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 As happens over time these machines got out of date and had to be replaced, and the school has spent a lot of money buying replacements.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!

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.