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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."
Wow, this will be a great oportunity for OSS to snap up another user base. Not only will it save a lot of money for the schools, but this will more than likely result in more users seeing the wonders of free software, and converting themselves. Would be good if they openly condemned Windows though :P
Anonymous Coward
Once schools are teaching how to use Free software, then businesses will no longer be able to use the bogus argument "but that's what they teach in schools" as a reason to stick with Microsoft.
Schools should not be Microsoft training centres anyway. We pay for schools with our Council Tax, and this particular Council Tax payer resents having my hard-earned spent on consolidating a foreign monopoly.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
The issue at hand is really a "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" question. Though some may argue otherwise, schools exist to educate young people and prepare them for their eventual dilbert-like status in the the cubicle. So if these student all learn linux and open office and who knows what else the schools might be offering instead of M$, then what will they do when their prospective employer asks, do you know how to use word, access, powerpoint, excel, xp, the list goes on. Is this a safe bet, and who should adopt what first.
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
But aren't schools already getting a significant discount? How much lower can Microsoft go before they give it away to schools?
UK Schools will be Microsoft dominated for a long, long time to come. Whatever this report says its likely to be wishful thinking. Speaking as someone who has left education in the UK recently, don't get your hopes up.
Lately I was absolutely amazed how much my 14 year old cousin associates 'Windows' with 'Computer' and vice versa. He had absolutely no idea that there even is a company called Apple and that there are other operating systems like Linux or *BSD.
Computer is PC and PC is Windows.
This is actually a really bad sign, since one tends to like what you are used to. If you learn on the one OS and get into computers only on this road, than everything else you cross by later will only be 'Not as you know it.'
We hear that argument ever so often, especially in the context of Office programs. People dislike OpenOffice not because it does not do the job for them, but because '...it is not like MS-Office'.
'In Word I can do this and that...'
Using MS Products in schools cements their Monopoly in a way that no other marketing campain could achieve.
-jsl
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
most uk schools now have more than one computer room, if they used an MS room for teaching kids to use MS office, then an OSS room for doing their work. then they're trained to use office and educated on OSS products - if in 15 years, most UK business converted, that could do wonders for our economy.
My partner works in ICT at a UK high school. Drawing on her experience I can suggest a bunch reasons why "dump Microsoft" is a simplistic solution.
1. There are a lot of computers to reconfigure. A high school has more workstations than the average small business and far fewer sysadmins per machine. The cost in time of switching all the machines to Linux or BSD would be vast.
2. Her school has special software for controlling access to resources. You need this in a school full of inventive and downright evil kids. The current s/w, which is rather good at its job, is build on M$ protocols and would have to be replaced. Doubtless you could build something similar on Linux for zero capital cost, but it would take ages and you'd only make it secure after the kids had exploited all the initial loopholes.
3. UK business want shool leavers trained explicitly in Windows and M$ Office tools as that's what the businesses use. Schools used to use non-M$ computers, and employers found that school leavers couldn't handle the real-world norm.
4. Schools _teach_ ICT. If the ICT curriculum says "teach them M$", then, duh, you have to have enough Windows boxes around to do that. If the school has the liberty to teach use of OSS systems instead, then the change has to be phased in so that students part-way through school aren't disrupted.
5. The students do their homework on home PCs which are almost always Windows. If the school has Linux or BSD machines, then the work and the files needs to be perfectly portable between M$ and OSS. That simply isn't the case (yet) and no amount of OSS evangelism chances that fact. In fact, schools are a good metric for when OSS and M$ become _really_ interchangeable.
I have been wondering just how long it would be before someone realized that the annual tithe they pay to the folks in Redmond made little sense when the purpose was for students to learn how to use a spreadsheet or a word processor. There are plenty of lower cost or even no cost (as in free beer) versions of these old warhorses. If the basics of page layout and print formatting are the subject at hand, then using MS Word or Office is not the most economical way to go.
What this really does do, though, is break the lock step routine that has been going on for a while -- the schools teach MS specifics because Business uses MS, while Business says they use MS because that's what new hires know, so the new hires won't waste a lot of time having to learn new tricks.
I hope to see more of this, because for too long MS has been "locking" students into their way of thinking and of doing things. Bravo for the folks with enough courage to stand up to the MS juggernaut!
An analog gray hair frantically clinging to the trailing edge of technology.
A special problem in education computing is the need to add and remove user accounts in batch. If you are setting up a Linux based server and you need to add many hundreds of new user accounts to it, I hope you might find this useful:
http://www.lfsp.org/
It offers a little free utility called "createusers" that I wrote for adding and removing user accounts en-masse. As well as basic login accounts, createusers optionally also sets up corresponding Apache personal webspace in the home directory, Samba account, MySQL or PostgreSQL personal database and per-user disk quota.
In reality it probably is though. Microsoft don't make software for other x86 operating systems (I assume linux is the choise here), so if you dump Windows then you tend to dump Microsoft totally. Also Microsoft would be quite unlikely to give the same bulk discounts that they are currently giving the schools if the schools aren't actually buying their entire software package.
Your post should be given full merit but... a lot of jobs today require computers unlike in the past. You didn't suggest it, but I think computer use should be scaled back alltogether, used sparingly and not thrown around as though it will solve all of educations problems. I'm at college and even there we have to do it the old fashioned way before we touch the various rooms full of lovely powermacs, macs, emacs and various scanners or even the college network. The understanding is that you must be able to perform without a computer first, though it is simply a tool just like a paintbrush or T-square, abeit more complicated however.
If they teach this at A-level (but I do a Art and Design course) then that thinking should be carried down to secondary and primary schools as well.
Jonathanjk.com
The report may well be perfectly valid, but I'm a little suspicious of it without further information, if only because the main cost normally hyped for Open Source Software tends to be the training cost. (I'll welcome being corrected.) From the article:
It's difficult to judge this because the report hasn't been released and the article isn't very specific. I'd be interested, however, to know what kinds of prior skills the people at the 15 OSS schools had before they began, versus those at the 33 Microsoft schools. For all we know from the article, these 15 schools had the only 15 staff who are at all familiar with open source software in the entire UK education system. This is unlikely, but my intended point is that the actual cost could be dependent on what skills are available to the school within their existing staff.
If the IT staff at the OSS schools were already confident with installing, configuring and maintaining OSS software, it may be that it was no problem and they could have the low-cost benefits of free software. For all we know, however, the staff at the Microsoft schools might have been regular teachers with more important teaching responsibilities than how to administer the computers. Using Microsoft software would clearly cost more, but what matters is how it'd compare with training all the necessary staff to use OSS.
Staff at Microsoft schools may have had little or no OSS experience, and almost no hope of successfully setting up or administering an open source system without some serious help from an expert. This would be compared with plugging in a pre-installed Microsoft PC similar to their home PC, and running a few setup programs for various educational software, that is.
What's the current status of random people being able to randomly install and use open source software in useful ways? Without having had to go through an installation from that point of view for some time, it's hard for me to know.
Anyway, this isn't to say that the OSS installation and configuration issues couldn't be bypassed in some other way that might still work out to be cheaper. Perhaps it's still not too expensive to simply train people. Alternatively, depending on how serious the curriculum was, an education department might offer a service to configure computers for schools, and perhaps even administer them remotely.
Well, there's these. I haven't tried them myself (no need, you see ;), but some of them have been winning awards and such.
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
Money's a big factor at my kid's school.
Ditching MS software would enable them to hire one or two more teachers. This will give the kids smaller class sizes and get better teaching as a result.
Also their parents wouldn't have to fork over a load of cash for OS + AV + Net Nanny + antispyware + office software + drawing software and so on.
With MS you get the OS and not much else, with any decent Linux distro you get everything you need.
My kids (8 + 4) can use MS and Mandriva with ease (I set it up that way and it didn't take much) They can use Openoffice and MSOffice interchangeably. They both prefer Mandriva, which suits me just fine - less work to look after the setup.
Kids need to learn word processing and spreadsheets not Word or Excel, there's a world of difference between the two.
Oh and my kids have to handwrite their stuff first, and it has to be spelt correctly, with good grammar before they go near the word processor, and they are not allowed to use calculators (or phones for that matter). Some of you Slashdotters need spelling lessons more than the kids at school.
my mum is a year 6 primary school teacher. in her class there are 5 computers; 3 with Windows 2k and 2 older machines with SuSE 9.0 (that i installed a month or two ago).
only one of the windows machines is covered by their office licence, and their other licences for educational software. the other two windows machines were pretty useless until i installed abiword on them.
the SuSE machines are definately the most popular amongst the kids (aged 10-11); partially due to the selection of games that came with the distro, but mostly because its something new and different. this effect will obviously ware off after a couple of months but it will be interesting to see which machines they favour in the long run.
The worst that can happen is that they'll know that non-MS operating systems exist.
If computers were only used for Browsing the web and word processing, we would be fine.
But when teachers use Frontpage (regardless of the best tool for the job) to teach the basics of web design, then it stops being just an issue of what's on the desktop, and now a job of retraining to use whatever would replace it, and also a relacement of 30 x "front page and the web" books.
There are numerous educational programs that do not run on anything other than Windows, there may be alternatives - but re-training, resources and purchasing of new sftware will quite easily eat that 24% saving.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
Most Elementary schools don't have computers in every classroom, nor do you use computers to help you in your assignment. Generally there is a computer lab that every student visits once a week for maybe an hour. During this hour they learn some basics about computers and possibly have a little but of fun. It definatly does not replace traditional learning. They are there mainly to get kids interested in technology for the future. I know LOGOWRITER got me interested in programming at a young age, though I doupt they do anything nearly as cool.
My kids will start their career like I did, get a proper degree in science like math or physics.
Word or other data-entry related skills are then used by those providing cheap and basic data-entry and burger-flipping services for my kids.
I do think it is very good that the western world is dumbing down the education system. Very good indeed, the more people are trained to do basic data-entry instead of real work the less competition my kids will have.
Having Not-MS running at school lowers all the cost associated to children constantly reconfiguring the software, installing 'cool' stuff and otherwise render the PCs unusable. Of course you can try to lock down the PCs as much as possible, having them reinstalled for each course and all the other ways to keep the PCs in a non-surprising and workable state. But all those are associated with additional cost (either having someone knowledgable setting up the labs, probably to be hired from outside, or sending the responsible teachers to training courses or whatever).
For Linux there are educational distributions (in Germany for instance ask Schulen ans Netz e.V.), which take care of the special problems of educational computer labs. You can create workable computer images with ease, and without violating the license agreements that came with the software. You have a very good set of computer work related tools already within every distribution, so there is no cost for additional software.
And: for a school it could be very important: You keep a lot of computer players out of the lab and thus are freeing seats for people who might actually do their homework or class projects after regular hours.
this article is a dupe of an identical one from last week. anyway. When I was at school we used such computers as commodore PETs, BBC Micro Bs and Masters, Acorns and the occasional spectrum or Dragon32. I didnt use a 'Windows PC' until college (17 years old) and even then its not what folk use these days (being pre Windows 3.11!) and that was only when I couldnt get onto an Acorn Archimedes 3010! what harm did 'not using microsoft' do me? none. I am far more computer literate than someone who has been stuck in front of a Win2k box for 4 years and been taught 'computers'. I think not only ditching microsoft at schools but also ditching x86 PC's is the best way to go. lets get an eductional machine back into the schools. lets allow our children...future generations of the human race..what computers mean and how they work. NOT just to move the mouse to select icons and how to type a basic spreadsheet in. I WROTE a spreadsheet program when I was at school. do children learn that sort of skill now at school?
As long as you are still using Windows, you are not threatening. Announce a migration to Linux and THEN you may get free or significantly reduced product.
MS WANTS it's software in education so that Windows and MS Office are the only things young people entering the workforce know. Apple's educational programs are really the only thing that kept them alive all these years (although OS X has finally given them a true technological edge over MS so it's not Quite as important, but is still important. Pre-OS X MacOS was truely horrible.)
you *try* donating old PCs. People don't want to know - ok, a primary school where they have a couple of machines for kids to play on might, but secondary schools are like corporations: they want new, fixed TCO machines on a 4 year refresh cycle. they want them consisted, so they can use the same image on them. what they don't want is a ragbag of old tat that'll cost more to setup and support than buying new will. PC costs are negligible now: I've just bought a Dell with a monitor for 211UKP with 3 year warranty, for example.
These come with a client licence for XP as well.
Bash MS all you want, suggest schools use Linux/Open Source, but don't set up a straw man argument that's clearly false.
I'm an ICT technician working in Primary Schools within London and Microsoft are not the whole problem here. RM (Research Machines) still hold a virtual monopoly over all-things school, at least in the primary schools arena, and they will supply and support only MS.
Then you have individual boroughs who will ONLY supply/support RM stuff, so you're fighting a losing battle.
The borough I work in has no non-MS schools to my knowledge, there are no borough tech's supporting non-MS stuff (in fact, support for any non-RM stuff is almost nonexistent hence my employment). Borough support has been effectively removed for any school which dares go non-RM (I kid you not).
Schools with even just plain Windows 2000/XP setups are abandoned and have to employ people like me to do silly things like add printers, block websites, fix paper jams, etc. as well as keeping the network going in all weathers.
Convincing a school in such a borough to go non-RM (and therefore possibly non-MS) means possibly removing any sort of borough support, having to coexist machines (the borough I work for can do finances, classlists etc. **only** via a piece of arcane Windows/DOS software), replacing every piece of software and all their paid-for expensive site licenses with an equivalent via Linux, or getting Wine to work with programs that cause no end of trouble even in Windows-only environments.
Training of staff/students is a minor matter, despite some posts on here, because most primary school teachers are nowhere near proficient on computers (I've met 2 or 3 across 6 different schools, and that's using a definition of "can install printer on standalone Windows PC by self given instruction manual and driver disks"). Some staff I know have cheat-sheets for almost every action from saving to printing to logging in.
Change the OS, change the cheat-sheet, the teachers still fumbles along without too many problems. You can actually watch them and see just how quickly they relearn how to work when you go from standalone to networked, PC to laptop, 95/98 to XP/2000. This happens almost every year for a decently-funded school.
The problem is 90% political, 10% technical. Convincing a school to go against the grain is hard. Cost savings are easily countered by hiring of technicians to replace lost support, previous expenditure on software and licenses. School's have little to no interest in moving to a "unheard-of", non-popular, finnicky, incompatible, new operating system with no "groundbreaking" features for themselves.
Existing software is pretty much Windows-only, even with Wine, and hardware is very below-par (some schools still have PC's with 233MHz or less). But most hardware is Linux-supported, even down to things like SmartBoards, microscopes, printers etc.
Teachers know nothing about software compatibility and will expect to be able to pick up Rainbow Fish/Barnaby Bear/Tweenies etc. and just plug it in the network for it to work. This will not happen with Linux. It barely happens with Windows.
No major educational software distributor that I am aware of supports Linux in any way, shape or form.
Saying that, I have slipped a Linux machine or two into schools but as kiosk-style machines for things like the Intel QX3 microscopes, exotic printers without XP drivers, etc. but these are expected to run pretty much unattended and unserviced for years and, when they stop working, it's no great loss to throw them away.
In short, get rid of RM, make boroughs and those higher-up in educational terms learn what an ass RM are making of them, encourage most educational software creators to support Linux, let ICT Co-ordinators/Heads/Governors know that this "Linux" thing exists and THEN try for a push.
Why would they? If they have to give their product away for free, they lose the basis for their entire business model.
Besides, even if you get MS software for free, you still have the costs associated with mitigation and damage control for the zillions of exploits that will dog your network.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I lied on my application for a job, instead of putting OO.org, abiword, wordperfect, ect as my expert skills......
i put down Word.
i put down Excel.
i put down Powerpoint.
I had to do "skill testing", which included a typing test for speed/accuracy on some other app, making a chart in excel, and EXACTLY copying a letter from a printed page to word.
Suffice is to say, i got the job, but i havn't used Word/Excel for a few years now. On all my applications i still write down Word/Excel/Powerpoint. When the landscape of office applications changes, i will switch my 'expertise' to the current wordprocessor/spreadsheet/presentation software of the day.
I have beaten the system. I suggest you do the same if you have confidence in your skills.
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
Most of the parents wouldn't have the influence to enforce it in their offices, but some might. Suppose the parent of one of those kids is the CEO or CTO Reed Elsevier with 20,000 employees world wide. Do you think MS wants to risk potentially all of those desktops to save the income on a few licenses in school?
I'm not arguing against schools going for OSS, I'm just saying that it wouldn't be such a bad deal for MS to give away their software in this instance.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.