Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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
"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.
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.
"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.