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Ditching Microsoft Could Save Education Millions
ElvenMonkey writes "The Times Education Supplement has published the results of a BECTA (British Educational Communications and Technology Association, the Government's ICT agency) study, to be published next week, into the TCO of using Microsoft products compared to using Open Source products. The report shows an average saving of 24% per computer in schools using Open Source over those using Microsoft systems. Now if only the government wasn't insistent on locking schools into using Microsoft in arguably illegal ways."
Think how much they would save if they just got rid of the computers.
air and light and time and space
This is the insidious thing about Bill's Foundation. Libraries get placed on the MS upgrade cycle, hooked by the initial free-ness. Then try doing anything with your machines without spending a whole lot of money...
You can save tons on licenses and expensive hardware. Also you can teach children how computers actually work instead of giving them what MS wants the PC to be ... a glorified VCR.
No matter where you go , there you are.
I've always wondered why schools don't use Linux. If kids start with it, they would all be able to embrace technology to the fullest extent, where in Windows, all you get is annoying paperclips, error messages, and EVERYTHING spoon-fed to you so it's as bland as possible.
While I certainly agree with the sentiment of the news article, isn't it a little premature to link to an article that only announces a real report. I am interested in the details and how they obtain the 24% mark. My estimate would be more in the 10% range.
Considering the earlier article regarding OpenOffice, it might make sense to calculate [expensive license] - free = savings. But where does that leave cheap academic licensing?
see a Text Widget
Can you use Excel? Yes - if you can use open office oocalc, you can easily use excel Can you use Word? Yes - if you can use open office oowrite, you can use word. Can you use Windows? Yes - but I can save your business money by helping you to convert to Linux and open source software. Sounds great! When can you start?
but as people get more and more accepting of OSS the more we'll see it. Who would've guessed 7 or 8 years ago that there would be an exodus of entire governments switching to OSS? Software is becoming a commodity in functionality. As an example Word became all anybody needed with Version 97. M$, as an ongoing business concern needs to keep selling upgraded software even if the new features are things you don't need. This isn't something that OSS suffers from. If it ever gets the bugs out completely Open Office is set to become much more important. After all why keep upgrading M$ stuff when you don't need to? (Munich anyone?)
If we ever see Google embrace Open Office and champion OSS then it could become a viable threat to M$, the likes of which M$ hasn't seen.
OSS has been making great inroads these last few years and sadly it is not going away as much as M$ would love to see happen. M$ just needs to learn the lesson that IBM did. As time goes by you have to evolve from a company that creates standards to one that contributes to them. The past is littered with the carnage of companies who did not learn this.
Not that M$ will ever go away.
Can you use Excel?
Who can't?
Can you program Excel macros?
Sure! (Just lemme download that tutorial at the web)
Can you use windows?
AND tweak it.
Welcome to our company. See you next monday at 9.
(See? That wasn't so hard, was it?)
Nonetheless, I can believe these numbers. Libraries and elementary schools are no-brainers for using Linux and free software apps. Anyway, this is an improvement on the usual hypothetical TCO numbers pulled out of one side's ass or the other's.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
"Windows and Office are anachronisms"
Dude, pass some of whatever you've been smoking this way. Like I said elsewhere, I'm far from the president of the MS fan club, but anybody who gets any low- to mid-level job anywhere is going to be sitting in front of a Winbox and needs to know how to use it. Sure, Linux would be great to teach to kids who know at age 10 they want to be developers or sysadmins, but the average person working the average job is *gonna* be on Windows. It's unfortunate, but it's the truth. I was a production support analyst and mainframe operator for a Fortune 500 company, and guess how we interfaced with the AS/400's and mainframe? Using a terminal program running on a windows XP box.
The fact of the matter is that people who are very familiar with Windows and Office - not love it, mind you, but know how to use it with some degree of expertise - have an advantage in the job market over people who don't. Sad but true.
They will never stop until somebody makes the
1. the article is dealing with the united kingdom
2. students aren't paying for the computers, e.g., no market
3. regardless of whether you're using a windows, mac, or linux machine today, there's an enormous amount of free software available for all those platforms. today's students certainly aren't stuck developing in basic like they were 15 years ago.
Good god, would you really want to employ someone who was unable to transfer their knowledge of one application on to another of the same type?
Then there's the corollary, would you want to work for the kind of muppets who couldn't realise that the concepts are the same for all word processors, hell even the menu layouts are similar.
Reality check. People who are this dumb are going to get eaten alive in the globalised economy.
Deleted
Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but this would be a tremendous move for schools. Having computers in the classroom is an enormous waste of resources -- teachers rarely know how to use them, students don't use them productively, they're a hassle to maintain (especially if you allow web browsing on them, regardless of the browser you use -- kids will be kids), they're a waste.
Computers belong in labs and specialized situations in schools (we had a pretty successful mac lab for a media production class at my high school, for instance), and rarely anywhere else. If it makes sense to use a computer for a lesson (typing up a paper, a research day, etc), the teacher can sign up for the lab (that is easily maintained, and can often be staffed by students).
Seems like the average economics student could figure out this is bullshit.
Supply of msft admins = high
Supply of non-msft admins = low
Replacing all msft admins with the low # of non-msft admins = high demand for a low amount of resources.
Which makes the non-msft admins outrageously expensive. Thus, negating the savings...
Seriously, where is the average school in po-dunk Mississippi going to find a quality non-msft admin cheaply when a drop-out could do msft administration?
There is a theory the Microsoft software was created by Intelligent Design, but so far scientists have not been able to find any evidence to support this theory.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Actually, if I were doing the interviewing, i'd ask them why they were evading the questions, and probably file it in the round filing cabinet for being dishonest.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
A good education system would show students the different OS alternatives existing out there -- Mac, Windows, Lunix, etc.. But, hey, that's just my opinion.
The thing to consider is that the HR departments at most companies act as the first level of filtering of resumes. So, they'll usually scan a resume for certain keywords. It's entirely possible that even though someone is a perfectly qualified candidate, they might not be able to pass this first level of filtering. It's not entirely logical, but that's unfortunately how most of the world works.
So, you might argue just put the MS products on your resume, even if you don't really "know" them. Well, then your resume is technically inaccurate, and this could get you into trouble (either any interviews will question your honesty, or you could be dismissed from your new job when it's discovered that you didn't know of a particular quirk in Excel '97).
Just giving a counterpoint. In general, I think it's much better for people to be flexible and quick learners, rather than mindless automatons. :)
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
We are talking about secondary schools here though, these normally have pupils aged 11-18(ish).
Assume you have a typical office worker, who does their A-levels, takes a gap year, goes to a middling 'university' then sells their soul working in some mindless office job (quite a common situation, at least in the South East of the UK)
These 11-year olds, entering school today, won't enter the work force for about a decade.
10-12 years ago, the Amiga was still alive, windows 3.11 was modern, and the 'new shiney stuff' was things like the Atari falcon. Word Perfect was battling MS Word, and not clearly losing.
Netscape navigator was the major web browser and most people didn't even know what the internet was.
what will be commonplace 10-12 years from now?
Furthermore, that is only at the point they enter the workforce, most school children will not retire until their 50's at the earliest, that is 40 years away.
40 years ago computing would've been unrecognisable to those in the field today.
15 years ago was the era of wordstar, 20 years ago the age of typewriters. Do you think that lessons in typewriter maintainence that they took as teenagers help 30-year olds in the job market today?
if schools are merely training mindless drones for a job now, then slavish adherence to modern de facto 'standards' is an uncertain proposition, but if, as I believe, education should be something that is for life, then such an approach is indefensible.
That argument has cemented Windows into schools in the UK. However it is total bullshit.
The main reasons for this include:
1) All word processors/spreadsheets/whatever have almost exactly the same user interface. Once you know OO.org, it's not exactly rocket science to know how to use MS Office.
2) The version of Windows/MS Office that the school uses will be out of date in around a year or so, and you can bet your ass they won't update for another 5 years. So you'll probably be using something slightly different from what you learnt in school when you get a job.
3) Knowing how to use a computer is NOT about knowing how to use MS products. The main point of computers in schools is to improve typing skills, learning how to lay out a document, spreadsheet formulae, etc. All of which shouldn't be specific to any given piece of software.
Speaking as someone who started learning how to program on an Apple II at age 12, then moving to Mac OS, then to WinTel at 16, and arriving at Linux in my 20s, I can say that it doesn't really matter what is in front of the student.
What matters are the fundamentals that we are teaching. As an example, my sixth grade teacher would spend time after school with me helping me debug BASIC programs on the ol Apple II. What my teacher did was set the stage for me to grasp fundamental logic concepts. This knowledge allowed me to move freely in the computing world. That type of knowledge transcends making the font bold or creating that powerpoint slide. This is what the computer should be used for, not some silly test of which button to push, hell, you can tech mice that kind of crap.
"Give me taste, give me funk, give me fury, gimme some more."
That's very true, and does make for a more valuable employee in theory. However, jobs rarely advertize for someone "able to learn foo", rather for someone who knows foo now.
Locking people to Macs? Bad.
Locking people to MS? Bad
Locking people to Linux? Good!.
Students should learn on linux. They can really get to the guts to learn how computers work. They can even make contributions if they want. Finally you are not whoring your students to some company.
evil is as evil does
Think about the cost for the kids education. They are teached to use a system that is designed so you don't have to THINK while using the computer. It's maybe ok for your grandma (It's still ethically wrong to use it since it's proprietary), but, do we want our childs to go to school so they are teached NOT to think?.
Unix is the way to go.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
A national goverment policy locking schools into buying from a single company if they want funding is quite different from a group of schools deciding independently from the national government which machines to purchase, to be fair.
Dishonest how? They're answering the questions.
It's analogous to an interviewer asking "can you drive a Ford" and receiving "I can drive a variety of standard and automatics" as an answer. It's the question that's wrong, not the answer.
I don't think they are advocating removing Windows/Office from the Administrators. Allthough saving tax-payers money should always be the goal of any school district. More money = more teachers and better salary for others.
Advocate using Linux/OpenOffice to teach computer fundamentals to the kids. Word Processing, SpreadSheets, Graphics, etc. These activities don't require expensive Microsoft software.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Things that keeps us on MS office:
1) (native aqua that uses mac fonts) OpenOffice for Macintosh and we need an easy way for teachers, students and staff to have one standard suite for both PC and Macintosh (Windows and OSX)
2) SMS (Student Management systems that we seem to be using are locked into MS Office) -- they always link through some sort of Sqlserver foxpro type driver. Most SMS products are this way probably because people write them in Visual Basic. Unfortantly, the ones that fit what educators need fall in this category.
3) Open Office is dog slow on the PC (Windows and Linux). Also it does not run well on the Macintosh.(Extra X11 stuff). the best verion of Open Office for the Mac is still neooffice/j. Open Office 1.9 and 2.0 beta is a lot better in this respet. I am sorry but Open Office is slow.Abiword is fast, but it lacks a presentation and spreadsheet.
4) We need more than word processing otherwise we would could use abiwork or the ilk.
5) People were trained on Microsoft Office or Word Perfect. Retraining is difficult with staff and teachers because we have become such a "Standards" based place which eats up most of their time. Also , training can traditionally cost more than the products and it is not like Teachers are usually technically savvy and many have trouble "learning it" on their own.
6) Most important is that it takes goverment organizations a long time to change; corporations will change faster than we will.
7) Many educational database programs and the like interface only with office (thank those dot coms for that one).
8) There is a version of office for every os that we use: Mac OS 9 and 8 - Mac OS X, and Windows 98, and XP.
I say this all and I am an avid linux user. I think Linux and Open Office is the future because it is a software evolution not a revolution. People will not "switch" to linux -- it will just be there... I don't even think it will "wow" people like longhorn or tiger. It will get them on the internet, do some word processing, and that is what education really needs.It is just going to take time that is all.
Some schools buy computers for the mere sake of having them. They think the mere presence of a computer in front of a student will make him learn faster or better. The reality is computers change the way students work, but not always for the better.
If you are going to have computers in schools - and I think you should - do the following:
1) make sure you have the electrical and networking infrastructure in place ahead of time, or at least concurrent with hardware delivery
2) train the teachers on how to use the computers in the way they and their students are expected to use them. Train them well enough so they can teach the students what they need to know. But wait you say, students will used computers in unexpected ways. Expect that to happen and train accordingly.
3) have an appropriate software infrastructure. This means a suitable operating system, suitable security software, device drivers, etc. Infrastructure is the "under the hood" software, it does not include tools, applications, and educational software.
4) use hardware and software that is appropriate for the task at hand.
5) use the applications you need for the task at hand.
In addition, you need policies and procedures in place to prevent abuse, recover a machine that's been downed due to accidental or deliberate damage, etc.
All of this costs money. If it's not in your budget, the right thing to do is to either scale down sensibly or perhaps scrap the project entirely. Leaving out key components because you didn't have the money is like building the first 99% of a road that connects two points and leaving the last 1% unbuilt - it's not very useful.
I for one would rather have the entire computer budget moved to the student materials budget than have it spent on a system that, because it was poorly implimented, is being way underutilized. On the other hand, if it's properly implimented, computers can improve the breadth, depth, and overall quality of education, particular for research-intensive classes like history and for projects that require non-local collaboration.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If the same 3rd graders were using OpenOffice's Presentation program, would you make the same comment?
Personally, I think teaching third graders the rudiments of office productivity programs is a good idea, if that knowledge will help them achieve the non-computer curriculumn goals.
Take PowerPoint and similar software, for example:
If itis used to teach students how to summarize and find the important points for a presentation, then that's good.
If it's used to teach them how to make eye-candy presentations devoid of content, that's bad.
When it comes to making cards, third graders are probably better off using a simpler program that Powerpoint.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
How dare Microsoft think they can hold the British government by the balls. The government needs to basically say "Ok, we're going to use Microsoft software for some things and other software for other things, if you don't like this arrangement we are quite happy to use other software for all things and to maybe start sharing these ideas with your other customers."
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Mabe you need to find a windows maps software, so you can see that there is a world outside the USA and that not everyone is a native english talker.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
1 - I Run the GNU Operating System. Linux is just my kernel.
2 - I'm not saying that it's unethical to use things created by big corporations (That would be actually a critic to the whole capitalist system, and yes, i actually think that the capitalism system is in itself corrupt and unethical, but we live under it, and it's a whole different topic to the one we are dealing with right now). What i'm saying is that it's unethical to use products that makes use of copyright law and other laws designed to take your freedom as a user, as a scientist, and as a human being awawy, because by doing so you are helping them to continue doing it.
I Wouldn't mind using a good system, like, for example, Solaris, if sun would provide it under conditions that woudln't affect my personal freedoms or the freedom of someone else.
Right now, the only system that fullfils my ethical and technical specs is GNU.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
There was a study out of Europe, I think Germany, last month that concluded that having multiple computers in the home led to lower testing grades at school.
The previous studies in North America of course have concluded that computers give people a competitive advantage over their computerless peers, but that trend I don't believe. I work in the computer industry so to speak, and in a type of educational field, and I may be nuts to say this, but we need fewer computers in the schools, or homes if teachers and parents aren't going to supervise the computer use.
If you watch a 10 year old use the Internet these days for instance, if they are unsupervised, they will be on MSN or AIM talking with some people they don't even know, and visiting games and marketing websites, or playing games that teach nothing, not even pseudo-educational games like Oregon Trail are played. Having unrestricted computer access as a child is harmful to education, as are things like TV and video games. The only time a computer is going to help, is when it is one of many tools in the parent's strategy for educating their children in the home. A kid can't be plunked in front a computer with no educational goal in mind, for an undefined period of time.
The majority of callers to the radio station that reported the German study, concurred that a computer is no good unless access is restricted, in the way that video game time should be.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.