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UK Schools At Risk of Microsoft Lock-In
Robert writes "UK schools and colleges that have signed up to Microsoft Corp's academic licensing programs face the significant potential of being locked in to the company's software, according to an interim review by Becta, the UK government agency responsible for technology in education. The report also states that most establishments surveyed do not believe that Microsoft's licensing agreements provide value for money." In a separate report, Becta offered the opinion that schools should avoid Vista for at least another year, since neither Vista nor Office 2007 offers any compelling reasons for schools to upgrade.
ALL schools, or in fact anyone who signs an über-licensing agreement with MS are at risk for "lock in", especially if you define "lock in" as being "we spent all our money on products from company X, so we have none left to buy products from company Y".
How is this even news? What's next, if you spend a dollar today, you don't have a dollar tomorrow?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Hooray!
Common sense arrives at last. It's only taken more than a decade! Now, could we possibly do something about the actual REAL problem, being the Research Machines monopoly over just about every government contract to do with schools and the majority of the school market in the UK despite their poor support, substandard hardware, astronomical pricing and hard-sales tactics and MS-only policies that thus reinforce the MS monopoly?
(If you didn't already guess, I work in schools within the UK).
We used to be much more unix-centric, but there is now a very heavy windows bias. The admin staff (as in beancounters, not root) have too much control over computer policy. They assume that all we need to run is MS office and a access a couple of university databases of student IDs and cost codes. They don't understand why some of us want to run strange packages they've never heard of. It's getting harder to run Linux/Solaris/whatever. There is currently no official access to university email without Windows (although there are hacks to make it work). Remote administration of Windows machines is being introduced. It's sad. Unix admins cost more. Universities don't have much cash/don't pay well. Cheap admins don't understand/want unix. We get more Windows.
It's an issue because instead of teaching a set of tools for general ICT use, you'd be teaching how to use specific instances of Microsoft software. In general, we attempt to teach a range of skills which are applicable to all systems - the general computing ideas that enable slashdot-types to sit down with Mac, Linux or Windows and have at least a general idea of how to do something. Often, the best teaching platform isn't Windows. Sadly, it's what we usually have.
ICT teaching is more than learning how to use Microsoft Office. It's about modelling, problem solving, that kind of stuff. Done correctly, using Office isn't a problem, and neither is using Open Office, Textease, Tizzy's First Tools or any of the other myriad software programs UK schools make use of on a daily basis.
That's exactly what I think. The time for the Windows era to come to an end is nigh.
The only remaining question is will Windows' successor be Mac OS X or Linux, or will we (finally) evolve to the point that the choice of platform no longer matters.
I'm betting on the latter, myself.
My blog
As the parent of 3 children in the Scottish school system (which is substantially different from the system in England and Wales) I can confirm that M$ has a strangle hold on education in my country. A couple of years ago I sent a detailed letter expressing my concerns to the local director of education. After some time I received a considered response saying that M$ is the only game in town and that alternatives are irrelevant at best. Some of the phrasing in this letter I recognised from previous /. stories concerning M$ FUD, I suspect that the director of education contacted her IT dept. who in turn contacted their software vendor (M$) seeking reasons to justify the status quo.
Personally I blame the IT staff who tend to be very M$ centric and in the business for the perceived financial rewards rather than the love of IT itself. They will never recommend the use of something they don't understand as they will have to retrain and/or find themselves looking for another job. Windows as we know it is on the way out, in a decade or so it will no longer have a monopoly on the desktop or anywhere else.
It is my belief that teaching 'The Windows way' is harmful to my children's education, they would be much better served by learning software that conforms to true standards and that fosters a real understanding of the principles involved in IT rather than simple button clicking. I run Linux exclusively at home (I've been Windows free since ME), my daughters both understand IT well and rarely have to come to me for help with their web pages or anything else. They have both avoided studying IT subjects at school as they view the IT syllabus as 'A joke', their words, not mine.
Dead on. I was just going to say the same thing, but you beat me to it.
:)). When she was at my place and needed to check something on the internet, she just sat down and did it. She didn't even think about the fact that this wasn't familiar until she had already fired up Firefox. She knew nothing about Linux prior to this, but when you sit down at the screen and you see "Applications" menu, and under that menu, there's an "Internet" menu, and in that menu, there's a web browser that you know and love from Windows (Firefox), there is nothing really to think about. The transition to OpenOffice was seemless as well. She uses it full time, yet I have never given her any kind of training in it. It's all there, it's just a matter of finding out where, and that only takes about 2 seconds of your time.
I'd like to add, though, that far too often, those who were given specific training in something like MS Office, are completely lost when they are introduced to anything else. For example, Lotus Notes vs. MS Outlook. On job postings for a lot of administrative type jobs, you see "Must be proficient in " An applicant who was tought specifically how to do Outlook, will not even apply to a job that asks for Lotus. The idea that they are both just basically the same thing doesn't really stick. The same goes for any other piece of software. Operating systems are a good example, because I have observed the use of all 3 by n00bs. It's mostly a fear factor than anything really. I use Linux, the girlfriend used Windows (not anymore
The bean counters only reinforce the fear factor. They reason that we must teach our kids on the same thing they will be using in the "real world." Unfortunately, you are only creating a robot, who is programmed to do one thing and cannot think and learn for itself.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
Lock-in is the inevitable result of a monopoly. And I am not talking about Microsoft's monopoly either, although that is part of it.
When you have a vast, overwelming quasi-nationalized top-down educational beurocracy, with and almost total monopoly of education - the inevitable result is exploitive locked-in contracts with huge companies like Microsoft. Instead of Microsoft having to win over tens of thousands of individual schools, Microsoft only has to win over a few people at the top of the beurocracy. Bribing and misleading tens of thousands of IT people, all across the country would be prohibitivly difficult and expensive, where as bribing and misleading a few high officials costs virtually nothing when you are talking the huge potential profits.
Big government contracts, and big government policies, are naturally prone to extreme amounts of corruption and exploitation, because the stakes are so high and because authority are so centralized. You have to fight Microsoft on the level of the federal government, which is going to be impossible for your average parent. An average parent can walk over and talk to the head IT guy at the local school, or make an appoitment with the local municipal superintendant or mayor - But the average person can't fly off to meet with the head of the Ministry of Education, or the Prime Minister.
Don't blame Microsoft for this problem - they are simply exploiting the natural flaws in the educational leviatian. If they were gone, another company would simply find another way to exploit the system.
1) We need a way to pressure the school board into buying about 500 new PCs....
2) We tested a number of our aging and poorly-written edutainment titles on RC2, and most of them didn't work....
In technical circles, this approach is known as 'New Bugs For Old', wherein you trade a host of new (but unknown) problems for a heap of old and all-too-familiar problems. The beauty of this approach is that no one can fault the logic of the switch until after the deployment is under way and the new problems begin to emerge. It has been effective for as long as humanity has had a weakness for shiny new things.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go. I'm trying to pre-purchase my new iPhone. 8^)
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.