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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
NSW secondary school students could be issued with $56 million worth of Linux-based laptops as part of Kevin Rudd's digital education revolution.
The real reason behind this is that the federal government would supply the *hardware*, but that the schools would have to pay for the *software licenses* and the *support*. At least the price for software licenses would be greatly reduced now.
(Despite being a FreeBSD user,) I consider this is a good step forward: Give the children wooden blocks to play with, and they will build bridges with them.
bash$
...This is going to make me even more employable :).
The biggest opposition to Rudd's "computers in schools" plan has been that he's funding the hardware/software but no the support or training. No doubt this will give more weight to their argument.
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 NSW State Govt can't organise a chook raffle let alone something such as equiping kids with open source laptops. It has bigger fish to fry.
Besides, the topic is slightly wrong. Rudd isn't part of an Australian State, his part of the Federal Government. Two different beasts. The State won't 'give', it will 'receive'.
Rudd wants to give lumps of cash to a number of States based on need, spending not just on technology, but more importantly on infrastructure, health and education.
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.
It's easy to give something that isn't yours. Now wouldn't it be better if students buy their own laptops and choose which particular model or OS they like. I am not opposed to schools requiring students to have a laptop, in the same way they are required to have certain books, and perhaps offering assistance to those who can't afford it. But giving each child, even those who already have it, and those who are not interested in it and will simply sell it on ebay, a government approved computer seems like an idea that sounds good as a soundbite but terrible waste of taxpayer money in practice.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
During his campaign to be elected, he announced this plan, but never really elaborated on it. I took it with a barge-load of salt, as you should anything a politician said, but I still sent him (or rather his office) an email asking him if he was considering open source, and gave rough figures per student of the licensing associated with giving every student a copy of Windows, MS Office, Photoshop; for music students, something like Reason. My figures were retail price ones, as I said in the email, since I'm not aware of the bulk licensing prices companies offer for education, but even a 90% discount doesn't beat free. If he'd spent just $100 on software licensing on each student, it would quickly become a ridiculously large figure to throw around. The Labor government is a little wary of overspending, I would think, since the previous Labor Prime Minister, Paul Keating, plunged the country into recession. In his words "a recession we had to have".
Anyway, I doubt he read my email, or any of the other emails Australian open source fans could have sent. It's pretty much common sense, and if he has a brain, he's probably asked his IT department (not his IT minister :P).
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Purely because:
A. It's cheaper
B. They think nothing runs on Linux thus they can easily stop kids from playing games, chatting etc.
It's nice they're using linux but if my assumptions are correct then that sort of mentality doesn't help in the long run.
Given how Rudd behaves, the fist time a child is caught using the computer to access porn the whole program will be axed.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
You know, this is slightly OT, but I think it applies to the bigger picture. My Mom has been hyping prevention.com lately as a nice way to learn about health-related stuff. I just received an email from her today regarding what happened...
In short, prevention.com got hacked somehow, and she got a "nasty rogue-spyware". She spent quite a bit of time cleaning it up. She even warned me not to go there in her email. I wrote a nice reply, stating in effect, thanks for the warning, but we've switched to Linux.
Now I can just imagine how this would play out in a school running a bunch of Windows machines. One teacher hears from another than prevention.com is a good place for health information; teacher recommends it in class, and next thing you know the whole school is owned.
So who is going to clean up the mess? Will it be:
Windows: who is going to clean up the mess?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
"Australian State Threatens To Give Students Linux Laptops to Force Microsoft to Lower Prices"
There, fixed that for you.
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.
Support doesn't come cheap, in Victoria schools share one government provided technician amongst a local cluster of schools and the hours assigned per week are assessed on how many students are in the school. This can be about 10 hours per peek per school amongst 3 to 4 schools per technician. Some area's especially country area's one tech might only have 3 hours per school shared amongst 6 or 7 schools.
Any extra hours they have to pay for another technician out of their own budget.
A few years ago I was hired as a junior tech in a school working under the government provided tech, I was looking after a network of 150 PC's 5 servers and 28 staff notebooks for a school of some 550 students.
Schools are simply worried about the added support costs to this system because there will be no extra resources provided to schools to support this extra hardware.
The cost of a basic tech to look after this stuff could prevent many schools from providing special education teachers and reduce the overall quality of the education provided by the school.
I have no problems with Linux being adopted onto notebooks for students, I do have a problem with the affordability of the support available for Linux.
At the moment Linux technicians don't come as cheap as a Windows tech and trying to find a tech who can manage an extra 100 or so Linux notebooks while supporting an existing Windows curriculum network with bare minimum pay and resources, doesn't sound like a very appealing job.
If this program isn't properly funded for support it will be an absolute disaster because after 3 years the system will be run completley into the ground, and this is what many schools are worried about, they consider it throwing money away.
OK, now that's an interesting position. Could you back it up, please? By most traditional measures (GDP per capita, GNI per capita, etc.), Australia is one of the most well-off in the world. By which measure do you assert that it's not a first world country?
" 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.
It depends how the debt was incurred.
If the debt is incurred to fuel capital spending, then yes, the debt helps the nation to grow by increasing our productive capacity.
If the debt is incurred to fuel consumer spending, then it's bad debt.
Debt comes with interest payments. Paying interest on the debt only makes sense if the benefit received by the debt is greater than the interest paid. So it really depends how the debt is used as to whether or not the debt is bad.
As for Australia being a "developing" nation: what crap. Australia is not a "developing nation", according to all international benchmarks. We have one of the highest standards of living, next to the US and Japan.
Australia:
Infant mortality: 4 / 1000
Adult literacy (men): ~99%
Adult literacy (females): ~99%.
Life expectancy (males): 78.9 years
Life expectancy (females): 83.4 years
Per-capita GDP: 37,300 $US.
For truly developing nations, these statistics are much much worse. Take India, for example.
Infant mortality: 33 / 1000
Adult literacy (men): 76%
Adult literacy (females): 65%.
Life expectancy (males): 63.1 years
Life expectancy (females): 66 years
Per-capita GDP: 2,600 $US.
(Yes, I know that Qatar has the highest per-capita GDP, that's largely due to its reserves of oil. An outlier doesn't disqualify the general trend.)
Developing nation? Please. You either don't understand the term or are unqualified to speak about it.
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.
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.
Microsoft already did this. The Western Australian Education Department has a deal covering all of their schools. I was shocked when I found out why schools were putting in things like Exchange Server. They paid almost nothing for it. They were paying less than 10% of what I was paying for bulk licenses and they have all of that 'cheap, available' support for the MS products.
Ok, other than ignoring your lack of reading comprehension.. let's discuss your disgusting consumer point of view of credit.
You don't use debt to buy toys.
If I'm a business man and I want to build an office building, it's not because I'd really like some neat place to hang out. It's because I expect to be able to rent the office space and recover my investment. Now, should I save up all my pennies for the next 60 years, buy the office building with cash and then wait 15 years to recover my investment and then die? Or should I go and get some money from people who already have it? The building gets built, the renters can move in and the economy keeps moving forward at a sane pace.
Things I didn't mention: every now and then someone will convince an investor to build a property that makes no sense and the renters will not show up, they'll go broke, the property will be auctioned and the investor will lose part or all of their investment. There's risk involved, yes. But what's the alternative? The people who want to rent the property get together and build it? What if they guessed wrong about their future needs for an office building? There's still risk, it's just someone else who is carrying it now.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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)
I believe the GP was referring to the Late 80's recession (AKA, the early 90's recession) which like our current economic woes was mainly driven by external economic powers, but much I suspect the GP doesn't have a clue, just a significant political bias.
He also tends to forget that Labour had been in power for 5 terms, not 1 (Hawke government (Labour) was elected in 1983 for the uninitiated). He also forgets that the 1982 recession which was worse than the current or 1992 recession was under the Fraser government (Liberal).
Recessions in Australia are mainly driven by by external stresses(to Australia), our economy is tied to other key economies the US, Japan, Europe to a lesser extent(mostly a leftover from our days in the British Empire) and more recently China, because of this when their economies are up so is ours and when they go down Australia follows suit. Whilst personally I'm against Howard (mostly due to his stance on I.R.) he did do a decent job of the economy (granted in the halcyon days of 2000-2005 it wasn't a difficult job). If Rudd keeps the economy afloat in the current global crisis and by all indications he will, he has done just as good of a job with the economy. Australia has the second most stable banking system in the western world, second only to Canada so we will weather the current crisis but we will probably have to pull the belt in a few notches.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
I just spoke with the bloke who's behind this, and he pointed to the following source material which forms a background to their proposal:
Reading it, seems like they really have a solid grasp of the issues, and have made a cogent and excellent proposal.
Here's hoping it doesn't get subverted or ignored.
"There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order." Ed Howdershelt