Slashdot Mirror
UK Schools Told to Dump Microsoft
kubla2000 writes "The current issue of the Times Educational Supplement is running an article in which they cite a report by the British Educational Communications and Technology Association telling primary and secondary schools in the UK to dump Microsoft Operating systems and products in order to save millions. In a report to be published next week, obtained by The TES, Becta will highlight schools which have turned to free software instead of the market leader's products. Becta does not name Microsoft in its analysis. But almost all schools use some of the company's products. Their conclusion? Schools running OSS are saving 24% on average per pc versus those running proprietary systems."
I bet they're are looking to get a sweet deal from Microsoft by threatening this...
Just recommending dumping one supplier of software simply to save money is a worry.
Is our school's education all related to money? do we just want to make it cheaper?
Or make it truly better. As much as I don't like Microsoft maybe there are situations where their software is best.
Just saying to dump them because of cost to save 24% sounds appealing at a first glance, but then replacing teachers with babysitters at half the wages would save 50%.
But it's not doing much good for the kids. Maybe a less broad "Microsoft is 100% evil" attitude would help the kids. Their the ones learning
Schools should, in theory, be pushing what is best for the pupil, not what is cheapest. So whilst there is an argument for using free software to teach, for example, programming, a course which teachs pupils spreadsheets or word processing could, arguably be using the most widespread software.
Oh and the article title isn't exactly truthful. "Told to Dump Microsoft" makes it sound like it's an order from on high; it's not. It's a recommendation, not a government mandate.
OpenOffice, MS Office, AbiWord etc. are all pretty similar, so it should not be too hard to work out how to use another product; even when the students in question have not learned how to use MS Office directly, they have learned how to use a generic office suite, and could probably pick up MS Office in a day or two, if required.
The chicken and the egg thing doesn't really matter, what matters is that some party is going open source, and more should follow.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
If the objective is simply to teach kids the basics of how computers work, what an operating system does, and what can be achieved with a word processor, a spreadsheet, or a database program, then OSS is perfectly adequate to the task. Given that Free software can easily at least match the basic capabilities of proprietary non-Free offerings, it is surely pretty obvious that there should be no real need to spend large amounts on licenses for proprietary software.
However, don't overlook the wider politics of the matter. To some degree, what employers want is a trained workforce (as opposed to an educated one), and in that case it makes lots of sense to train them with the exact same tools they will be expected to use in employment. Which means Windows, MS Office, etc.
Also, don't forget that it will surely be so much in Microsoft's interest to get those youngsters to equate software with Microsoft that they will provide exceptionally deep discounts to education purchasers - probably as far as giving the stuff away.
It will take some principled political leadership to enforce an OSS policy on education in UK, and I really can't see much prospect of that coming from the current government.
I think it's a good move, but only if there is no significant downgrade in terms of quality. Making such a move solely based on monetary or semi-political motivation wouldn't be good. With the current state of OSS software (e.g. OpenOffice), we might be seeing this condition met.
see a Text Widget
I have this exact problem. In school we were only given LUMOCOLOR pens. Now when I look for work and they ask me if I know how to use Blic pens I just break down and cry. I blame my education for my inability to adapt to change. I think schools should do something about this!!
So whilst there is an argument for using free software to teach, for example, programming, a course which teachs pupils spreadsheets or word processing could, arguably be using the most widespread software.
Why? They should teach a generic use of a word processor, I doubt the goal it's about becoming an expert in an especific product. Then why should they teach expensive programs that students possibly can not afford to use at home legally or share between them?
Computer competency does not come from learning one app, and one app alone. It does not come from restrictive interface to a single tool.
.. anyone who has been in the computer realm longer than a couple of decades should surely know, by now, that computers are a rapidly spinning barrel upon which no man should try to stand .. true competence comes from the ability to learn AND USE X, and/or Y, and/or Z to get some computing job done, not from 'having learned A, and only A, and very rarely B to do only one particular job, ever' ...
Computers are utterly arbitrary machines.. software only works when people agree on the way software should work, and then use it.
For schools to be shifting focus from Microsft to OSS is a good thing, because it highlights, yet again, the reality of computers, in that they are only as good as the things you use them for.
I for one welcome our future generations of computer-using students whose competence on computers will have been refined as a result of the shift as much as the actual software used
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Don't schools use a lot of software that runs on top of either of the Windows or Mac platforms?
Are there OSS equivalents for titles like The Way Things Work, or science lab programs, astronomy simulations, or all those Director based multimedia titles, etc?
OSS is great at replacing an office suite, email program, graphics editor, etc.
But are there a lot of OSS educational programs out there, or educators going to rely on web site content?
Just curious.
However, if the course is "Use GIMP" rather than "Image Manipulation with computers", then that is no worse than "Use MS Word" rather than "Document presentation on computers". Except GIMP is free and MS Word costs a lot.
Not suitable for use in schools? What do you think schoolkids do on the computers? Everything I ever did in a school IT lesson I could have done in an out of the box linux distro at the time, even more so now. Possible that some of the circuit design software for design tech might be missing... but then we had old Acorn machines still running for that very reason anyway and then had a few dedicated windows machines installed running just that, for the majority of school computers linux is just fine. Based on the UK National Curriculum at any rate, which is what matters for this.
I recognise that sometimes this is unavoidable - for example, hospitals need computers and those computers need to be bought from a PC supplier like, say, Dell. But I would alaways hope that in such a curcumstance, the best deal possible has been negotiated.
In the case of software in schools, I do not understand why commercial software is purchased when viable free alternatives exist at the level at which they are used in schools - for example, if a schoolkid is being taught how to use a word processor or how to create a spreadsheet, why do they need MS Office when OpenOffice has more than enough functionality for the level they need?
What's more heartbreaking is the fact that companies like Microsoft suck money out of the system which can instead be put to better use training and paying teachers more, on books, etc.
No, I'm not blaming Microsoft alone or directly, they're just a business trying to make money after all, but Open Source software can also serve as an example to kids to show them what can be achieved when people put pure financial gain to one side and just work together for the purpose of making something good.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'm with you through the second sentence... Education is not all related to money. There are other concerns, the most important ones are:
-how well does it facilitate people learning?
-does it provide an environment that is open to advancements and does not lock you in?
Of course there are basic requirements like being able to perform the required tasks, and cost related issues, but aside from these issues, open source beats MS on all fronts.
Oh, wait, no, they don't. QWERTY keyboard, numbers in the same place, + for add, - for subtract.
There's also a compelling argument to be made against using any kind of WYSIWYG word processing: it encourages you to think too hard about the rendering at the expense of the content. Not many people can be both a calligrapher and a poet
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
What's preventing them from installing the same program they use at school on these home PCs ?
You know, OpenOffice run on windows also. And it's really the same interface, and since the total cost is $0, what could be the reason to NOT install them ?
I've been using OO, Mozilla/Firefox and GAIM on windows for years, this has made my conversion to Linux a lot easier. I didn't had to learn new ways to work, just had to get used to the fact of not crashing every now and then.
Make yourself a favor, use all the OpenSource software you can on windows, it will make your transition to Linux a lot easier. My emails aren't jailed in M$ land, I just copied them from Mozilla-mail on Windows to Mozilla-mail on Linux. My documents are free to go to any platform that OO runs on. My bookmarks followed me on Linux, I just had to copy a single HTML file. etc...
Linux : because penguin don't freeze
Avoid the MS tax, always buy I.B.M. PC's (I Built-it Myself)
They may save 24% per PC, but do they save that 24% on every technician and IT
manager, CS lecturer etc.? As far as I know they teach programming in schools on
Windows because it's an easy environment (VisualBasic and so on) to introduce
kids to it. And it's useful in the real world, still. Did the consider the effect
of having to reimplement every lesson plan around a new OS and new applications
which may be wholly different? The trouble of having 3 years somewhere with 3
different groups of kids all on a different OS, application, and curriculum?
It looks to me (having BEEN that technician and IT manager at a school, and had
to discuss lesson plans with teachers) that this 24% saved is going to be spent
for the first 5 years in finding suitable replacements for Windows, and not on
saving money at all.
I don't agree with MS's business practices, nor its monopolization in software, but children are not best served by denying them the skills they're most likely to use in work.
By the time these children have to "work" whatever version of software they learned their skills on will be outdated. Schools should learn general skills, not specific software or versions.
Nobody expects the spanish inquisition!
I think this is even more tricky than what you've pointed out.
The real trick is in the tools market. Educational software is a special class of software. It's very different from say engineering or scientific software. It's not like networking applications or graphics or text editors. Those are all software applications, but in the bbrave new world of edutainment you tend to think of the software in terms of "titles" or at least in subject matter categories because subject matter or content is the emphasis rather than usage or applicaton.
Most adults who don't have kids in school simply rely on their memories and think that computers in school are about teaching typing or perhaps even programming or maybe using the Net. Well, that' certainly can still be the case, but in the 90s, things changed and software pervaded education in a way that it never did before and a lot of people aren't aware of the extent to which that happened. In many schools entire curricula are computer based and a very small set of companies has a major chunk of that market.
The major tools providers in this market create tools for "non-programmers" because they're meant to be used by "content specialists" and specifically that means teachers. This class of development tool is not a popular one among open source enthusiasts particularly because they build their applications around runtime applications that are guaranteed to lock-in the products.
THis is the reason I have long insisted that education will ironically be the last bastion of closed source. It's a systemic issue with roots in the tools market.
The one thing that could change this sad situation is precisely the sort of thing being proposed here. That is, with a bit of encouragement of this sort, companies like Macromedia with an elephant's presence in educational software might be more likely to release Linux runtimes which would allow existing projects to be re-packaged as Linux native apps.
And, since Adobe has recently purchased Macromedia, perhaps such a change might be even more likely as Adobe proceeds to "enter new markets" as they have stated they plan to do.
Luckily, it's not that urgent either way because most of those eudcational apps built with Macromedia tools like Director and Authorware can already be run under Wine.
Then coming back to your point about "best tool for the job" it is really just about OS's rather than the apps since, with the help of Wine, the apps tend to work both ways. And with some pressure, a native Linux run-time could change those apps into native Linux apps at the click of a button as long as the original project files were saved and typically a big project gets archived.
So, it's really about what OS to use simply to hold the content. If you seriously think Windows is a better tool in this case then I would simply say that if it's my tax dollars you're dealing with, you're wrong.
or say text editors or , tends to be very heavy on repetitive GUI interaction with an emphasis on displaying multimedia content and creating easy-to-use interactions that make use of moving graphics and animations and the like. The goals of educational software are very different from most software applications.
Sigh.. visio.
..don't panic
[i]...MS Office,... should be taught in schools and colleges as a key skill for employment[/i]
No I totally disagree. Pre-college, the users should be taught generic common material about PC's. There should be NO single product training. The students should be taugh how to learn, adapt, explore, and think on their own not how to do a very specific task in a "good enough" way.
When I was in elementary, all I did was play games on our Macs cause the material being taught (how to bold, double space, print... docs) was well below my skill level.
When you leave high school or equivalent, you should know how to use a PC, not Windows, Linux, or Mac and said software.
When in college, sure, it should be in the labs, but it shouldn't be a required software on every students PC. And teachers should be encouraged to accept more open standards for submitted work. But it is totally accetable to have application training courses here.
This really gets on my shoulder as I have come across too many people who know a specific task very well, and nothing else. Example: A guy knows Word well, totally amazing with it, but gets confused and lost if I move the icon across the desktop!! Also, the lack of knowledge in PC usage is IMO the main cause for the huge damage caused by viruses and such.
I hope my child is able to aquire the education and learning skills which would make such mundane trivialities as learning the few basic steps necessary to link an Excel spreadsheet to an Access database and have it generate a graph nothing more than minor inconvenience !
A lot of people seem to be saying that kids should be taught Microsoft so they wont need to be retrained when then get jobs. This is inflexible old-think espoused by people who really don't understand how computers work.
It is only people who lack much experience with a diversity of technology who think you need to be trained how to use each specific task keystroke by keystroke.
Young people who have grown up in a technological enviroment have much more powerful mental paradigms relating to computers. Truly proficient computer users do not need to know specific details about what menu to use or what button to press. They have a higher level understanding of the general design of user interfaces and can jump with little effort from windows to mac to linux to xbox to ps2 to nokia to motorola and so on.
Increasing exposure to more types of technology is in the end a better education than intensive study on one particular (soon to be obselescent) technology.
"MS Office is here to stay" ...and ten years ago, it would have been "WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 are here to stay!"
Who knows what office systems will be in use in 2010 or 2020. I imagine that there'll be greater diversity than now, whatever happens - the likes of OpenOffice.org will be adopted increasingly as people realise they have a choice, even if others will continue to use MS Office for both good and bad reasons.
The one thing I can absolutely guarantee is that your child - at least if she is under 14 and planning to go to university - will not be using Office 2000 or Office 2003 in her first job.
Genuinely teaching kids how to use information communication technologies and not Microsoft Office is one of my pet peeves. A kid that is taught the fundamentals of GUI and CLI use and is exposed to several different implemetations is going to be significantly better off as with any luck they'll absorb the concept of usage metaphores.
Rather than teaching a child how to use Outlook to send emails, I'd rather they were taught how emails fit in to their toolkit of applications. When to send an email not a letter, when to send an email not make a phone call, not: Press Start, Program files, Outlook Express compose new email. If nothing else it future proofs their knowledge.
What kids need is as much exposure to different technologies as is possible and genuine disscusion on when that technology is appropriate, that means using proprietary and OSS solutions.
The problem here is making sure that the teachers understand this and the curriculum reflects this. The scary thing is even IT professionals don't seem to understand.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
If you want to learn web development you ought to know HTML. My tech class had us making pages first in notepad then in Frontpage [though I just stuck to notepad because it's simpler].
... well you get what you deserve.
If you hire some cocaine addict off the street [e.g. my college] who doesn't know HTML or anything about W3C to teach a tech class about web pages
Of course my high school went the other way at first. Buying all Apple bullshit. Of course we were doing video processing on them back when PCs could hardy capture video let alone process it in any meaningful way...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Tech teachers have had to deal with this for a very long time. You simply can't afford to keep your lab equipped with equipment that is currently used in industry. Therefore, you can't teach specific skills required to use proprietary equipment. What you can teach is 'generic skills'.
You teach in such a way that the students can take the generic skills they have learned and transfer those to the equipment they find on the job. The students get a huge benefit from this. Because you are educating them, rather than training them, the students are well equipped to cope when the employer changes from one type of equipment to another.
In light of the above, 'training' students to use proprietary software is cheating them.
...what you need to learn children is not OS or application-specific. I would be equally frustrated if they started teaching about /dev/hda0 as C:\, and init-scripts instead of autoexec.bat.
Office suites have long sinced passed the barrier where it is your skills that is the limit, not the application. Most children I know couldn't wield the full power of OpenOffice or GIMP than they could with MS Office and Photoshop.
And by skills, I don't mean knowing which keyboard shortcuts to push, but to understand what it is they are doing. Even though www.google.com is available to all, even those with supposedly tech skills seem amazed at what I can do by a few +'s and -'s and qoutes and such.
And yes, it all comes down to money. Those money could be well spent on other things, things that really matter. It is not a 3GHz PIV and MS Office 2003 Expensive Edition that will teach your child to be a computer wiz any more than a $10,000 set of golf clubs will make him the next Tiger Woods.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Schools should be teaching children "concepts", and not "programs". ie, the concept of a GUI, the concept of an email application, the concept of a web browser.
That way, the students are equipped to move from os to os, platform to platform without prejudice.
It's how your user who has never seen anything other than MS products can move from XP to OSX or KDE with little difficulty without complaining about the missing start button and throwing up their hands in horror.
It's how they can deduce how to browse the web, write a letter or send an email based on experiences in other systems.
Platform independence comes naturally once you understand the underlying concepts. This is what should be concentrated on rather than "product X".
That schools may be using OSS is not the point and it shouldn't be championed on that aspect alone. Get a mix in there, let the kids see all sorts.
>> "No? Well we couldn't POSSIBLY teach you that.."
Actually its more likely that the response will be 'No? Shame, but we have another 20 people to see. We'll let you know - NEXT.'
All things being equal if you have a choice in employing someone who has the skill you have and someone who is capiable but lacking you choose the one who will hit the ground running.
Employers are not running a charity.
What the normal Slashdot crown seem to completely ignore is that not everyone has the superhuman brain power they have. For every computer programmer there are 100's and 100's of low-grade clerical jobs that are not won on the basis of how quickly you can learn new skills. They are won on the 'how quickly you can settle into your new job and be productive.' If you don't have the skill(s) they are looking for then don't apply.
their, there, they're.
You're at university?!?
Your reasoning is probably why this government reccomendation was made. A single school wouldn't want to go out on a limb and put a child in a situation where s/he is the only one who uses OpenOffice. By "encouraging" schools accross the UK to learn OO, these students will grow up together and will be trading .sxw's instead or .doc's.
I think this works when it's a country wide thing. The other thing we should remember is how corporations have seduced school systems by making systems cheaper *cough* Apple *cough*. You could argue Apple is better for the students, but it certainly never became the US standard. Still you look at all the corporations who offer "deals" to schools. Its prevalent enough that buying based on price will probably leave you with a mix-matched network which is highly confusing.
I think OSS avoids the problem of cheap commercial software by being consistant and by proving its worth based on merit, not a huge marketing budget.
P.S. with all the stories about students hacking their teachers machines, I think saving money on computers could be a very good thing. The level of learning through high school can be very low in technical things. Students will be exposed to more challenges, which is a good thing, and the teaching ability doesn't matter as much in that aspect.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Train to understand concepts. Learn to use as many packages as you can.
If you know how a spreadhseet works you can learn the exact way to use Excel or whatever. Plus you can migrate without massive re-training.
The whole "I know package X" or "I'm trained to Level Y on suite Z" attitude is complete bullshit.
You need to teach kids to be flexible, to understand concepts. You don't hear about them being able to read a particular publisher's books. They aren't taught how to do individual Math problems. Why should they be taught a particular vendor's applications?
-- I like the cut of your thinking, young man. - me.
So at age 12/13 you bought yourself a $500 computer and spent hours creating websites.
..." not every kid does.
Well done, we're all very proud of you.
And as you said, "If the kid really wants to learn how to make
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
I think that depends on the school. Not all schools have the funds to buy computers and take whatever they can get. This is especially true in the US where local property tax dollars are frequently the primary source of funding. In poor / rural areas, there just isn't the money to buy all new systems every 4 years. Heck, I still see old Mac Classic's and 386's all over the place.
Furthermore, Linux doesn't have the same diverse hardware issues when dealing with images that windows does. Think Knoppix as an example of how this works.
Bottom, line is that this is NOT a "clearly false" argument as you claim. It may be false SOME places, not not ALL places.
this would be a terrible thing if it happens. Please allow to explain:
In my school they switched to Linux 3 years before I graduated , as a result we had 3 years of Computer Science courses on Linux. As I am posting on Slashdot it is pretty obvious that I didn't have a problem with this but the case quite the opposide with most students.
Allot of my classmates had barely used a PC , and what was important at that time , was teaching them how to get work done on the PC. Now for better or worse that means knowing your way around Windows.
The complete switch to Linux basicly took that chance away from them . They were learning Linux , when at home ( and at Internet Cafes , and pretty much everywhere) they had only Windows.
Obviously this isn't good.
A school must have BOTH imho. Linux is a nice thing to learn , but Windows is too. You shouldn't dump Windows completely because in the end the kids are the ones that are going to suffer from it.
Sorry for the lengt.
-- TRUST ME! I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!
".. are brats that think school is a punishment. But that just reflects about the parents. "
So children should be punished for their parents attitude?
"If the kid is that arrogant to think they have nothing to learn as a child"
Or they may just not be interested in learning to use a computer to make webpages. Maybe they are interested in History and spend the time doing that? Or maybe their thing is Mechanics?
"tired of that "we gotta entertain the children" bullshit"
I am not an educator but I think people learn best when motivated and enthusiastic.
"we can't afford a computer" bullshit.
Good for you, knowing exactly what everyone's personal circumstances are.
You made your choices, and were given the opportunity, not everyone is as lucky as you, or dedicated from an early age knowing exactly what they wanted to do.
But let me ask you, were you as dedicated to every subject, or was it just computers? In geography, did you put in extra hours in understanding plate tectonics, in history did you do outside reading around the subjects you were taught? In english were you taught to argue without swearing? There are model students that will do all of this, and maybe you were one of them, I would think you were the exception rather that the rule?
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
"Furthermore, Linux doesn't have the same diverse hardware issues when dealing with images that windows does. Think Knoppix as an example of how this works."
I used to think this was true until I found out that a $499 RAID controller that's only a couple years old was a *bitch* to get working under Linux. (MegaRAID Enterprise 1500, Series 467)
Seems that support for "older" megaraid cards was silently dropped, screwing over lots of people with older (and not even *that* old) Dell, IBM, and HP hardware that came with these cards.
Google around, there's a few bugs about it on Red Hat's bugzilla. It really boned quite a few people.
So now, when I have a hodgepodge of parts, I take the time to make sure that they're supported by the Linux distro that I'm using. I no longer have to check the Microsoft HCL - the stuff Just Works under Windows, but that isn't really true of Linux anymore.
FWIW, I couldn't get the card to work at all with a new Knoppix CD, but an older Knoppix 3.6 CD (with the 2.4 kernel) had the module for the MegaRAID card. I loaded it, was able to partition the drives, and did an alternate install of Gentoo 2005.0. The correct module exists in the 2.4 kernel, and the box has been working great. Only 3 days of Googling, forums, IRC, and mailing lists wasted.
Fedora Core 3 won't see the card either. Fedora Core 2 *does*
Anyway, I think that yes, Linux does have hardware issues in many places that Windows does not.