Software Monoculture in Schools?

The World Is Not Microsoft asks: "I've been worried by changes my school has made over the past year or so to the general computer setup we have. The school is a City Technology College, and as a result of this there are an abundance of computers around the building which everyone is free to use. When I first started there (almost six years ago now) there were approximately even numbers of Windows and Mac machines. As happens over time these machines got out of date and had to be replaced, and the school has spent a lot of money buying replacements. What I'm bothered about is that when they did this they completely eliminated the Mac population, and by the time school starts again in September the only machines we will have will either be Windows 98 or Windows 2000. What's the situation like in other schools? Is everyone else completely locked into Microsoft like we are?" "There have been security problems with these systems in the past (mostly IE toolbars which requested content from sites which were blocked by the content filters, which caused problems for everyone), and with all the recent IE security problems I'm surprised that the people in charge aren't considering alternative systems (I know Linux would be too much to ask, but rolling out some OS X machines would be good). In addition to this, those who actually study ICT are required to use MS Office for spreadsheet and database tasks; no OpenOffice allowed."

Comments

Be a rebel!

[SeanTobin]

Seriously.. Rebel! Grab yourself a Knoppix CD and outperform everyone else. Now, you have to be smart about this. It'll probably involve some after-school time practicing and making sure you can do absolutely everything your particular course requires without problems. Knoppix by itself is a very eye-appealing distro but you can do some things to spruce it up (i.e. School logo's where appropriate. Set proper homepages. Setup any printers and other networking quirks.) Having the one computer in the class that looks the nicest will quickly draw the attention of your fellow stu^H^H^Hrebels.

Now, Your teachers depending on their level of expertise will probably either ask you to remove that theme or actually wonder what the heck is going on. This can be a good thing if your teachers are smart - getting them to join the rebellion will help you in your fight.

Now, this being a technical school of sorts, you probably have other enlightened persons hanging around. Polish your CD up a bit, make a funky logo to print on it and start handing it out to your fellow rebels. Having 3-4 people in a class running something different will immediately draw the attention of everyone else in the classroom (the innate nature of teenagers to all be different in roughly the same way :). The fact that it is something you "shouldn't" be doing will only help you here.

Now, you have a few possible endgame scenarios. First off, the administration can come down hard on you for violating their acceptable use policy. Not much you can do in this case without ending up as a martyr.

Secondly, you could get the teachers more or less on your side. As long as you get your work done, they shouldn't have much of a problem. The more converts you get, the more points you score :) Just don't ask them for support when your sound stops working.

Finally you could achieve total victory against the software monopolist throughout the galaxy (or at least your classroom). This is when every student carries around his/her own Knoppix CD or you get a Linux-based installation on a few computers. This is a tough one, but you can always shoot for it.

So my advice is don't try and convince anyone. Show them that you can do the same job faster, cheaper, better, and somehow learn more out of it. Administrators like the first three benefits, and teachers especially like that last bit!

Re:Be a rebel!

[bgfay]

I'm a teacher in a very small school with ten computers in our little lab. All but two of the computers run WinMe while the last two run XP and are administered by a tech staff off-site. We usually have one or two machines down at any time due to different software problems. Currently, one of the XP machines refuses to connect to the web though it will print to the networked printer and talk to the other computers on the network. Odd.

I got tired of this but don't have a lot of power to make changes. Beyond that, I'm not willing to become a pro-bono sys admin for my school. I'm underqualified and too poor. Instead of tending to all of the machines I claimed computer #1 and ran Knoppix off a cd for a week. All of the kids wanted to try it and liked it except that it was slow running off the cdrom.

Two kids and I installed Knoppix to the hard drive and it has been running without a problem since April. No problems at all. The two kids started making it look good and then got to see that they could do a lot with it including play games that the tech folks won't allow on the Windows machines. They introduced kids to it and I, in turn, introduced them all to having their own accounts on the machine. They loved that. (The windows machines are single user machines used by forty different people, ugh.)

The only people unhappy with the situation are the tech folks offsite. One of them asked what was wrong with computer number one. Nothing, I said. It doesn't look right, she said. I told her it was running Linux. She said that she had heard of it. I gave her a Knoppix cd and told her to try it. "I'm not supposed to have pirated software," she said. I told her that I thought it would be okay just this once. Geez.

Anyway, the point of this long-winded post is this: None of the kids has missed MS Word or IE. They asked about both and I said that Computer #1 doesn't run those any more. Instead, I showed them OpenOffice and Firefox. The kids showed them the games. Another teacher discovered The Gimp. Two kids moved the scanner from a non-functioning Windows box to the Knoppix one and got it working in no time.

I'm still not willing to switch them all over, but Computer #1 works and works all the time. I have a feeling that one or two kids might want to make some changes to Computer #2 this year.

How long before we get our hands on the server locked in the closet down the hall?

Re:Where I am...

[QuantumRiff]

I work at a small college, there are 3 of us in the IS dept, and probably about 1000 students. We buy dells for the reason you blame them for, their cheap, however there optiplex line is all hardware compatible. Meaning, if I order a GX270 at the start of the year, at the end of the year, I can still order the GX270 with the same parts.. (most companies will change the sound card, or no longer offer the same motherboard chipset, something small like that.) Because were a small college, I use Symantec ghost constantly. I've even tought the LRC staff how to force a machine to re-ghost itself over the network, without any intervention. (The click a button, and put in a password) Saves alot of time compared compared to them submitting a support case becuase "its broken" and me slogging over to that building and finding theres just a bunch of spyware..

Windows is Perceived Low Cost Standard

[4of12]

...by people in charge of budget.

They use Excel, Access, Word, Powerpoint and Internet Explorer all day, curse "the hackers" responsible for their computer's failings and pay MS like they pay their utility bills, for another essential facility.

They regard Windows as a standard.

At MyCorp, the training rooms are full of Windows boxes. But the hardcore technical people use Mac laptops that give them applications "that just work", full UNIX, and compatibility with the beancounters that send them MS file formats. Lately, various directors and VP's have been getting Mac laptops, too.

It'll be interesting to see how far down the corporate hierarchy Macs migrate: the managers acquire some cachet by mimicking the choice of IT professionals, but if their secretaries and training rooms start to fill up with Macs the exclusivity will have worn off. OTOH, aspiring middle-level managers will want to keep up with the big cheeses...

My school did not

[Anonymous Coward]

I was hired to be the computer teacher in the bush in northern Canada. The lab had decent hardware but we had to re-boot hourly to keep crashes at a "tolerable" level. I could not tolerate it and installed a Linux terminal server for peanuts. The whole lab then ran as thin clients. One decent machine running Linux was able to satisfy all the users in the lab at once. No data was lost all winter. See the .pdf report on the installation:http://www.skyweb.ca/~alicia/report.p df

My students loved Linux. They could do more faster and more reliably. A gui is a gui. A gui that does not crash is better. Favourite apps were OpenOffice, the GIMP, and Mozilla. Students learned to set up simple servers in 5 minutes or less on some of the doorstops laying around. The grade 12 students set up dynamic webpages using LAMP. Not one student had a bad thing to say about Linux because they had seen what the other OS would do. They definitely had marketable skills and many of them are prepared to use computers more effectively at home and work because of Linux. Of course, they did express their opinions about their decrepit, old, ugly, over-the-hill teacher.