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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?"
Afraid to upset MS? What have they got against saving money? Sounds like some people in education need to get their asses fired.
Tech Public Policy stuff
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.
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.
If it's reached the point where you are scared of upsetting your sole source for software you depend upon, that's a clear sign you need to GET OUT NOW!
- Always spend at least 5% more than your budget (so you'll get more next budget cycle).
- Never underspend your budget (or they'll trim your budget in the next budget cycle!)
- The department director with the biggest budget wins.
Nuff said.007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
Were's the vertical education apps, for all education levels?
You can start browsing here.
http://richtech.ca/seul/
One school I worked at in NSW had a network of Windows 98 boxes drowning in malware, to the extent that they were almost totally unusable -- it took literally five minutes after logging in before any program could be launched; crashes were hideously regular; Internet Explorer had shady toolbars, popups in Google and refused to open a link in a new window. Disturbed that students actually had to try and work on these computers, I told the network administrator that he should install some antispyware software and Mozilla Firefox.
As if the sorry state of the network wasn't disgusting enough, the administrator replied that he'd received a Department of Education directive which said he couldn't install any programs for which there was a Microsoft equivalent. That meant no Firefox.
So, in my experience, the impression that the article gives of our school system not forcing Microsoft to actually compete for its business is pretty much spot-on.
Sadly, kids need skills with Windows, specifically its office applicatons for jobs and the real world(tm) in general. I can't get hired by some places because I've refused to learn how to learn some MS products.
That's pretty much a myth since most schools don't teach kids how to use these apps except in the most rudimentary way. Granted, if you had no exposure to a word processor or a spreadsheet, that might keep you from being hired, but most kids coming out of school don't know anything but the minimal basics of those products. Otherwise, why would businesses spend so much money on training courses for employees?
Kids don't need skills in Windows or Microsoft products. They need skills in using word processors to put their ideas together in a coherent and esthetical fashion. They need to know how to use a spreadsheet to solve a problem, but first they need to know how to solve the problem, conceptually.
None of those things require a single Microsoft product. If it were the case that those skills don't transfer from one vendor's product to another, then we'd all still be using Wordstar and Visicalc.
A federal bureaucracy is, by defintion, among the slowest and most hide-bound of organizations. Remember, all bureaucracies run not on incentives (i.e., making a profit) but on constraints (i.e., following rules). These constraints lead to organizations that are manifestly inefficient compared with their private-sector counterparts. Absent signs from the marketplace that its methods aren't working, a government agency might persist in pursuing an unsuccessful strategy for years. As James Q. Wilson notes in his book Bureaucracy, "the Ford Motor Company should not have made the Edsel, but if the government had owned Ford it would still be making Edsels." Remember, America's federal government pursued a welfare program aimed at ending poverty a full decade after it was obvious that it was having exactly the opposite of the desired effect.
In America, this problem is somewhat ameliorated by the doctrine of Federalism, which incorporates the idea of subsidiarity, i.e. that government functions should devolve to the smallest unit of government which can carry them out. The federal government should not undertake something which can be handled by a state government. A state government should not undertake a function which can be handled by a county government, etc., all the way down to, in this case, a local school board. (Let us admit here that America's system of federalism has been steadily erroded for the last 70 years or so).
By centralizing their software buying decisions in their federal educational bureaucracy, Australia's education establishment persists in error when a smaller, more nimble organization would moved on to a more optimal solution, i.e. using software which isn't an expensive, kludgy, virus-and-security hole riddled piece of crap.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
As a school district employee I tell you why. Microsoft cuts us some sweet deals on our software. They make it worth our while to keep using them. Beside how do you think teachers would take it when I said "Sorry, but Accelerated Reader won't work on Linux" or "Whoops, SASI isn't supported without using wine. And you need Libs X, Y and Z to run it. Guess you'll have to do attendance the old fashioned way." Microsoft is best at ease of use and wide application support, I would have ten times the headaches moving to linux as I have running windows. Plus with Websense and a kick ass firewall we rarely fall victim to spyware and virii. So it's a non-issue.
Although we still have pentium ones around and it would be nice to move from windows 95 to Linux. But even though teachers may teach, I found they hate to be taught.
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.