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The Argument For F/OSS In Schools
pfaffman sends us word of a two-part article in LinuxInsider that lays out to an audience of non-tech educators a cogent argument for using F/OSS in schools. The piece was written by a University of Tennessee professor for the education journal TechTrends. It makes the case that proprietary software is inconvenient and that when schools choose to use proprietary products they spend their constituents' money. The article won't contain a whole lot of surprises for Linux initiates (save perhaps some software recommendations for educational use), but it's interesting to see these ideas presented so clearly to a wider, and influential, audience."
If the students are using F/OSS throughout the K-12 years, some of the students will go on to college to study programming.
What better projects for them than enhancing / bug-fixes for the software they've been using for so long?
In essence, the educational system ends up teaching students to write software for the educational system. So it just keeps evolving and improving.
It makes the case that proprietary software is inconvenient and that when schools choose to use proprietary products they spend their constituents' money.
There are so many reasons to prefer F/OSS (and yes, lack of up front licensing costs is really nice). However, this is the worst "benefit" to pitch. In reality, the software will very likely require the same amount of support as other software (which many times Adobe or MS will give gratis or close to gratis). In any case, sysadmins and tech support people cost more than software (unless your software is built by Lockheed to NASA safety specs or you are using custom production and manufacturing control software).
Some better arguments include: freedom to roll out additional seats without tracking licenses; freedom support something yourself if that is better for your organization than upgrading (upgrades often being forced by proprietary vendors); the money spent stays in the local economy instead of going off to some software company's home state/county/whatever; heck, even altruism.
The point is that even F/OSS requires that "they spend their constituents' money."
For those who do not already know it, Microsoft has settled its anti-trust case in California, resulting in a settlement fund that allows every school district in California to get a set dollar allotment per student per school district. This website has all the deets:
http://www.edtechk12vp.com
So if you have been wanting more FOSS in your school district, but haven't had the budget, step right up!
The article was well written and does make an excellent case for using F/OSS. I kind of consider it a pain factor. In my most recent project of phasing out a small special ed school's Win2K SBS Active Directory server, pain was the motivation. We were lucky to have reliable uptime. I went to diskless freebsd workstations running GNOME, FireFox, and Evolution. Teachers were amazed that F/OSS was so good. After using the system for only a few weeks teachers and students raved about the system. Since december, we have had only 8 hours of downtime due to total power failure. Plus, I could get students input into customizing the system with snappy login screens and desktops. You can do this with Microsoft, but it is *unsupported* and *discouraged* We can provide a high degree of customization of look, feel, and security.
I work part time as a school teacher Saturday mornings. We have old Celeron 800 Mhz computers with 128 megs of RAM, an nVidia TNT 2 16 meg VRAM that just barely manage to run Windows XP Pro SP2. Weak frackin' hardware, I know. So I burned several copies of Ubuntu 7.04 hoping I could demonstrate that version of Linux to the students, and after the initial menu selection, all the machines (the hardware is identical) got to where the X Server is coming up with the tan color, and then nothing else happened. What is supposed to happen is the two desktop icons show up for installing, but it never got that far.
This doesn't affect my favorable Linux view, but this is the first time I have tried a Linux distro on old hardware and it just wouldn't work. I works fine on my Dell Insprion 8200 laptop though. I would have expected Mandriva to do this, but not Ubuntu.
Just because you get modded "insightful" on Slashdot doesn't mean you actually are in real life.
Yep, they're probably not that good when they first start.
But remember that F/OSS is developed in the open. They'll have some of the best minds critiquing their patches. And they'll be able to see how a project evolves, in real time.
That kind of interaction with skilled programmers on an evolving project just can't be had at most colleges.
But they'll get it just because their school system was smart enough to invest in F/OSS for their students.
I'm not sure to mod or reply...guess by the time you read this I've chosen.
I'm not certain that really good linux admins are more or less expensive than really good windows admins. The key for schools is that - given 20 or 30 adults in one building - someone on staff probably knows enough to load windows and do very basic OS maintenance. They can't do it well, and they're likely to screw something up, but they are "free" in teh sense that you don't have to pay them extra to do that work. The chance of having one of those same adults even know what Linux is is depressingly small, and to be confronted with something that doesn't look _exactly_ like their box at home is truly frightening to them.
Although I'd like to say that F/OSS software is "vendor neutral" or "corporate neutral", I think another poster was onto somehting bigger - freedom from licensing accounting. Shools have as much budget for mundane IT tasks as they have for the hardcore ones - none. I'm sure there are enough applications to satisfy most needs on either side of the fence, but the installed base of training is high enough for the corporate software that it would take real effort to switch people over. And as anyone in a school system is aware, teachers are some of the most stubborn, change-averse creatures in the universe.
It is my general opinion that for F/OSS to take over the schools, it will take an effort equivalent to the corporate "free dime-bags" that is academic software pricing. In this case, it will need to be local volunteers providing the service side of the equation for free. For MS et. al., low cost software and free/low-cost installed-base support can only be countered by F/OSS software and _reliable, long term_ donated support. Until that is a reality on a large scale, corps will always win.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
As a happy employee of a broke private school most of the 'must have' edu-apps I've tried (Mavis Beacon, Accel. Reader, some crufty legacy apps) work just fine in WINE, so thats a several grand site license for Windows that wasn't spent. And you wouldn't believe how easy it is to train teachers to use linux boxes:
The ones that even noticed a difference all complimented me on how much more quickly the computers ran. Re-training is easy when there is little to no knowledge to 'unlearn.'
Now the few teething problems got noticed, but since I had them all dloading updates automagickally with cron, it was easy to propagate fixes.
Now if your school has a cargo-cult mentality to teaching computers, I can see how you would have a problem.
Behold! Uh, what was I going to say?
I have to disagree with most of your post. It's not that people are too stupid, or that they would find things "significantly difficult" to try something else. Actually, they simply REFUSE to try something else. I, for one, find OpenOffice Writer and MS Word 2003 to be extremely similar. Take your example about footnotes, um, for example. A teacher wanted me to add footnotes, and I said it was too difficult...I would rather do endnotes because footnotes get shifted off the page if I add a line of text. The teacher then explained that I should click "Insert > Citation > Footnote" or something like that in Word. Well, I don't have word, so at first I thought that I was screwed. I figured I would try anyway. Turns out it's easier or just as easy in Writer: "Insert > Footnote." If people would simply TRY, we wouldn't have this kind of problem.
Having said that, I just finished a course on Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Expression Web, and Access 2007. I officially LOVE the ribbon, and I can't wait until (hopefully) OpenOffice implements this feature. It is SO much more logical! I wish I had it in front of me now to give examples. Basically, everything is on a ribbon at the top. I find that much more convenient than having to dig through umpteen menus and submenues, then dig through 12 tabs in a dialog box, then if it's not there I'd have to dig through the menus again. No...the MS Ribbon wins this round.
The major problem I had with that course, though, was the book. Most of what we learned was done by simply reading the book and never having to look up at the screen. I never really knew what I was doing (especially in Access) because it didn't really matter, so long as it compared properly to the picture in the book. Still, if people know how to use one word processor, they can use any of them, given some time.