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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."
This was not done in a vacuum but because of hard work. Well done to the Open Rights Group, UKUUG, Dr John Pugh MP, FSFE, the LUGs and everyone else who has been trying to get Becta and the government to know that there are alternatives to Microsoft.
My little Linux and tech blog
The interesting thing is the timing.
Every single technology-aware teacher in Britain is at the BETT show at the moment - the trade fair for the educational IT industry. And the Eee PC is the star of the show. Rebadged it may be under various resellers' names, but it's the same old Linux-based Eee PC, complete with OpenOffice and - more significantly - 802.11g and Firefox, ready to access any number of educational webapps. Of course, it doesn't hurt that in a time of reduced Government spending, the Eee is also ridiculously cheap.
So along comes Becta and says "actually, you should look at free alternatives to Windows/Office". When they said that three years ago, everyone went "uh-huh" and carried on buying what they'd always bought. This time, there's an alternative. This is the first serious challenge to Microsoft in UK schools since the demise of the Acorn Archimedes.
The UK Newspaper the Guardian says more than a million kids in the UK don't have access to a computer at home.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-7210652,00.html/
The supported use of FOSS software could make a radical difference. Recycled hardware running free operating systems and applications could reduce the cost of student PCs to almost zero, and truly put computing within the reach of every child.
I have several computers at home that my children use for school-related activities. TOTAL cost of each (hardware, OS, office suite, image manipulation) is that of the monitor. These boxes are absolutely fit for purpose, and would otherwise be landfill.
My children regard computing at home as a commodity, which funnily enough, it is, if you step outside the wierd monopolistic force-bubble that is our educational computing practice.
The only excuse for the situation in our schools, the only reasoning that could possibly hold water, is 'They should use what they'll use at work'. This is short, snappy, and is accepted easily by those only peripherally involved in the question. I don't think it bears examination though. Some thoughts:
A trite one:
I don't believe any otherwise suitable candidate has ever been passed over because they were trained on the wrong spreadsheet, but if they were they should count themselves lucky to have escaped. They are more likely to be passed over if they didn't do well on the coursework because their parents couldn't afford to give them access to a PC.
A less trite one:
Office 2007's new UI, if it achieves the any sort of foothold on corporate desktops, will render all experience of word processing at schools until now totally obsolete. Or will it? No of course not - conversion courses will help the latest intake drive the latest software.
If this change can be handled between versions of the same product, then exactly the same case can be made for conversion between products. So (for example):
Train on OpenOffice (or other product if it's free at least for educational and domestic use, and runs on a free operating system.) With the money you save on buying no Microsoft Office or Windows licences build and deploy short conversion courses for people about to leave school, getting them up to speed on the current commercial favourites. This would spit out kids with more up-to-date experience of the commercial softwarescape than the current policy.
The benefits of this approach come from breaking the lock-in: commoditisation spreading children's access to computing in a way that otherwise only massive subsidy could (fail to) achieve; our children, their teachers and parents able to take advantage of the freely-given, high-quality work of a global community, while ending their education better trained on the latest commercial tools than they are today.
From the report, only 20% of computers in the schools are even capable of running Vista and Office.
My 7 year old Son's school (West Sussex, UK) approached me for advice on replacing a very ageing Windows server that was hosting all the students' work. The school manages their IT budget independently of County Hall and so can make their own choices for equipment, software and suppliers. The school did have a quote from the UK's top supplier of computer equipment to schools (RM), but with the quoted cost to supply and install being several thousand pounds (yeah, for one server for a primary school!), the school felt they needed a second opinion.
To cut a long story short, the school now has a custom-built server running Linux (CentOS 5) with RAID 1 mirrored drives in trayless caddies AND a spare 'cold swap' chassis that the school computer technician can use if the main server dies (which can then be repaired at leisure). Total cost was around £500
So there is hope.
AT&ROFLMAO
I'm an ICT teacher in the UK and I totally agree. We are trying to teach skills and not packages. But it is more than that, you can;t teach kids everything in school and being able to access the skills and tools that you implement in school at home is essential to complement what they are learning in school. After two years of quite severe debate, our school now uses several OSS packages and the kids are given copies of the OpenEducationDisc. Teachers and students can't believe it is free. I now have kids making music, 2D and 3D graphics and actually able to complete written assignments at home as they have something to write with and open word docs with (OOo). For me propriety formats do not have a foot to stand on when you take the home situation into hand.
"all through my house i set up traps, it seems like the rats have a map, so now i feed the rats crack" - Donald D
Let's see: the demise of HD-DVD was a blow. Then the fact that MS is associated with those trying to undermine a charity (OLPC) will certainly not generate a whole lot of good will. Then this little chink in the armor, in the british schools. And then there was that class action lawsuit against Microsoft because of the Xbox Live network downtimes. A year that barely started, and already generated all this sh*t for MS!
However will this year continue, for MS? I hear that a lot of disillusioned users of Vista just decided to get macs. A little number, perhaps, but still an erosion of Microsoft marketshare. And then there's Firefox that's increasing its marketshare every month a little bit.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I know the parent poster is joking, but often you find Microsoft equals US economy. Microsoft is actually not even a US company anymore, as they launder their money in Ireland or wherever to pay less US tax.
I would like to point out that Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Novell, FSF, Linux Foundation are all based in the US. So good for US.
My little Linux and tech blog
I wholeheartedly agree. We need to stop touting OO as a good substitute for Office.
Office isn't very good, and for OOo to do *worse* than it is a pretty miserable achievement. We need to get some fresh faces involved with the project to either clean things up (a la Firefox), or start from scratch to build an application that's got an overall "friendlier" appearance.
"Lack of features" isn't even the biggest issue here. Despite being much "simpler", I find AbiWord to be vastly superior to OOo, even though its featureset is comparatively limited.
The GIMP has been stumbling along for years upon years, and has never really managed to reach a state of usefulness to designers. However, in a very short period of time, two guys wrote an f---ing amazing shareware "Photoshop substitute" for Mac OS. Granted, it's not photoshop, but unlike The GIMP, or OOo, it's fast, has a good UI, and even though it lacks some of Photoshop's more advanced features, it's more than adequate for my needs.
It's not open-source or cross-platform, but seriously..... two guys wrote it in their spare time!
I'll also ignore that comment about teaching primary schoolers LaTeX. I'm a reasonably savvy university student, and I find LaTeX absolutely unusable. It's got to be one of the most difficult and convoluted pieces of software in widespread use. It's great in concept, but make one tiny syntax error, and the compiler blows up with a 2-page long indecipherable error message. Most C compliers have better error handling.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
That's what I do routinely for relatives ; want a word processor ? Sure, here is my OO.o CD, I'll install it no problem, my pleasure. Oh, you meant MS Office ? I can install it for sure, but you hand me the money first so I can go and buy the boxed version. Find a WHAT ? Nope, sorry, no way, I'm not breaking laws for you. OO.o will do ? Fine, let's go.
So far, all the persons I equiped with OO.o have stuck with it. None have reverted to MS-Office. Maybe they resent me, but that's a proof that they didn't really needed the real thing. And if you ask me, most weren't even needing a full Office suite in the first place. But somehow after a while they grow accustomed to OO.o and wouldn't change for fear of losing documents. And they really get quickly the 'export to PDF' because they're sure that all their contacts will at least read what they typed, with no final-line-jumping-on-a-new-page-depending-on-the-default-printer-driver-choice quirk.
I'd be very interested to hear people's thoughts on this because I'm guessing it will bring out all sorts of interesting suggestions for improvements that have never occurred me.
A-Bomb
The ribbon just reminded me of the toolbar in iWorks. Maybe it's the organization, or the simplicity or the layout. There's just something to it that seems reminiscent of iWorks.
Really, I should've mentioned Adobe's recent products, which are more of a direct rip-off than the iWorks stuff. I guess I'm just more sensitized to iWorks since I've been using it (and been very impressed by it).
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
that is because microsoft's idea of 'word lite' (ie wordpad or works) seems to be 'can't be compatible with word'. i work for the it department in a school. i have to use ooo on my linux box to convert most of the 'non word' documents that kids bring in, because word stuffs them up so badly. ooo doesn't convert all of them perfectly, but 99% of the time it is much better than word's poor excuse for a conversion.
on a side note, the number of kids bringing in odf documents has been slowly but surely increasing. just something that i've been finding interesting.
porl
>> Sounds like they are negotiation with Microsoft for cheaper licenses
Yes, can we have 'obvious reaction' mod points.
This is as insightful as banging on about a Beowulf cluster.
It's a sensible report about real stuff.
Why should my kid get taught that computer == Microsoft? She uses openoffice, firefox etc at home and gets on fine for her work. Why should her school haemorrhage money at Vista when it is not necessary?
They've got better things to spend money on. Like teaching the teachers how to use Ubuntu
Down with categorical imperatives
I think the biggest disconnect with MS Word is what it's capable of compared to what it's good at. I constantly see people trying to make MS Word do things it doesn't do particularly well and getting frustrated in the process.
Credit where it's due: MS Word is a good word processing engine. You can type things, check your spelling (it's often right), check your grammar (it's often wrong), and print. These are good things that MS Word does well, as long as your document isn't too long.
MS Word is capable of tracking changes in a document so you can know who made what edits and when. This does not make it a document versioning system, yet that is often how I see it used. It's a nice feature for a writer or a small workgroup but entirely ineffective for a larger group or over a longer time. And it will bite you hard if you send documents externally in native MS Office formats without killing all the evidence of previous edits.
MS Word is capable of generating tables and embedding graphics or spreadsheet objects. It's just not very good at it. Between different users on different systems (or the same user on the same system) it seems to have its own mind about how things should be displayed. Anything embedded can change on a whim, and will change provided you open the document often enough. Which feeds right into the next point.
MS Word is capable of doing document layout. But it's a complete nightmare. Lines disappear and reappear; text boxes change size and shape for no apparent reason; fonts randomly switch from 10-pt sans to 12-pt serif because they feel like it; auto-numbering decides it knows better than you what numbers go where; and objects resize and replace themselves entirely according to their own rules (which are confidential and proprietary).
MS Word knows better than you what you want to do with it, and if you want to something else, well, you're obviously mistaken. It really makes me miss the days of WordPerfect 5. I appreciated and made good use of the fact that I could see the codes embedded in the text, could tell from the codes when something would be bold or italic and not have to worry about text randomly changing format later
Like most people that advocate OOo, you really have no idea how Office is used, do you?
You think people sit around writing macros for themselves? Maybe some, but every company i've worked for in the last 10 years has had (literally) hundreds, even thousands of documents on file servers with embedded macros for use by the entire company.
The Accounting departments are particularly notorious for this, as are Human resources. They have create macro embedded documents for vacation request forms, health care and insurance forms, Expense reports, travel requests, Yearly occupational reviews, etc...
One company I worked for had macro'd excel sheets for shipping and receiving, inventory, RMA and other processes.
You're absolutely right that there is a minority of specialized MS Office users who *WRITE* those macro's, but legions of everyday people use them. It's this kind of thinking that keeps OpenOffice where it is. "Oh, only 10% of people might use that, so we can ignore it". Ignore enough 10%'s and you don't have much left.
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Well, I can't comment on the state of the UK's school computers.... But I am 3/4 the way through a PC rollout for the coucil/local governement that I work for. We are now, more than ever a Microsoft shop, because our new Finance system and Document system are both MS SQL based. For desktops our new spec's are 3GB RAM on each PC - just to keep up with the new systems (won't get into how we were oversold on the products here!). I have had to write new doco for the new PC's as we are *JUST* moving to XP SP2, and Outlook 2003 - but still running Office 2000 for everything else. I have had a fair few comments about just moving from Outlook 2000 to Outlook 2003! Our software vendor has just informed us (unsurprisingly to me) that they are no longer supporting their platform on Office 2000. Got a spare $150K for Office upgrade? As far as Vista goes, we are on a total "wait and see" - as we have some serious legacy applications that still have to be supported before they can be migrated over to the new system. As far as the new "features" of Vista's Areo and Glass, it is lost on our environment, as most of our users are happy enough to log in, check email, browse the internet - but primarily launch the main Financial package and be done with it. We would still be on 2000 Pro, but that is no longer supported on the newer hardware - at least with our fleet of HP desktops, getting XP drivers is still an option.