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Britain Advises Against Vista, Office 2007 for Schools
An anonymous reader writes "The British government's educational IT authority has issued a report advising schools in the country not to upgrade their classroom or office systems to Windows Vista or Office 2007. According to this InformationWeek story, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency says costs for Vista and Office 2007 'are significant and the benefits remain unclear.' Instead, Becta is advising British schools to take a long look at Linux and open source suites like OpenOffice.org."
The head of IT at my sons school (here in the UK) recently told me of their irritation at being told they had to use Microsoft only software for their network and teaching. The result was a network that was a nightmare to keep secure (you try and keeping hundreds of enthusiastic kids from finding ways round microsoft security), and poor quality teaching tools. Had he had his way there would be a linux sever running the network and email, XP classroom machines (not linux just yet), openoffice, and python in the programming classes.
As it is they have windows server, Exchange, MSoffice, Dreamweaver (after a successful revolt against frontpage), and VB.
I've started teaching my kid myself....
BTW here is the report in glorious PDF:
http://learningandskills.becta.org.uk/download.cfm?resID=35275
My little Linux and tech blog
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-7210652,00.html
"Becta is advising British schools to take a long look at Linux and open source suites like OpenOffice.org." I'm sure they will take a look at Linux and promptly forget about it as soon as they realize that they would have to fire their existing Windows-only IT staff and/or hire new staff to support it. After that they will take a long look at their agreement with Microsoft and realize that just ditching MS Office will not help either since their current volume license agreement is a package that includes Office too.
In order to *really* save money you have to go for the full monty and almost completely ditch all Microsoft products, which requires a talented IT staff. My experience with K-12 Education IT is that most IT staffs in this category can't make this work.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Not to mention, and sorry for taking this further off-topic, deep-fried mars bars and deep-fried pizzas. Us Scots know how make scary food. My personal favourite, from a recent visit to Edinburgh, vegetarian haggis samosas (from a baked potato shop at the top of Cockburn St, if anyone is curious).
Thor, the very first US ballistic missile system, was deployed between 1959 and 1963 from bases in the UK. These were the days before intercontinental ballistic missiles. The missiles were controlled by the UK but the warheads were controlled by the US. A dual-key system was in place that required both UK and US authorisation to launch.
However, the situation has changed since the 1960s. The UK still leans heavily on the US for its nuclear capability, and today it uses Trident missiles which are shared with the USA in a common pool. However, the warheads on British subs are designed and built in the UK, and the UK has the ability to use its nuclear weapons completely independently of the US. The USA has not always been completely comfortable with that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Trident_system http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/E2054A40-7833-48EF-991C-7F48E05B2C9D/0/nuclear190705.pdf
At least in the United States, computer training in schools is already lacking. More and more students lack general or even useful knowledge of using business software. With many businesses already using Microsoft Office products (Maybe not 2007), wouldn't it be in the best interest for everyone to teach kids what the working environment actually uses? Sure OpenOffice and Linux is used, but 90% of OEM machines use Windows and Office. About the same percentage of businesses use the same. The cost of upgrading computer systems may not be cheap, but logic would dictate that you upgrade every 3-5 years. How ever popular Linux and OpenOffice may be, the schools shouldn't be dictating "standards" for computer software. School is supposed to prepare students for life and work, and until Linux or OpenOffice become the majority operating system or office program, I can't see it being worth the school's time to retrain and waste time switching. For example, the state government I work for uses Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, Windows XP and Office 2003/7. If the local schools switched to Linux and OpenOffice, the time spent training students on OpenOffice and Linux to get jobs with the state, which provides 70% of the jobs in our state, the four years spent doing business computer classes would be almost wasteful.
The site's in French, but FF numbers are the lower in the UK than anywhere else in Europe -- and according to this report, it actually shrunk this fall. (Search for "Royaume-Uni" for the UK's numbers).
Last time I checked, IE's still number one in the UK, and its share seems to be growing. Anyone know why?
And yeah, I know FF isn't Linux or OO -- but its IS free, and it IS open source. And IMHO, its MUCH more accessible for the laypeople than Linux or OO.
Now, if we could only be more like the Aussies . . . .
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed." -- Mahatma Gandhi
Hardly.
Some people add spices, but this is peasant food so that's just wrong. In any case it's unnecessary; haggis is delicious.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
OK, time to piss on everyone's parade.
Sorry to spoil the party but what BECTA say counts for bugger all as they have no power beyond recommendation.
I, am the admin of a UK school that has been running Linux on all of our servers for the last three years. It's brilliant! Uptimes are long, hacking is minimal and we save a bloody fortune in licences. Centos backend running LDAP,DHCP,DNS, Mandriva boxes for Samba and Zimbra (Open Source version) running on our mail server. The desktops (much to my despair) are still running XP but the curriculum software our teachers use won't run via WINE. The IT club however is going to be running Ubuntu or Fedora 8 so at least some will get the point but I digress from the point that I wish to make which is "Building Schools for the Future" or "Fucking-up Schools for the Future" as it's often to referred to by those of us that the council claim have been fully consulted when in fact we haven't heard a word.
Building Schools for the Future (BSF) is the governments plan to scratch build new school buildings for every school in the UK. Sounds great doesn't it but what they don't mention is that the building of these schools is a PFI (Private Finance Initiative) project that will lead to these schools; a) costing more long term than keeping them public and b) being run by private companies with the tax payer footing the bill (and the CEO's bonus).
On an ICT front, computing services will be tendered out to private companies along the lines of Capita and RM. Let's play spot the Linux oriented company in this lot shall we? Oh right, they're aren't any and that probably explains why leading edge BSF schools aren't running Linux. Whole counties are run on SIMS (School Information Management System) and it doesn't run MySQL or Postgres as the backend (Take a guess). The collection of data from schools will also be centralised to the governments education department which will require compatible software and all this is happening now.
And here folks is the problem. BECTA have been spouting on about Linux for years now and you will be hard pressed to find anything except Windows in schools because once you get to a certain level of decision maker no-one cares as it's just a few extra zeros on the end of number that's already very large. Part of this is probably down to the fact that no-one actually seems to know how much BSF is going to cost even though they are trying to sign service companies up to it. You can probably throw whatever figure you want at it and it will get paid because, like the Olympics, it's a Government prestige project that the tax-payer will underwrite. Obviously, if Linux did look too promising, educational XP licences would be extended and discounted to ensure that whatever converting cost, it would be more than the status quo.
I'll believe Linux in schools when, and only when I see it. Until then it's a fairy tale.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
Yep