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Roadblocks to Linux in Education
An anonymous reader writes "The Open Source Industry Australia (OSIA) has lashed out at government schools and education departments for snubbing FOSS. In this column, OSIA says it has been trying for over two years to make headway with these government agencies but 'they tell me that they are scared of doing anything which will upset Microsoft.'" From the article: "If these departments suddenly stopped paying for proprietary software and switched to FOSS, the schools know they won't reap any of the purported savings. So, why would schools bother with trialling FOSS? Where's the incentive?"
It's true that by switching to FOSS now, they won't save anything, today. They've already paid for the proprietary software. The real savings comes in the next year or two when they don't have to pay for new software to stay on the proprietary upgrade path and they won't have to pay for new hardware to meet the demands of the new software.
It sounds like these government schools are being a little short-sighted in their reasoning.
The incentive should be in educating your students the correct way. Teaching kids using industry standards rather than proprietary Microsoft crap is of much better educational value in the long run.
You don't let teachers use their "own" versions of English, you make them teach agreed upon standards (in terms of spelling and grammar); using open source software instead of proprietary software is comparable.
Teaching children GNU/Linux and other free software exclusively will merely limit their employment opportunities.
Teaching it alongside Microsoft software would be great. However, it is unlikely that schools that do such would continue to receive discount prices on Microsoft products.
This is a relatively easy switch, and it's amazing most don't make it. First, start by switching to Firefox and OpenOffice. You already start saving money on MS Office licenses. Once people get used to using these apps on Windows, you switch out the OS underneath, and the learning curve is extremely limited. These are high school kids and younger, they aren't regularly demanding Visual C++ and MS Project software, they need to write papers and do web research. Doing that on Linux is a breeze, and people need to stop treating it like EVERY aspect is hard. It's not. If you wanna be a developer, sure, there are more hoops to jump through, but I don't see this being a big issue with grade schools, and by the time it is Linux will be even more polished than it is now.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
I've had extensive experience with use of FOSS in Victorian Schools, or rather, the lack of.
The crux of the matter is, most educational software ('games', if you will), comes for Windows. True, there are alternatives for Linux, but the teachers hear on the grapevine from one another about the popular packages (i.e. Windows-based).
On the server end, many Victorian schools use WinNT/2k/2003, as the licensing arrangements with Microsoft give them basically free OS licenses. All they pay for is the media. There's an instant reason for them not to change - they won't be saving much, as you can find a MCSE going for much less than a unix sysadmin.
On the other side, a few schools are moving towards Linux on the server end - the school that I previously worked at had a number of Linux servers for fileserving, web, proxy etc. OSS can be utilised heavily on the server side, and is being pushed from the top (Dept. of Education) - a prebuilt proxy/wireless authentication box, "Edupass", is being sent to all schools, complete with documentation.
There are inroads being made with OSS to Victorian Schools, but on the client side, nothing will happen until schools are willing to undertake PD with staff on how to use Linux, and there is sufficient educational software available.
Requirements Specification for Educational Document Retreival System. (Web Browser):
Software must retrieve documents from Internetwork Uniform Resource Locators.
Software much display said documents using standard HyperText Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheets.
Software must allow multiple documents to be presented simultainiously within a single instance. (tabbed browsing)
Software must not allow executable modules to contaminate the base operating system. (no ActiveX)
I agree.
I'm no MS troll, but I don't think this is that good of an idea. Most system admins at public schools are used to MS. They would be useless on linux boxes. Same with teachers, same with the school's staff. If we push this too soon, we will give linux a bad name for a very long time.
Remember, only fools rush in.
"A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes." -Mahatma Gandhi
I cant believe this guy got modded down. Just because his facts were incovenient. If people want to get Linux used in education they need to work with education software makers (like Accelerated Reader, and Scholastic) to produce Linux versions of those software products. Even Openoffice in some parts(Presentations and the database) doesnt work as well as Microsoft Office. IBM are you listening? Wine is not acceptable alternative, you must have native linux versions of these products.
All of his statements are dead right on. As someone who also works in a school Ill verify what he says.
Except teachers dont hate to be taught...they dont have time to be taught.
Schools that I know, which are Florida schools so bottom of barrel, aren't run by the most tech literate or most intelligent people. They're run by principals who could easily be a life-long middle manager somewhere, never rising above his position. What will he do when he needs tech resources? He'll look to well-known names and people with certifications from well-known names. Yes, they'll hire MCSAs. I'm not saying OSS is difficult. In fact, I find Linux to be simpler. However, mention the words "compile", "code", and "command-line" these MCSAs will freak out. Plus they want the job security of all Microsoft shop. Essentially, you have a tech clueless principal hiring someone who's barely competent with a recognizable certification to do IT. Can he get it to work? Yeah. That's what Microsoft aims for. Even the dumbest of us can build a network with Microsoft products. Is it going to be good? Not really. I remember how easy it was for us to bypass all their "security" features. In fact, my friend email-bombed the principal using the school's own mail server. You think any of these people involved in the decision making is going to risk trying something different? If they go Microsoft and it blows up, they can always blame Microsoft. Anyone will accept blaming Microsoft. If they go with OSS and it blows up, what the hell were they doing with "cheap" software with no corporate backing? In PHPs' minds, a corporate logo is a stamp of approval.
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We have several computers lying around the house. Anytime I see a PIII or beter, at a garage sale or pawnshop I buy the damn thing. As well, I have several highend machines in the household. With my daughters (9 and 4), they make very little distinction between the underlying OS. My 9 year old in particular loves wikipedia and chatting with her girl pals.... We have: Windows XP : IE, Firefox and Trillian Mac OS X : Safari, Firefox and Fire (multui client chat) Linux : Firefoxand gaim. guess which one shes uses the most? The one with the best looking monitor.. she could care less about the differences between the OS's. I moved the 17 inch LCD she loved around to all flavors of OS and she followed the monitor not the OS. It was a unique experience. She now have a little X-Terminal in her roow (with a modest 15 inch LCD she loves). When I finally asked what OS she liked the best, her answer was somewhat amusing. She cose Mac OS X because the mac mini was cuter than the others. Kids adapt as long as the apps are there, it's us adults that muck things up.
My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.
MS probably has a lot of governments on the ropes. Think about it for a minute. MS is a foreign investor in many countries. It is cheaper to pay MS for software than it is to annoy Microsoft and lose millions of foreign investment capital
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I work for a state educational service district, and many of our schools pay for Microsoft School Agreement purely out of fear.
One of our schools was being courted by Microsoft last year, and the district politely gave Microsoft the finger, explaining that between Open Source software, pre-installed Windows OSes and Microsoft Select licensing they were perfectly happy with their current licensing and budget.
Two weeks later the Business Software Alliance came knocking. Three months of legwork and tracking down purchase orders and the district is facing a five-figure fine (and grateful it wasn't six) because of one copy of a piece of software they believe came pre-installed on a beige box workstation but can no longer prove it.
The average district would be looking at seven figures based solely on the decade-old workstations no longer networked, sitting in the corners of their elementary schools and probably stuffed with bargain bin titles from the local superstore.
Though under a dozen of our districts have been audited, not one of our School Agreement schools has been contacted. News like that travels around.
Could it be prevented with Open Source software adoption? Sure. But as other posters point out, public pressure to adopt industry standards and internal pressures to support proprietary curricular software are too strong for district support personnel to take a stand.
Unfortunately, they're also the first ones out the door when the lawyers and that five-figure fine comes.
And no one tells me what to put on the computers - certainly not the government. I've been gradually moving the whole network over to F/OSS. I do a few PD courses for the teachers every month, and they seem to be taking to it.
What Primary and Secondary schools are you're talking about? Seriously.
I think a good question to start with is what are we trying to accomplish with computers in primary and secondary schools anyway? Some research indicates that avoiding PCs in the classroom and at home improved the literacy and numeracy of the children studied and that "messaging" depletes human cognitive abilities. Certainly, there is value in familiarizing our youth with the tools of the modern workplace, but is that enough to justify the trouble and expense of putting computers in our primary schools?
It appears to me that many children are making it through primary (and even secondary) school without picking up some things that I can't believe we'd let our youth proceed without: make change, read a map, comparison shop (math, logic and units), wipe, research, sit through a movie in a theater without talking, reasoning and rhetoric (form an opinion, present and defend it), produce some art, etc. I think we really should be more worried about nailing these.
Once we get beyond penmanship, I think a text editing program really helps a child learn to put thoughts into writing but that until a certain skill level is achived any benefit is offset by Clippy and other features more appropriate for doing, not learning how. In other words, when it comes to primary and secondary education, pico is better than Word.
At some point, some students are going to need some "Getting the most out of Microsoft Excel" type courses. Personally, I think the place for them is as "adult education" at the local community college or parks and recreation center, as needed. Still, this wouldn't be entriely out of place as an elective in High School or even universities that will teach students the software employers use.
You have a good point. Most people can't afford to regularly upgrade their MS OS software. Case in point, two jobs ago I was working for a company where we used Windows 95. We never bothered to upgrade because it was expensive and we managed with what we had. Fast forward a few years to where we purchased new hardware that came pre-loaded with XP.
,everything looked and felt different. My boss (who was barely computer literate) eventually changed back to 95 because she just could not cope with XP.
From 95 to XP - it was like using a whole new kind of OS
IMHO using Windows does not teach you to think and to figure things out for yourself. You learn what and where to click but not why so when something is different, something is changed you're a little screwed.
"I'm going to worry like hell and that's not an easy job, believe me" - Lu-Tze "Thief of Time"