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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.
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.
"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.