Slashdot Mirror
When Teachers Are Obstacles To Linux In Education
jamie found this blog post up on the HeliOS Project, which brings Linux to school kids in Austin, TX. It makes very clear some of the obstacles that free software faces in the classroom. It seems a teacher came upon a student demonstrating Linux to other kids and handing out LiveCDs. The teacher confiscated the CDs and wrote an angry email to HeliOS's founder, Ken Starks: "Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. ... This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older version of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them..." Starks pens an eloquent reply, which contains a factoid I have not seen mentioned before: "The fact that you seem to believe that Microsoft is the end all and be-all is actually funny in a sad sort of way. Then again, being a good NEA member, you would spout the Union line. Microsoft has pumped tens of millions of dollars into your union. Of course you are going to 'recommend' Microsoft Windows."
it is.
contribute at wikademia
After confiscating the disks I called a conference with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your organization.
I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.
I think it's more a mindset. I've experienced the same attitudes in school and by teachers long before Microsoft became a recognized name. It seems that many teachers still think "no pain, no gain" (or like the kid athletes said during one of the Olympics, "No pain, no Spain"). I also remember that we were not allowed inside the school during sub-zero temperatures during recess because recess is about being outside. Yep, I even remember one teacher confiscating a ball from a kid at recess (the kid told his parents who had that teacher suspended)... and not too recently my mom talked to one of the neighbour kids who was suspended from school for being late for class. It's an authoritarian attitude. Things need to be bought; if they aren't bought then it's either stolen or its communism or "socialism".
I also remember when a person from a British government copyright enforcement agency emailed the Firefox foundation to inform then that their software was being distributed and that punishments for those offenders will be forthcoming. That person had a hard time believing that software could be free (I believe this was a Slashdot story many moons ago).
But if you feel strongly about this, the only e-mail I could find on the web-site was
Ombudsman@austinisd.org
If you feel compelled to respond, please be polite. You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.
For someone so quick to judge someone elses ignorance, your response shows a similarly poor grasp of the English language.
For example, teachers often call conferences with students, the term 'conference' differentiates between 'simply talking too' and having a formal meeting. Also, 'hinge on falsehoods' is a perfectly valid statement, I'm suprised that a 'professional editor' would fail to understand what she meant. 'Verge on falsehoods' means something totally different. You realise that, right?
Your critique is weak, and you sound like an arrogant prick. Professional editors with such a poor understinding of English should not be editing.
Don't fake us out. If this is real just tell us which public school. Its our right to know as tax paying citizens. We'll get the rest of our information directly from the school district.
That's exactly what this situation doesn't need. With 60 comments in the thread, I've already seen two different "outings" of the teacher in question. Having hundreds of well-meaning and dozens of raving emails and phone calls targeted at the school district and the unfortunately misinformed teacher will make the Open Source movement look like children. It's the nature of massive mailing campaigns that the ones remembered are those that are over the top, and those become the characterization of the movement.
TFA says Ken Starks is going to meet with the school's superintendent and the teacher in question for some adult discussion. It's a lot less flamboyant than setting fire to copies of Windows, but it goes directly to the point of introducing Linux to the bureaucracy in professional, credible terms
With all those 5-16 year olds from poor families hanging around with no school to go to you have the perfect cheap labour pool: time to reintroduce them to joys of working in the mills, down coal mines and up chimneys.
You are an idiot.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Pretty sure you've got your definition of "factoid" messed up there champ. Like most people, you have assumed it means "little fact" or perhaps "little-known fact". Possibly due to abuse by CNN using the word in this sense.
From Wikipedia:
A factoid is a spurious - unverified, incorrect, or fabricated - statement formed and asserted as a fact, but with no veracity. The word appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as "something which becomes accepted as fact, although it may not be true.
It muddies the intention of the sentence when you use this word, because its meaning has been overloaded like this. I would have gone with:
"which contains an argument I have not seen mentioned before"
[dons flame-retardant suit]
Getting opensource into schools is a hard process. it took me three years before my school moved in that direction. A good stepping stone is the openeducation disc. they can still hold onto their windows installs and software and you can slowly slip the programs into the curriculum, also a great way to dstribute the software to parents for a very small overhead.
"all through my house i set up traps, it seems like the rats have a map, so now i feed the rats crack" - Donald D
I'm posting AC because on /. saying that I have a Lab of 20 Ubuntu 8.10 workstations using Likewise-Open to authenticate to AD would be karma whoring - but I do.
Teachers ARE obstacles, but an even more nefarious opponent to the deployment of FOSS are poorly trained support staff in the district who object to anything that innovates in the classroom that doesn't come from approved sources.
>>>I then tried to explain about linux and FOSS but he had grown up with the solid idea that nothing worth having is ever free
When explaining complex concepts, it's often better to keep things as simple as possible. I would simply ask the man: "Don't charitable organizations exist to give away free tutoring to students, free food to the hungry, and other volunteer work?" "Yeah." "Well the same organizations exist in the world of computers. They give-away free software to benefit the community." I'd then leave him to think about that for awhile.
>>>The teacher confiscated the CDs and wrote an angry email to HeliOS's founder, Ken Starks:
This is the point where I would take several steps:
(1) Ask the teacher to meet with me so we can discuss why she stole the personal property of my teenager.
(2)(a) If the teacher is not cooperative, I would remind the teacher that theft is still illegal, and that she should return the CDs to my teenager, else she could be prosecuted for criminal acts. (b) Schedule a meeting with the superintendent of the school district to discuss the teacher's stubbornness.
(3)(a) If he is also uncooperative, I would stop paying school taxes to this non-free district. (b) I would then use the money saved to pay the tuition for a private school, or a neighboring public school, that does not violate a young adult's basic rights.
It's a bunch of bullshit that government schools can dictate to teens/parents what OSes they can or can not use. Or what books they can or can not read. Or... Citizens need to fight back when this kind of tyranny happens, not just "give in".
BTW:
My alma mater Elizabethtown College has turned its back on Windoze. They use Linux to run the campus-wide network and for the student labs. I would also mention that in my discussion with the close-minded teacher/superintendent. "Well if Linux is illegal, then why is my college using it?" and see what they say.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
You could say that, but it's not true for any Free Software. If it's GPL'd, you don't have to give away the changes for free, you only need to give the same rights you received to anyone you gave the software to. If it's pretty much any other Free Software license, you don't have to do that either.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Well, there are a lot of cognitive shortcuts people use to reason about situations like this that are applicable most of the time, but have significant exceptions.
The sticking point with free software is that people think it's too good to be true. After all, software is hard to make, why would somebody do it without being compensated? But free software developers are compensated. They are compensated in payment by their employers for solving problems. They are compensated also in terms of status in the developer community but only when they share. And here's the point they miss: status is worth money. Proverbially, you can't eat prestige; but you can dine out on it.
Look at a project like the Linux kernel. Early on contributors nothing but status, but for a few people like Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox, the magnitude of the status payoff is huge. Those kind of people can walk into any big software developer and say, "I want a job with a six figure salary and by the way I'll be spending most of my time just working on things that interest me." And they'll probably get a job. There are people who have done comparable work in closed source projects, and while they got more pay in the front end, they never get that kind of status.
It's kind of like the difference between being a rock star vs. being a guitar teacher. If you are diligent and conscientious, you can make a living as a musician by teaching. But a rock star makes a lot more money than a hard working music teacher -- after he makes it. Beforehand, it's expected he'll starve until he gets his first hit. Software is more moderate. Unknown contributors don't have to starve, because they're creating things for which people will pay good money to have exist. On the downside, being the equivalent of Elvis in the software world involves a lot less wealth.
The problem with the "no such thing as a free lunch" theory is that the assertion is much to strong. Free lunches exist under special conditions. For years free radio and television flourished. You could say recipients "paid" for the programming by watching the advertising, but using that loose standard of "payment" people who use free software "pay" the creators by enhancing their status.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Because USA public schools do not pay enough to attract competent educators.
Honestly, most are flocking to easier or more fulfilling education avenues. Most going to school to be a teacher are wanting to be grade school teachers or college professors. Almost NONE want to be Jr High or High school teachers. The ones that are fantastic end up at private schools that pay upwards of 2X what the public schools do. Being a teacher = you're poor nowdays. This is not the 80's when they had high salaries. it's 2008 and my sister in law makes $44,500 as a teacher. And she's considered at the top of her pay-scale for the 4th grade teachers. Oh and she has to buy many supplies for her classroom because the schools cant afford to.
American public schools are a massive failure.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Excuse me, I'm an American and I understand "gratis" perfectly, thank you very much.
I also understand "vrij", "libre", "frei", "libero" and "livre".
Despite what you may have heard, we Americans are not as unsophisticated as you might think. Even those of us that are Conservatives.
Apparently this Teacher isn't the only one that needs to free her mind from stereotypes and misconceptions.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Suspension for being late for class is a fiscal issue.
1) First off the kid I'm talking about isn't American, so American rules don't apply.
2) Second this is not a fiscal issue nor should it be. Education is an educational issue. Forcing a person to not be in school merely hurts the child's education.
3) Using draconian forms of discipline solves nothing except to make children cynical and untrustful of the people who are supposed to be helping and supporting them.
4) "It's a tool to get the parents and the kid to make sure the kid gets there on time." It's a tool that doesn't work. Study's have been done on this issue; having punishments for lateness actually results in more lateness, though I would think educators would be educated about such issues. Market economic theory doesn't always work for social situations.
"Linux is not illegal." - Bill Smith, Ph.D., director of computer science & engineering.
I would love to see the look on the teacher and superintendent's face.
.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Unfortunately, it has been my experience that this teacher is typical of public school teachers in the U.S. They are sterling examples of the axiom, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."
When my daughter (now an MD) was in college, all of her classmates who were going fore teacher certification had the lowest GPAs--without exception. All science majors had the highest GPAs. (My daughter graduated Magna cum Laude.)
The point is, do not expect the best and brightest among U.S. school teachers. The smart ones are in tech and biology fields, or otherwise engaged in better-paying and more rewarding pursuits.
Perhaps if teaching paid better, the situation might resolve for the better. Meanwhile, look into private schooling or home tutoring if you want your kids to get a decent education.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
karenware.com:
"Welcome to Karen Kenworthy's web site."
http://www.austin.isd.tenet.edu/schools/staff.phtml?teacher=1600:
"Karen Ciesla"
That's why Eric Raymond et. al. coined the term "Open Source" back in '96 or thereabouts: because most people presume that "free" means "free as in beer," and get suspicious. But the name "open source" has its own problems, namely RMS railed against it because it doesn't address the idea of freedom.
I think we should call it "freedomware" but my idea doesn't seem to have caught on. ;-)
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
And Portuguese for free as in speech...
That's fair enough. Although not very many Americans travel outside the US. That's a fact, not a stereotype. Actually, now I'm talking to a real, live American, I have a question for you. A colleague who recently visited New York came back with some Hershey's chocolate, and very nice it was too. Except for the milk chocolate ones. They were disgusting - stank of vomit and tasted of sour, old milk. I remember on my visit there a few years ago experiencing the same flavour, but I put it down to it being a bad batch, or possible it got heated in transit. But no, it appears that taste is by design. Do other brands of milk chocolate made in the States have a similar flavour?
This attitude is common with the older generation who aren't used to the net. "Free" rings alarm bells and this is an issue I rarely hear mention of when people talk about the problems linux has spreading.
Has he never volunteered for anything? Has he never helped his neighbor to shovel his driveway when his neighbor was sick? I don't think it has anything to do with older generation, or the net.
I also don't believe that NEA has anything to do with the moronic attitude of the teacher described in the article. I am an NEA member, and I try to avoid microsoft software as much as I can. I know a number of NEA members who have very poor opinion about microsoft, and very high about Linux, and free software in general.
I think mentioning NEA in the letter was somewhat unfortunate, as it politicizes the whole problem, which seems to be not one of politics, but rather of stupidity.
AccountKiller
As a web developer, the open source CMS I use *is* my livelihood. I contribute a small amount, and everyone else contributes a small amount. We're all helping each other make the web a better place.
Perhaps it is analogous to unions - we all pitch in a little more so we can take advantage of working as a team.
Well, Hershey's is rather low-grade milk chocolate. It's mass-produced, and like many things mass-produced, some quality is sacrificed along the way to the quantity gods. Small-batch milk chocolate usually tastes MUCH richer due to the use of fresh whole milk, rather than re-hydrated milk-powder. Think of Hershey bars as "The working man's chocolate". Cheap, easy to produce, and pumped out by the BILLIONS each year.
Also, Milk Chocolate is very sensitive to temperature changes, and can be rendered rancid quite easily. I've had a fresh Hershey's Milk Chocolate Bar right off the assembly-line when I visited Hershey, PA. It tasted nothing like the candy bars I bought in the store, yet it was the exact same candy-bar machine the store-bought ones came from. It's the shipping and shelf time that ruins it.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
And the "catch" at least with GPL, is that you can't sell a community raised "barn" to other people, you have to give it away.
That's completely wrong. The GPL explicitly allows you to sell copies, provided the buyer gets the source code as well. You don't have to give it away.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Yes, they had. Unfortunately, we didn't know that. The Japanese made the mistake of trying to send their feelers through the Soviet Union. The Soviets, seeing a chance to divide Japan the way they were dividing Germany by prolonging the war, made sure nobody else knew about them (as it was, they managed to do it to Korea). All we knew were the Japanese declaration that they would fight fanatically to the last man, woman and child, and after Okinawa we had no reason to doubt them.
Here you are: http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html The original was in Spanish, it's been translated into many languages. Brilliant - but Microsoft still won, if I recall correctly.
Not just PHP...
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.austin.isd.tenet.edu
PHP on Linux, perhaps this teacher should quit her job working for a school that hosts their website on illegal software.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
This is what I tell people when they say "They can't possibly be making money off Linux!"
I say it was created to save money. I tell them about how UNIX used to be (mostly) the realm of incredibly expensive workstations made by premier companies like SGI, DEC, HP, etc. You couldn't get UNIX without forking over tens of thousands of dollars, but lots of universities and businesses wanted it.
So then came Linus the broke college student, who adapted a "UNIXalike"-Linux, that could run on cheap Intel boxes. He filled a need in the market-not by making money, but by saving it...
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I am a non-union Administration/Support person (IT Manager) for a public school system in Michigan. I am also a member of a group whose goal is to educate K-12 CIOs on the benefits of Open Technologies (you can find more information out about us at www.k12opentech.org). I find the "factoid" that the author of the note includes stating that the NEA receives funding from Microsoft and is thus influenced by Microsoft laughable. Here is a link to the NEA's positions on Technology in schools: http://www.nea.org/technology/index.html I am sure Microsoft gives money to the NEA (I have no idea if they do or don't), but in my experience the classroom teacher has never been the problem with adopting Open Technologies in K-12 education. In fact, Open Technologies are almost always adopted from the classroom up in sort of a grassroots fashion. Classroom teachers (and the NEA) want one thing - access to more technology in a classroom. Ask any teacher if they would rather have 3 Windows or Mac machines or 6 OSS machines and they will always ask for the latter. In my opinion the roadblock is always the federal, state, and county leaderships. My state, Michigan, seems to have some freakish, unbreakable alliance with EDS and Microsoft. Every solution that they push on us always seems to require some sort of Windows box. Another example, look at Maine. Their 1:1 legislation was basically authored by an employee of Apple at the time, Mark Whesten (now works for Dell). Of course, you could say the same thing about Indiana's INACCESS program, but this is more about the economics and not the application. I do not know what is going on in Texas (of course Dell is in their backyard), but this story contradicts everything I have witnessed nationally in the classroom.
Sorry to nitpick a bit, but German is a very precise language:
"Frei" is the German word for "free" as in speech. The word for "free" as in beer is "kostenlos".
I used to be the sysadmin for a high school. The district standard was Windows 2000 or XP on all workstations, with Altiris Deployment Solution to manage it all. My F/OSS experiences:
- We somehow wound up with a massive number of Ubuntu install CDs. I left them in a help-yourself tray in the library, until it was pointed out to me that SOME student is going to install it on a home computer, format the HD, and the parents will be calling the school for MY head on a stick. This wasn't too far-fetched, considering that I was frequently blamed for problems with teachers' home computers.
- I pushed out Firefox to lab computers, until teachers started to complain. Turns out there were several websites teachers sent students to that required MSIE--including educational software running on my own servers.
- All my lab computers ran Office XP. Because of my experiences with teachers who tended to be idiots, I did not also install OpenOffice.Org, lest I be blamed for installing something that doesn't work. One time, one student came in with a OOO document on a USB flash drive. I used this student as my catalyst to install OOO on lab computers. Surprisingly, no complaints from teachers.
Now, Altiris did support Linux imaging, and if a teacher wanted Linux across their lab, I'd jump on the opportunity. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case, as the teachers with computer labs under their control had the combined IQ of a tree stump. Example: the web design teacher told me her computer was "out of memory" because she had the entire desktop filled with icons.
So I suppose they are breaking the law too:
The site of the Austin Independent School District:
http://www.austin.isd.tenet.edu/
What they are running:
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.austin.isd.tenet.edu
OS: Linux
Server: Apache/2.2.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.6 PHP/5.2.5
Last changed: 10-Dec-2008
IP address: 206.77.0.250
Netblock Owner: Austin Independent School District
My school (in Germany) had a cobbled-together pick-of-the-litter CIP-Pool running under Suse.
When I went through physics the CIP Pool ran on Suse and DEC Alphas.
I did my diploma thesis in an MPI and we were/are running Suse on P4s and the number-crunching is done under Suse on some old Alphas and Opterons.
Now I am on Xubuntu on an EEE - well, that's what you get when you head out for a year abroad.
So there was definitely no shortage of Linux in my education.
However, e.g. most of the Architecture department has never heard of Linux - the CAD vendors make sure of that. The same with the Business department. And I know that the CS-department gets free licenses from Microsoft to avoid them "going Linux" [many still do].
Marx ist die Theorie, Murx ist die Praxis
Trinity was a plutonium-implosion device, just like Fat Man that destroyed Nagasaki. So that one was already tested.
It was Little Boy, the uranium gun-type device, that was untested. The physicists thought they knew the physics so well, and the mechanism was so straight-forward, that there was no need for a test.