A School District's Education in Free Software

david.jonathan.russe writes "The school district in Kamloops, BC, Canada has been working on a linux-based terminal infrastructure for several years. They now have a system in place district wide and they can not keep up with all of the requests for info. They have a great hybrid system, using diskless workstations all booting from local servers. 'The second-generation system cost the Kamloops district about $47,000 to implement, as well as the cost of training and the release time for personal study and taking exams. However, Ferrie has no doubt of the savings overall. License costs are disappearing as the district phases out its Novell NetWare licenses, and the district no longer needs to purchase productivity software. Ferrie also figures that the increased reliability represents a substantial savings, although he admits that it is hard to quantify. However, perhaps the greatest benefit of switching to free software is that the reliability of the new system frees up technical staff to do more than routine support.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge.

Comments

And all the cost savings are eaten up by

[einhverfr]

the IT staff having to process all the requests for info from other school districts ;-).

Actually, congrats to them. In areas where you have competent IT staff and are willing to do the work yourself, Linux offers great cost savings *and* the ability to have a system tailored exactly to your needs. Other places, it just offers the latter.

Schools can switch easily

[Opportunist]

All the problems that companies have with OSS, like having to train their supporters and techs, or a fear of loss of productivity due to unknown software, don't apply for schools. They usually have a fair lot of clued students at their hands who would gladly offer support in exchange for additional credit or at least other services the school can provide (like net access and so on), and the loss of productivity is, if it applies at all, on the head of the student, not the school.

good,

[joe 155]

I was pleased to read about how they handled staffing issues, with help and support for the people to retrain and time off to train in their own time and to get good qualifications. That's just good management. Bringing people to open source software will probably need initiatives like this to reassure people that the skills that they have won't now be wasted...

Good effort by them.

Re:But...

[Bert64]

We used wordperfect in school, now that i have left school i find that noone uses wordperfect in the workplace.
Those who learn word in school today will probably be using something totally different by the time they enter the workplace anyway.
Atleast for them, whatever they end up using will almost certainly be an improvement, to someone taught on wordperfect word is a huge step down.

Re:Dickless again?

[Rakishi]

fail to reboot most of the machines after a power outage Wouldn't someone pressing the power button fix this right up?

require unnecessary amount of effort to make an extra application available to a particular user... It's a school they don't want suers to install apps,if they did they'd have kids failing out for skipping classes to play games in the library while making it impossible for library systems to be used for actual work (yes this happened in my HS). Then there is all the fan wanna-be hackers that'd be putting trojans on the systems.

And still control freaks everywhere are pushing for an architecture that inhibits user creativity, User creativity in schools by students generally means figuring out how to break the school network, repeatably. I think the only thing that wasn't compromised at my HS was the grade system and the main admin's password. The later was was mostly since no one cared enough to get it (it'd be quite possible to fake a problem, get someone with the pass to need to log in locally while modifying the keyboard to have a hardware keylogger). The former was rumored to be very difficult to break into and the punishment for trying was a suspension, no one card enough to risk it. Oh and the students weren't above dissembling school computers in semi-public areas (mostly to bypass hardware security devices), one library desktop lost a cpu and the server room got raided as well.

What does apply...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Microsoft and Apple, among others, are willing to give stuff to schools. With Linux, the software may be free, but you probably have to buy your own hardware.

It's true, it may be cheaper in the long run, if you're not a highly technical school -- meaning, you don't have to upgrade your hardware very often. But even then, many schools prefer to take the first hit free, and then be stuck with the recurring licencing fees.

Personally, though, schools are the first places I'd want to start on free software, as unlikely as it is. That way, when they graduate, they'll be ready to move their workplace over -- or at least be easily trainable for anything -- and if they go on to be programmers, they'll be more likely to fix the free tools than to buy the commercial ones.

Contrast that to the way it is now, where you only use the proprietary stuff because it's free in school and easy to pirate at home, so when you get to work, you insist that the company buy you the same tools, and the company figures it's cheaper than retraining you.

Re:Thin Clients at School

[Ant P.]

Easy answer.

Every second Tuesday of the month, walk by the IT office and remind them what day it is with a snide remark of your own.

Children learning products instead of concepts?

[kungfoolery]

Here was the most tragic line in the piece for me

secondary schools in British Columbia are supposed to teach skills rather than specific software, in practice, many teachers had developed courses that specified particular pieces of software. "You get a teacher who's been around 20-30 years, and they're not that keen on developing their course again," Ferrie says in wry hindsight. Also, many schools had already paid for textbooks that referred to specific proprietary software.

The teacher is absolutely right in this assertion: students should be learning about concepts and ideas - not only about examples and instances. It's fine if an algebra student can derive the quadratic formula from rote memorization; but it is far more important that she develops the skills to think critically on how to attack this problem on her own.

In the best computer science programs and programming books; you walk away with a deeper understanding of the science behind the code. Learning should be focused on cultivating concepts and ideas that can be applied to a broad range of implementations; not churning out specifically Java or C# developers. Similarly, children should learn about core computer concepts and ideas - not on how to create flashing text in Microsoft Word.

Re:Congratulations to them, but...

[TrancePhreak]

My experience with Windows is that it is sloppily coded, and lots of things cause Windows to need maintenance. For example, the CPU hogging bug in Firefox, which seems to be worse in Firefox version 2.0.0.4, sometimes causes Windows XP Professional SP2 to become unstable and require re-starting the computer. When Firefox hogs the CPU under Linux, it is only necessary to kill Firefox. Linux remains stable.

Or you could say, just kill the process in Windows.

A side benefit of Linux is that it is much more secure, partly because of its design, and partly because students are less likely to know how to tinker with it, I was told.

The whole point of computers in schools is to familiarise students with them. There's always going to be at least one uber-geek able to take down the whole network with a flick of the wrist. Anecdotal evidence does not setup your computer to be the most secure platform.

Another problem with a Windows system is hiring people who are willing to work with products from a company such as Microsoft that is so abusive. It's tiring to work with abusiveness.

I'm sure it's hard to hire from all those millions of certified people.

Re:But...

[JohnBailey]

So instead of teaching applications, teach concepts. There is no profound difference in using Windows and associated apps and using Linux and the alternatives until you start doing the admin stuff. Outside any computer tech classes, that isn't even a consideration. These are school kids not IT admins. You still click on a menu or an icon to open a program, you still need to use a menu or a button to save a document. And last time I checked, Open Office didn't require you to convert everything to hex and back to decimal to do any calculations, Same old formulas in cells stuff as Excel.

I agree, a monoculture is bad.. So how are you proposing that it changes? Teaching kids that the only way to use a computer is with Microsoft products just maintains the current state. Teaching them to use different systems can only be an advantage. If nothing else, it will give the kids a chance to see a different system in use. At worst, it will require them to do a little more study to get up to speed with Office.

Re:But...

[CheeseTroll]

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Are we sending our kids to secretarial school, or are we teaching them to think? I used AppleWorks to type papers in high school, and wrote them out in cursive before that. Who the heck writes in cursive anymore (except grandparents and elementary schoolkids)? But amazingly enough, I have *somehow* managed to get jobs and be a productive member of society.