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Australian State May Give Students Linux Laptops
Whiteox writes "The Australian Prime Minister's plan to equip high schools with 'one laptop per child' may go open source. Kevin Rudd's $56 million digital revolution will include 'laptops [that will] run on an open source operating system with a suite of open source applications like those packaged under Edubuntu. This would include Open Office for productivity software, Gimp for picture editing and the Firefox internet browser.' So far this has been considered for New South Wales and I think other states may follow."
That strategy worked great for Apple back in the late 1970s / early 1980s. Get Apples in front of schoolchildren and by the time the IBM PC came along it was too late. Kids were already in love with the Apples, and many "stuck with what they knew." It was the most effective long term marketing move Apple ever could have made, and I doubt they even realized it at the time.
Times have changed, though, and the ability to monopolize the hearts and minds of kids with the only computer they're exposed to is long gone. Many of the kids will already have PCs at home, many will have (or at least have played) X-Boxes, PS3s, Wiis and a host of other devices, including smart phones. I don't think this can have the same social effect that Apple had on us 30 years ago, because the environment is now so different. The novelty won't be there.
John
Microsoft will be forthcoming with massive discounts 5 minutes before the deal with RedHat is signed and our government will renege on any promises they made.
It's the traditional "what do you mean we don't get a discount? Well, ya know, Open Source is getting more and more acceptable..."
Unfortunately, the moral imperative for schools to use exclusively Free Software is not even a consideration here.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The word is too.
Fear spreading is as popular a past time here in Australia as it is in the rest of the world. Widespread filtering would not only be easily detectable and ineffectual but it would also be defeated by public outcry. It won't happen.
How we know is more important than what we know.
" Give the children wooden blocks to play with, and they will build bridges with them"
Give the children technology that they, and their teachers don't understand and the laptops will end up gathering dust.
I'm all for using OSS, but somebody needs to take responsibility and ensure that teachers and students are properly educated in their use.
on the one side the govt says "hey, we've paid enough, you get free laptops!"
on the other side the schools are saying "this will eat into our already slim budget, more money please!"
net effect: the kids lose out, better off investing the money in better teaching programs than laptops that the students don't even need.
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
Maybe the teachers can take some (albeit added) responsibility and take the relatively few steps to teach themselves.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
They're giving these laptops to High School students.. the project has already failed.
How we know is more important than what we know.
When everything is free to obtain and upgrade, students learn it all in school, and interfaces don't arbitrarily change every 4 or 5 years, the whole system collapses. There won't even be any big companies to bail out, either.
" Give the children technology that they, and their teachers don't understand and the laptops will end up gathering dust. I'm all for using OSS, but somebody needs to take responsibility and ensure that teachers and students are properly educated in their use.
How difficult is it to use firefox, Openoffice, and Gimp? Seriously? It's not like we are asking them to use LaTeX.
Neither students nor teachers are idiots, despite being treated by idiots for years by Windows software.
Please explain the economic policies put into place by the Liberals to "solve the problem"?
Most economists would say that it was resulting from a boom in the mining sector and a general global economic boom during the years the Liberals were in office... in fact the recovery had already started during Keating's term..
Now we are in a global downturn our economy is not going to do as well as it used to..
Blaming/rewarding either party for the economic situations in the recent past/present is just partisan politics and bears no relation to reality.
"The Australians wanted to ban..."
Australia has a population of 20 million, we have a diverse background, we are not all the same.
Perhaps you could have been more specific and stated that a minority of Australian federal politicians wanted to ban such a thing.
That's not what experience teaches us.
I'm of an age (born in '64) to remember when the pupils were the only ones who really knew how the computer systems worked. It was a time when 'hacking' was a positive term, and those happy few who had access to their systems became the people who have driven this whole technological revolution.
I'm a perfect example. I have exactly zero formal computer training, and am in the process of negotiating a director's position for an online company.
In my experience - and I have applied this method countless times - all you need to do is identify the bright, curious ones and give them time in front of the keyboard. The rest takes care of itself. A cultural effect sets in, in which bragging rights go to the most innovative, and the whole process takes on its own momentum.
I've spent the last 5 years working in a part of the world where academic opportunities are very limited, and even here every single one of my apprentices (only one of whom had any post-secondary experience) has gainful employment in IT.
Courses are all well and good. They serve a definite purpose. Teacher training serves an important role as well. But your premise that any shortfall in this regard will result in systematic failure is demonstrably false.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
You've got to give kids clocks to take apart.
No, you don't. ;-)
I remember back when I was in maybe the 4th or 5th grade, and I found an old mechanical clock in the house that wasn't being used. I took it apart, studied the pieces, and put it back together so it still worked. I did this several times, to figure out more about how the pieces worked. Then one day, my mother found me with the clock disassembled. She blew up, gave me a lecture about ruining the clock, took it away from me, and disposed of it.
If she had been around when I found the clock, I'd have never been permitted to take it apart, even though it wasn't being used. She didn't believe that kids like me were smart enough to handle something that she couldn't understand, not even when the teachers kept telling her how smart I was.
People don't have to give kids anything that's educational. Many people would prefer not to. The kids might get the idea that they can learn about such things on their own. We wouldn't want kids to get such ideas, would we?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Yes, that would make it so much easier for the schools to support. Everyone with different hardware, operating systems, installed software. And everyone would pay full retail instead of getting the massive discount that a purchase of thousands of laptops gets.
Can I mod the article summary (and everyone's pro-OSS hopes) down for a couple of reasons?
- The summary lets you read in an implication that it's being considered by the NSW Government. It's NOT, it's being suggested by the President of the NSW Secondary Schools Council, which REPORTS to the NSW government.
- Even if the NSW government WAS looking at it, that would still be irrelevant. State governments make noise about being standards compliant, but still stay fairly fierce about doing things their own way.
I say this as somebody who actually spoke to a representative of the Education Department (and other departments), in Government, in another Australian State. It was all part of one big "study" by this State Government. The single loudest speaker against adopting Open Source at this table was the Education representative.
At the same time, there was a domain name registered for www.opensource.nsw.gov.au. The site, during the time of this study, was never up. The NSW government doesn't necessarily take OSS seriously, let alone other states or Federal government.
OSS has already been examined somewhat, look in South Australia instead. Look for a 2004 paper by Hudson and Moyle, "What Place does Open Source Software have in Australian And New Zealand schools' and jurisdictions' ICT Portfolios? Open source software suitable for use in Australian and New Zealand School; A review of Technical documentation" published by the Department of Education and Children's Services South Australia. That spoke VERY glowingly re: OSS.
Note, however, that you don't hear screaming success stories of OSS all over Australian schools and governments. It's my opinion that Microsoft has the place mostly sewn up through the usual dodgy deals Slashdotters have come to expect; and that parts of the government are very firmly in bed with them.
As far as Australian PM Kevin Rudd's promise goes... well, let's just say we Australians still remember his predecessor's invention of the election term "non-core promise".
Posting anonymously, because although I'd like the karma, I'd rather not risk it. The "study" I did whilst with those government people in that particular state was shot in the face like an old man in front of Dick Cheney. There's a reason I subscribe to RMS-like principles of "anarchism" now.
Whereas if it was ex-PM John Howard in charge, the kid would have been used as an example of the evils of technology, so that police need to be given unrestricted powers to access school and home computers to monitor children's surfing activities (they may turn out to be terrorists one day).
He would have also ridiculously blamed the previous two Labor governments for inventing computers and for making porn available on the internet.
Finally he would use it as a way of getting reelected by claiming that under a Labor government porn would be rampant, and that only under a Coalition government could it be safely reduced.
(I could also throw in analogies about the Tampa scandal, President Bush ass-kissing, climate-change denial and Iraq but lets leave that for another day)
Yep, it could have been Keating's 'Recession we had to have,' but the only one term Labor government with a bad economic record I could think of was Jim Scullin. Two days after taking office, the '29 crash occurred. Not an easy time to govern.
Eh? No offence, but that's a problem with your character. Learn some mental discipline.