I did just tonight trying to get MS Organizational Charts to work in MS-Office 2000 under Win-NT and Win-2000. (By the way, the fix is to give all your users change rights to the c:\WINNT directory and some of the files in it. yeah.. security by design.. sure.)
Guess I'll stop ranting now. If it were up to me we'd switch out all of our Microsoft and Novell software for Linux/open-source stuff. I truly believe that would free up at least one of our techs. That person could spend time with teachers doing one-on-one training to make sure they knew how everything worked and tailoring the system to work WITH the teacher and not get in their way.
But no.. I'm sure it's much better to stick with the status-quo and spend all of our time just trying to keep it all running. Hopefully the teachers will just figure it out on their own and hopefully the students will just learn. Yeah, the MS-based school is definitely the way to go.
Just a little "Those were the days":-
... COMMANDLINE! Hack the Planet! Well, no network but we'd sure try! My mate made a few basic programs for kicks, but we never managed to find god... that was until he showed me "Girl and snake by pool".
Generally I hated school. Everything we did there seemed to be enforced so it felt jail because I knew no worse.
There was however one thing about my first school that was optional. Sitting in the corner of the room was a (state of the art..) BBC Computer. I was probably 6 when 1st saw one (I'm 21).
I wouldn't be suprised if nearly all the intelligence I now have stems from my later interest in computers that can be traced back to that one BBC. It spawned the interest that later gave way to Logo Turtle graphics (the little Turtle thing that you could drive round people's ankles via very basic geometric `programming`) and those 1/2 metre wide videodiscs; Ms Called it Doomsday Project, I thought it was about the 2nd coming at 1st but later turned out to be an experimental history lesson). Acorn Electrons, C64's Plus4's, my Amiga500,1200 and then the crap I've now got.
On the BBC I remember fondly my 1st experience of the geeks 1337ism respect. I successfully managed to get past level 3 of 'Stig of The Dump' a very basic RPG adpted from the book with... "Picture Graphics"! Other kids went quiet as I battled beyond the levels of "There is a fence - what do you do?". I was the only one who could spell 'Climb' correctly. All your base are belong to us!
Then we had Acorn Electrons for absolutely ages. Only the 1337est of the best shared the hidden knowledge of the F12 key. Using this sacred key was scorned on by our English teacher, only to drive us on! She was clearly worried what an 7 yr child who do with this immeasurable power. With this you had
I tried to deny all knowledge as he loaded it up- with his father and the headmistress behind his back.
Later on I wasn't able to choose to use or study computers at school, I couldn't choose it for GCSE and due to this I'd have to move out from home to study it at any higher level. I wish I had.
If only the relexed attitude of my 1st school had continued to 2nd and 3rd I may not be studying Earth Science at University. right now I'm sure I'd be a lot smarted too.
This was only computing. I'm sure kids the world over have something introduced to them at school only to have it removed later.
ok, kids shouldn't be making there own choices all the time but you have to do what the kid wants to do, attenuated with what society whats to have them doing, so reading and writing remains the same.
I think all those private schools _tend_ to come up with better results because they have a freedom due to money that tends to be passed on to the kids.
Linux is about freedom. I think even kids should be able to choose between computers and something else. This is very important.
A blog I run for the wealth
I learned how to program in BASIC on an apple IIc during my second year of high school. A couple of observations. Early Eighties.
1. The math teacher who is the high school computer guy might not be Steven Hawking or RMS, nor does he have to be. He has to teach the course to you.
2. The software or hardware you're using might be inadequate now, and change even more before you enter the workforce. That's not a problem. Basic & apple IIc's aren't used anymore but I still use skills I learned there.
3. My high school, and the whole school district could have best been described as "mediocre", but this class changed my life.
So, good things do happen in public schools sometimes. I'm having a "Wonder Years" moment. I have to go cry now. goodbye.
You're trolling (or just making a joke), but I'll reply anyway.
The number of computer-based courses in the high school I work at is staggering, and blows away the single "Computer Math" that was offered in my own school merely ten years ago:
Not the mention the standard desktop publishing done in journalism classes (newspaper and yearbook). In my district, kids can get A+ certified, Novell certified, and more in high school classes. Amazing.
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
Q-Basic? Isn't that a bit old for today's computers? We're teaching advanced web design and on a limited basis we're also teaching advanced programming in our school of 1800 students total K-12. We start our kids on typing programs and learning games in a lab setting in kindergarten. Keyboarding classes start in 3rd grade, and full blown office programs are taught in junior high and up.
We started out as an Apple school, but when the prices came way down we switched to PCs. With almost 550 Gateway & Dell PCs we are one of the best equipped schools in our area and are very proud of the work that our students do.
As the technology director, I wish I had the time to learn Linux inside and out. My Netware 5 servers run almost flawlessly, but Window$ is another story. I have been researching and testing various Linux systems for about a year now and am making some headway introducing it to our teachers with favorable results.
You have to remember that these days secondary schools (6-12th grade) are NOT computer tech schools as such, they are preparing kids for the GENERAL work place, not computer tech areas. We have advanced programs for those who want it, but it's tough enough meeting the state & federal requirements (time-wise) with the general classes let alone the time required for the advanced classes.
Most computers in schools just sit around in the science room, and are used only once per semester, and sometimes as entertainment devices for a public school system that's nothing more than a communist daycare center anyways.
This just makes me laugh. You should check out a school system like ours someday. Most schools that I'm aware of here in Michigan are well equipped and the computers don't sit and collect dust. We don't allow ours to be used for "entertainment" like playing online games or chatting. That will get you kicked off our systems. We stress education and learning, not tom-foolery. Some of us are serious about educating.
Have you hugged your penguin today?
First the rebuttal:
... that wierd kid with the three earrings and rave-green hair just MIGHT be the next Dennis Ritchie or Nicholas Wirth.
... that's sorta like telling Albert Schweitzer that he can't go to Med School because there are so many doctors that he'll never NEED to practice medicine ...
... but there is a VERY limited job market for web designers and graphic artists, so they probably won't. Let's not offer them.
... very few subjects make a better tool for teaching critical and/or analytical thinking, as well as project planning skills and attention to detail.
> Many, many students will never program anything
> in their lives.
But it is not the school system's place to PREVENT them from learning to do so
> They'll never want to, and they'll never need
> to.
But, unless you are prescient, you'll not be able to know which will and which won't
> They need word processing.
WP takes about three months worth of daily use to learn as well as 99% of the people need to know it. Most K-12 kids learn so quickly that they will have adequate WP skills to last most of their lives after writing two ten-page reports.
> They might need graphics tools.
Oh
> The vast majority do NOT need compilers, huge
> bloated developing environments, or editors
> with obscure keystrokes.
And since only a few might benefit from them, NOBODY can have them? I'm certainly glad my children did not attend schools you administer.
Then, my points:
Kids need to be challenged, pushed beyond the limits they impose upon themselves, forced out of their "intellectual comfort zones." I sort of halfway agree that programming and systems administration aren't really appropriate core subjects in the "mainstream" curriculum of the public schools, but consider this
Programming and/or system administration suck as subjects taught for the subject matter skills they provide. Those skills become obsolete VERY quickly. However, as a vehicle for developing the mental skills that form the core of intellectual power, they are hard to beat.
Regards,
utter rubbish
Frankly, I'm often shocked at the amount of BS that users of GUI admin tools will tolerate.
...
...
How do I?
CLI: man foo ; more README (search for keywords)
GUI: *H*elp | *I*ndex
(OK, here we're about the same: if system has docs, you're off and running, otherwise, "Use the Source, Luke" -- you *do* have source, right?)
What changed?
CLI: run rcsdiff / cvs diff on cfg file to check
GUI: uh, I *think* I clicked on...
Where is it?
CLI: find / grep
GUI: keep on clicking, it's in one of those menus / dialog *somewhere*, you PDB.
How do I back it up:
CLI: tar cf backup.tar the_dir
GUI: click on backup C: thingy, hope for the best in regards to "registry" retardation.
Have I flamed enough? No? Go read "The Pragmatic Programmer" - "The Basic Tools" chapter, or "In the Beginning Was the Command Line".
Of course, when I started programming, there were no Macs and no stinking Windoze. That's not a hardship, it's a plus!
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
Sure the savings is $27,000.00 for a school district serving about 4,000 students. That's significant for a small school district.
However there are other issues that deserve serious attention. I do consulting in business and industry. Like it or not, it is a fact of business and industry life that MS Office is everywhere virtually to the exclusion of any other user productivity applications. Even applications like SPC and Product design are mostly Win-based.
Not having familiarity with these applications is a significant deficit for folks seeking employment after High School or Community College career training.
Remember, not everyone gets to go to University. Not everyone is talented.
Go ahead, have a infrastructure based on alternate technology. Just don't prevent youngsters from access to technology, that in spite of your religious convictions, increases their opportunity to get an ordinary job.
I love that line of logic. Linux admins have to be "smarter" than windows admins. And yet when the shit hits the fan on windows networks (nimda, klez, bugbear, etc, etc, etc) it is these same poor hapless fools that are blamed for not KNOWing enough.
Can't have it both ways fellas. Sorry. But it doesn't work that way. Microsoft walks into an office and uses 'cheap, inexperienced admins' as a major selling point. So PHBs leave this meeting with a microsoft salesman with the truly horrendous opinion that using microsoft products will save them money on admin costs.
So which is it. A windows admin doesn't need to know much and is therefore cheap. Or a windows admin needs to know alot and is therefore expensive.
Kent.
Google rocks, but it takes the challenge out of such things.
BTW - what do they sound like?
With web filtering being mandatory in most schools, a lot of them are paying HUGE amounts on licensing filtering software. Filtering software costs $thousands per year. However there is an open source alternative:
http://dansguardian.org
Like the 100 sun servers in our lab.
Like the 30 aix servers in our lab.
With your absolutely ridiculous line of reasoning, a CS degree will become nothing more than a Microsoft tech degree.
Teach concepts NOT apps. FUDpucker
Windows doesn't need to be taught.
Actually it does, e.g. it's counter intuitive that you log off a Windows machine by going to a place called "start".
Unix skills are valuable. I wish I had been exposed to unix when I was in school.
SERVERS are the machines working quietly in the background.
SERVERS do not run educational software.
SERVERS. We are talking about servers. GOT it.
'data and expressing our thoughts'?? spreadsheets and word processors. Nothing more.
Teach concepts. As in HOWto write, HOWto read, HOWto calculus.
-
Idiots like you that feel you can only drive fords because the driving school only had Fords.
Idiots like you that feel you can only cook on an Amana becuase thats the make of stove that you learned to cook on.
-
Skills are transferable. Even in the REAL world.
fudpucker.
word processors, spreadsheets, databases, presentation software. By time these students graduate, all time they have wasted memorizing the GUI interface of MS office 2000, will be painfully apparent. Students that have access to word processors, spreadsheets, databases, etc. will learn the CONCEPTS behind these applications. Concepts are transferrable. Besides..
THIS article is talking about SERVERS.
I recall being herded in there several times only to waste half of the class time learning completely useless software that barely demonstrated what we were supposed to learn.
This is at the core of the argument over specialist educational software. How often is it actually useful and how often is it being used more for political than educational reasons?
I don't see why schools are on the upgrade treadmill when the primary applications -- typing, web browsing, basic programming -- can be done perfectly well with old systems.
With "commodity" applications, such as web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheets, etc (as well as programming) being well supported by open source.
We upgraded to MS-Office 2000 recently. Did I mention that it cost over $40,000 in licenses and required purchasing an additional $20,000 worth of RAM because some of the older PCs couldn't run it?
That's with educational prices on the software and quite probably a nice volume discount on the RAM.
I spent less time on that server in over two years AND it's replacement than I did just tonight trying to get MS Organizational Charts to work in MS-Office 2000 under Win-NT and Win-2000. (By the way, the fix is to give all your users change rights to the c:\WINNT directory and some of the files in it. yeah.. security by design.. sure.)
Is that information common knowlage? Would MS support know the solution, especially since it involves 3 different MS products in combination?
The software or hardware you're using might be inadequate now, and change even more before you enter the workforce. That's not a problem. Basic & apple IIc's aren't used anymore but I still use skills I learned there.
That's the difference between "training" and "education".
Is this not about software for schools? Are not schools all about learning? And also schools often promote service to the community. At some time in the (near) future children will learn how to do software at an earlier age. And by the time there are juniors in highschool there will be some who will be damn good at software.
.
Simply put any 'problems' with the system are 'learning opportunities' for the teenagers and young adults in the community to give back.
Giving back might seem strange to some folks, especially folks who work for huge money-mongering corporations based in Redmond, Washington. Imagine a school that gets it right can then do a distribution of the software that they have that works. And they can burn the OS onto a CD ROM so that it can boot virus free. .
But that cuts into the growth plans for Bill Gates next pallace, doesn't it. So he hires neigh-sayers to try and argue that saving 27 thousand dollars (per student, I assume) is not worth it.
The real costs of running Microsoft software (because that what will be run if not open-source) is serf-dom for the subsequenct generations. So. . . damn the costs. Our children will not be slaves to the Redmond grubs.
One argument for using MS software is that it will train students in skills they can use to get a job: MS usage is what employers want. Well there is no guarantee anymore that in 4 or 5 years when students get a job that MS software will still be in use, or if it is that it will be like what the students use today.
Considering that Microsoft likes to change their current software every 18-24 months it's unlikely that schools will be able to have the "latest and greatest" for that long without spending lots of money. Of course commercial companies are also reluctent to spend their hard earned cash on software as a fashion statement. It's entirely possible that someone could get a job which involves using an older version of software than that they used at school.
Using open software allows students to learn the inner workings of computers that MS will never allow. Hopefully they will learn from basics and could apply the skills to any system,
These arn't quite the same thing. Being able to learn the inner workings is like being able to become a motor mechanic. Learning the basics and able to apply to other systems is more like someone learning to drive any car as opposed to only a specific model of car.
Ever notice how the brainiacs at school were never the leaders? That is because they lack emotional and physical qualities that other (better suited to lead) children have. The problem with intellectuals who worship knowledge is that they don't take care of their emotional and physical well-being which is equally as important as intellect.
And so, when you home school, you don't socialize your children in a way where they understand the differences in other people. This is a good reason to at least let them be part of something than over-bearing mommy and daddy dealing with them 15 hours a day.
Home-school, yes, but let the kids be their own people too. If your don't let your children do art, music, literature at home school then you cripple them in these areas. It is rediculous to think that there are not valuble lessons to be learned in these areas. For example MUSIC is based upon the mathematics of the human ear. So if they study this they will eventually get into human physiology and also frequency domain mathematics. HISTORY is important because it allows children to learn from the mistakes of the past. Literature is important because it teaches children about other people.
If you only emphasize the math and science then you are denying your children what they need to grow into full-fledge adults.
But, typical to those who think that only intellect is important, you seem to also be self-rightous in your point of view. (why else would you type in a long winded diseration about why what you do is so good).
Your children are yours in one sense, but they are their own people too. Don't cripple them by denying them a ballanced education. They will only hate you for it later.
Give a child a LINUX distribution, have them repartition their harddrive to allow for a LINUX as well as a WINDOZE boot.
They will learn a lot.
And they can choose chemistry software and astronomy software that comes in the distribution. They get all kinds of stuff like philosophy and mathematics for free, right in the distribution if they choose to install it.
And if they want to boot to WINDOZE, they still can.
OR if you have one of those five year old machines that isn't good for anything anymore, they can reformat the harddrive with the LINUX and have something that they can use as a firewall.
They can stick the thing in the trunk of their car and have it play MP3's for them. They will learn about electronics and about computers and software. VERY EDUCATIONAL.
BUT: Life in Redmond, I guess, is shrink-wrapped. Don't want to teach the kids to do it for themselves.
YES, all around, LINUX is educational software.
If they work for you.
Life isn't just about money, anyway.
How do you know what they will do?
They said the same thing about my Dad when he was in Highscholl. Why? Because he wasn't in the dominent ethnic group in his city. He ended up making a very lot of money.
We just don't know what kids will do later in life, do we. If we expect them to be poor and give them a poverty additude then they will take that in like food.
Most of them will be happy and make a lot of money. That's what I say.
Yes, but now that there is a better solution, you should make use of it. Plus, unless you were in a programming class all you did was launch whatever application you needed and stay in it, so the lack of a good OS interface wasn't as much of a detrement.
mbbac
What is that page supposed to prove? It shows how to do it. We all know you can do it. The question is whether it is ready or not.
mbbac
Speaking of counter-intuitive...
In OSX, do you still drag a floppy or CD-ROM to the trash in order to eject it?
How about this as an article topic then:
We avoided being traded off as slaves to a money-mongering corporate culture by switching to LINUX.
It makes it sound more biblical.
The battle for free software is about free people.
Slavery has taken a new form: indentureship.
indenture: A contract binding one party into the service of another for a specified term ( from the American Heritiage Ditionary).
Sound like the contract that come out of Redmond?
The LINUX and OPEN SOURCE community are like the Israelites who sought freedom through the very scarey idea of following a leader out into the desert. Who do you think Pharaoh is?
Yes, in many ways LINUX is barren and like a desert, but the promise is there and we know that it is a better choice then an operating system where we have to spend half of our time worrying that a malicious web-page is going to reformat our harddrive.
So. . . Let us tell the story in BIBLICAL terms if need be.
Pharaoh can be redeemed if he would just believe. Instead Pharaoh wants more and more and more.
So, is anyone in Redmond listening?
If you had not STOLEN the software, my guess is that you would never have bought it.
.
.
so, did you really save money?
And what you admit to. . . I hope it is a joke.
Because if you are a thief. .
Hey, from a religous mythology perspective (Christians will not take this as mythology but truth) the FIRST person who JESUS said would be in heaven with him (that day) was the thief who was on the cross next to his. .
So maybe stealing isn't a reason for you to be cast into hell.
If it is then the Redmond crowd is going down hard.
Kids are much smarter than a lot of people think. I built my first switching network when I was in 4th grade (no kidding). It was for an HO train that we had in the basement. The switches were all wired to the electric track switches so that I could route the train where ever I wanted on the 8'x4' plywood based track.
I learned all about groud loops too.
Yep, that's right.
Is that information common knowlage? Would MS support know the solution, especially since it involves 3 different MS products in combination?
I'm sure it's not, and based on my experience with MS tech support I highly doubt they would have been able to be of any assistance. It certainly isn't on the knowledge base nor in a search of USENET. Even enabling auditing on the system didn't help pinpoint the fix. I just know from experience that a lot of apps (including MS apps) require unreasonable rights to the \WINNT folder so eventually I tried that and it fixed things.
I'd love to know why a regular user runing a user-space appliation needs write access to a system folder and some system-folder files.
I am sick tired of the formulaic questioning of uninformed people like you regarding costs of software goods.
Sorry to be blunt, but your argument is not an argument. For goodness sake, have you ever worked with closed source companies?
Case in point: I work for a big bank in a big financial center, all our infrastructure relies in a certain service provided by one of the big UNIX guys. The thing does not work as advertised. They have accepted it. Period. Sue? Ha,ha,ha. Did not we read the fscking EULA or what?
We complained to the representative of the company and he said he can do nothing, end of life of the product is next year and I don't know what else nonsense. The final result is that we are completely tied to whatever the provider can or want to do.
If we had the source code we could have put two or three developpers with a system administrator (we can do that if necessary) to troubleshoot the problem and fix it.
As things stand, big UNIX company has being doing the best they can for months and the problem is not yet solved. It backfired a couple of times in which we almost lost business critical applications during business hours as a consequence of this problem.
I know what the cost is for depending on companies whose EULAs deny any responsibility for what they write: too high.
Give me OSS any day.
It is called principles and common sense.
Give us something better and we will drop the whole OSS stuff in the blink of an eye.
But most probably you can't.
Oh yes, also all thos big comapnies turning to OSS solutions are "religious" zealots. The idiots.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm sure it's not, and based on my experience with MS tech support I highly doubt they would have been able to be of any assistance.
One problem, IME, with MS support. Is that the tend to have people who specialise in a specific piece of software. Even though MS frequently produces "sphagetti code" where it isn't always obvious which is OS and which is application.
I just know from experience that a lot of apps (including MS apps) require unreasonable rights to the \WINNT folder so eventually I tried that and it fixed things.
Just hope it didn't break anything else.
I'd love to know why a regular user runing a user-space appliation needs write access to a system folder and some system-folder files.
Because some of the code might well have originally been written for 95 (or even earlier) and the "monkeys" do the majority of their development work logged in as administrator.
Another problem is where an app refuses to even open a file it can't write to
I am a high school math teacher who set up and starting a linux server specifically to run educational software. I found a great piece of OSS called WebWorK that allowed me to give my classes randomized, web-based homework. The server only runs on *nix, since the DB it works with doesn't exist for other OSes. Do the students get to work directly on the server, no. But the interested ones ask about it, and I show them how it works. That's called a teaching moment, and they are the reason I keep teaching.
On Netscape GPLing their browser: ``How can you trust a browser that
ANYONE can hack? For the secure choice, choose Microsoft.''
-- in a comment on slashdot.org
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