Slashdot Mirror
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."
Erm, we *do* have nuclear weapons.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
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....
In a related story, an agency of Her Majesty's Government advised against poking a sharp stick into one's eye.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
Is that like...DRM?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
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.
> Erm, we *do* have nuclear weapons.
...sorry, this kind of turned into a rant about my Virgin Media cable TV service. Carry on.
Yes, but they're British nuclear weapons. Before you could launch them, therefore, someone would have to come out and knock on the silo door to say that the power cables were never actually connected during installation, so they need to dig up the street to connect them--but first they have to get permission from the city council, which takes three weeks, and then six weeks later after the work's finally done, your actual launch technician is a toothless yob named Nigel with an Exeter City FC tattoo, who promptly says "Well, it's a nuclear warhead, innit? More than my job's worth, pushing that button." He then re-disconnects your power cables and fucks off for another six weeks while you call the same number over and over again trying to get someone else to come out, but only reaching "Kenneth" in Mumbai....
They want their excuse back.
No, really. I'm tired of answering your fucking phone.
Perhaps you might have been "insightful" two years ago, but Linux (and FOSS in general) is much more accepted and deployed in real-life situations these days. Nowadays, especially with Vista, people are serious when they talk about switching to Linux. It's no longer a negotiation tactic. It's *fact*. It's honest.
I've helped with Linux migrations for businesses that didn't even know Linux existed two years ago. Believe me, people are *tired* of taking it up the ass from Microsoft.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I do not deny for one minute that there are a minority of specialised MS Office users who write macros and VB programs for which OpenOffice would not be suitable - but for the majority of MS Office users that do use only about 10% of its features, OO is a perfectly good substitute.
And dare I mention one important fact. I work in the IT industry and have a large group of friends who also (mostly) work in high tech industry. All of them have MS Office on their home PCs but not one of them has actually paid for it - they've either borrowed a corporate license from their workplace or use cracks of the Internet. In my experience, when these people compare MS Office to OpenOffice, they forget that MS Office should probably have cost them a couple of hundred dollars/pounds/euros whereas OO is entirely free. If they were forced to pay for their copies of MS office, they would be a lot more inclined to at least give OO a try.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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
No, it's more like WMDRM.