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23,000 Linux PCs For Filipino Schools
Da Massive writes "Speaking at the linux.conf.au event in Melbourne, Australia, independent open source consultant Ricardo Gonzalez has told of how he has helped bring 23,000 Linux PCs to over 1000 schools in the Philippines: 'Ministers in the Filipino government now understand Linux can do so much for so little outlay.'" The slow process of educating a government that knew only Microsoft is especially well described in this piece.
The Philippines is such a poor country, it's about damn time they wised up and chose the free option. Although, I can't help to think that with so much corruption in every aspect of the government and business over there. I'll be surprised if this pans out in the end.
No todo lo que es oro brilla
I am also a Gentoo guy.
It doesnt matter what OS or software they use.
Typing up a document or surfing the net is nearly identical no matter what you choose.
Also hopefully some of these kids will go on to management and instead of being tied to Windows they will lean towards Linux instead.
I really want to shoot the managers who think "Windows works well on my desktop. Lets make all our company servers run it too!"
Thats a effect of Microsoft being in all the schools.
In Australia, Microsoft actually gives away all their software to schools in a effort to make sure everyone is brought up with their software.
Pretty much *any* software you are going to teach in school is going to be obsolete by the time they are "in the workforce", so it would be better to teach concepts as opposed to steps to follow. Teach them how to learn, not how to memorize, and they will get much further.
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Most of the public and private schools here only computer textbooks that is only related to MS products. What I find funny is that, they can't afford to buy those Office suites and operating systems in the first place, yet they are teaching them. There is nothing wrong with teaching it but then again it boils down to the fact that they had to pirate these software just to be able to practice what they teach \ learn.
Recently, BSA had been hot on companies and large educational institutions here, I have seen some smaller educational institutions switch most of their OS to Fedora since they could only afford to show a number of licenses. There are also raids conducted on local internet cafes but the rumor is that, they are not BSA but the local NBI units trying to make some money. Because of these factors, most cafes that only offer printing and internet surfing switched to Linux also. The only cafes I know in our area that run windows are those gaming cafes and those located at known malls.
Yes, we had been pretty much dependent on MS as a nation. At least this is a good step in the right direction. Even though DSL is pretty much affordable by middle classes here, the combination of OS and Office seems to be much, many just pirate them leading to numerous unpatched systems that are always online, coupled with users who only know the basics.
On second thought, we should really do something about the whole educational mess we are right now. Not just regarding computers / technology.
Or is resistance futile?
I used an Amiga with Word Perfect at school, and DOS with Word Perfect at home.
Fortunately the skills were useful for Word at a later point, and understanding how directories (now folders) work.
Many people I work with (as customers) don't understand how to download something from the internet (or an email attachment) and find it at a later time. This is a useful skill that is very cross platform. As are typing, google, webmail, and even spreadsheets.
If someone can learn enough to type as quickly as fast handwriting, use the internet, send an e-mail, and save a file for later retrieval they are much better off than one who can't.
Spell check, and spreadsheets are bonuses.
It could also reasonably be argues that the purpose of computers in school is to save money by not needing encyclopedias and other types of expensive books, and to augment the ability to teach certain types of subjects.
I say this as someone who set up a Xubuntu computer at my wife's work for a summer internship for high-school students that had very little computer experience (they could use a mouse and type, and certainly knew how to find myspace instead of work though). They would stay after they could leave to use the computer to type essays and learned how to enter data into a spreadsheet along with basic (very basic) spreadsheet concepts like sorting and dragging down a column to repeat a pattern. These are the types of things that will help them be more qualified in the workforce even though they gained no Windows experience.
Software like the test builder/taker in Edubuntu could be a great bonus to a school poor school and could easily save a school dollars a test (goes somewhat to paying for the computers).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Yeah, all those Mac-only programs like Word and Excel, well there's no way I can use that knowledge on a Windows machine now. And those Mac-only programming languages like BASIC, C, C++ and Pascal. Useless now that I use a Windows machine at work. Even those Mac GUI concepts like copy and paste are un-transferable to Windows.
Stupid Apple. Stupid schools.
All that time spent learning apps and stuff on a Mac was totally wasted.
"Teach them how to learn, not how to memorize, and they will get much further."
Talk about hitting the proverbial nail on the head....with a sledgehammer!!
Sadly, that method of teaching is not as prevalent as it should be.
When I was in college, one of the most important things I was taught is the concept of knowing where to find 'the reference materials needed' instead of a crapload of by rote memorizing.
I got my AAS in Veterinary Technology (think Registered Nurse for Critters), and while I was doing that, a BS in Biochemistry just kind of fell into the mix with no additional effort. (Vet Tech is TOUGH!)...No way to memorize all of the needed info, but knowing when and where to find the info needed made the big difference.
Medical Terminology, Pharmacology, and Anatomy(leg bone connected to the hip bone...by what? and by which attachments?!...hint: there are 27 major attachments to the scapula-shoulderblade to be learned- How's that for a non-sequitur?) are all brute force memorization, but after passing the classes it is just a PDR away (PDR=Physician's Desk Reference). Many times I have thanked the head of Murry State's head of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine's Dr. Kay Helms for this little bit of insight.
This concept applies readily to any tech field, and many more. *disclaimer: this could be a more cogent post if I was not into my second beer! (9.5% alcohol by volume, 40 oz.)*
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Even for those that do go on to work with Windows, though, having used more than one UI is a Good Thing for a reason: The more of them you learn, the better able you are to notice and generalize the common concepts, and the less limited you are to only being able to use the individual UI you learned on.
Actually this is a fallacious argument.
I just pointed out yesterday that kids can learn any OS. Keep in mind that I (along with all my peers) grew up in a world without windows and yet still managed to learn. In fact, I didn't even see windows until I was 19 and in college. That's when Win 2.0 came out and I thought it was - erm - mostly harmless.
My seven-year-old and five-year-old sons have no issues moving from my Vista laptop to my wife's Win2K desktop to my openSUSE laptop and desktop and to my mom's openSUSE desktop or to my father-in-law's Macintosh. Unless you're gonna teach kids how to administer Win2K3 workstations, then there's no issue.
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As a Filipino - and by the way, the comments here are very very disturbing - I am happy this is pushing through. If you are living here, Microsoft Windows IS the most dominant OS around here, with a few exceptions of other who used Macs. The only Linux users I knew are those that belong to my local Linux user group and programmers like me. But ever since the crackdown of BSA on schools regarding pirated copies of Windows and others, schools here (or at least in my city) reacted by moving some of their machines to Linux, using OpenOffice.org and using Firefox. Of course Windows machine didn't evaporated overnight but at least we are on the right track.
God gave Linux, the devil gave BSD, and a hacker gave Bill the MS-DOS - anonymous
Just don't look up anything in a reference book in front of your patients (or in the case of a vet, the owner of your patients). My boss is a pilot, and he told me a story about how he took up a friend for a flight once, and when coming in for the landing, he got out his checklist to go through the proper landing procedures. The guy got all freaked out because he thought that he was looking in a manual, and didn't know what he was doing. I'm a software developer, and I spend a lot of my time looking up the right answer in various places, rather than trying to come up with it on my own. It's often faster, easier, and more reliable to look up the answer somewhere else, rather then try to solve a problem yourself.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Hah, put "Landing for Dummies" on the cover of the landing checklist.....
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Well, think about the pricing, you could get an expensive (yet easy-to-use) Mac or you could get a cheap PC with DOS that no one really liked but it was there OS. Most businesses and people chose the cheaper route and got a PC, today we have the opposite, with Linux being cheaper yet not as (seemingly) easy to use as the Windows and Mac computers. I expect that because of the price point alone (and easier to use distros, Vista becoming ME II and OS X being popular) Unix/Linux will become the most used platform.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
In addition to that, it might be more rewarding in the long term to tech the student solution that they can own themselves.
Teaching Microsoft in 3rd world countries, mean creating a new generation of users that will completely dependant on an foreign solution, and that one day, the workforce of the country will spend significant amount of money which will be spent overboard and will go to the pocket of a foreign company.
This guarantee future bleeding of money : you have a nice new emerging IT environment that strives to develop, and most of the earned money will exit the country in term of license.
On the other hand, teaching open source software will help the new generation realise that these solution exist, and that they can take them as their own. Instead of having a Microsoft unleashing BSA-like dogs to crackdown on unlicensed copies, they have access to FSF software whose philosophy is "do whatever pleases you with it *AS LONG AS* you keep guaranteeing the same freedom when you passes it around".
Once this generation grows and enter into the workforce, a lot of busyness opportunities may appear that don't depend on foreign companies. Thanks to OSS, local solution my be developed, with new emerging companies basing their solution on infrastructure they can own themselves. The earnings from such companies will stay inside the country and help stir up the economy.
Free software empowers emerging countries, whereas proprietary software represents one additional way to lock them into a permanent dependence on foreign companies that will bleed out of the country the earning of emerging IT busyness.
That doesn't matter much for rich countries. But learning that you don't necessarily need to depend on some US company is very important in emerging markets.
Also, as you said, given the difference between Office 2007 and, let's say, Office 97, and given that these children will also be at least 10 years away from entering the workforce (and much more for those few who'll manage to go to universities) learning a specific interface implementation is completely pointless. What they need is to learn some basic concept in computing (what is word processing vs. which button should be clicked). And Linux is just as good as anything else for that.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Exactly, and why does everyone think that it has to be MS to create those concepts? I bet that if you go to a school today most people wouldn't know how applications are launched, or even how simple parts of the computer's OS works, and probably 98% think that the GUI==the OS. Most kids know how a program works by launching it from Start-->All Programs--->Games--->Minesweeper and not how the OS really works. MS always ends up creating new "buzzwords" to make their OS/Program seem new just think of the "ribbon" on Office 2007 (if you are unlucky enough to have used it) or "Shortcuts" rather then links, MS has a way of making anything that seems like a computer concept be totally linked to Windows and totally foreign to Mac or Linux, that's how I am sure they manage to keep market share from people looking at Mac/Linux who panic when they can't see a C drive.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
There are some majors where rote memorization is good. When you're in the ER and you just reacted to some drug and you're going into cardiac arrest do you want the doctor to go "Hold on a second let me let me look this up."
I'm an engineer and my sister is a pharmacist. I don't interact with people and nothing needs to be known NOW. Heck I sat in a meeting where we had 5 engineers around the room and I was the youngest and we all broke out our Fluids books to figure out some mass transfer through a pipe.
On the other hand I just got out of ACL surgery. I wasn't feeling any effect from the Oxycotin (naturally high tolerance to all drugs) so I called my sister. She knew off the top of her head what would react with it and how much more I could take. Granted she also knows where to find the stuff if she doesn't know.
As I see it:
Engineer: Where to find it>What it is
Doctor: What it is>=Where to find it
Well, Linux in such a context ("to ready students") isn't a method. It can be a tool (and so can Windows) of a given method. And the method can be adequate or inadequate.
As to the method, who knows what students will use in the future? At work or at home?
Schools (if they are not to be short-sighted) should enable students with skills that will allow them to use any tool, existing ones and specially future ones, unknown ones. Training to use one program instead of another based on current market shares is short-sighted.
I read a circa 1969 book by Lauro de Oliveira Lima commenting on a 1960 text by Marshall McLuhan. Both wrote how education would (or should) be in the future (and wrote about the future itself). Lauro de Oliveira Lima made quite a compelling argument about how education is about the future and the unknown. For the students are supposedly being prepared for a future life, work and a society that is unknown and unpredictable.
My point is, training someone to use Windows or Office is short-sighted education (and possibly inadequate education, if the student doesn't develop skills to learn to use any tool he may encounter. And he may encounter Windows, Linux, Solaris etc).
But the point of using gnu/linux or any other free or open source software in an education context is goes beyond the possibility of using certain tools. It's about the possibilty of understanding those tools, modifying those tools and creating new tools. It's about empowerment. And even if it remains as an unfulfilled possibility it remains as a door that can still be opened.
From such a point of view the use of linux, inkscape etc in an education context could be part of an open-ended education effort which aims at the future. And then comes to mind a Robert Heinlein quote:
Education should not be about Windows or Linux, but about being able to use any one of them, understand the differences, be prepared to choose and to deal with whatever the future brings.
Cheers,
P.S.: I use Ubuntu at home since 2004. And before that Gentoo and Debian.
Therein lies the key. You leared how to use an OS and computer, most people learn "if you click this that will happen" and cannot handle having things happen outside their little bubble of knowledge. I personally think that every school should have a decent mix of different types of computers, that way kids will learn the actual core skills to use a computer and not the other way. I'm teaching my two year old right now how to use windows and linux, soon Mac when I get the iMac for my wife. I want her to have a base knowledge about these things.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
The little guys count more than you imagine.
If every insignificant country switched to Linux overnight, Microsoft would be screwed within months.
Can you think of anything in Windows that couldn't be figured out by someone who has been trained on Linux?
:)
Why do people use this?
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