NZ School Goes Open Source Amid Microsoft Mandate

Dan Jones writes "Kiwis have built an entire school IT system out of open source software, in less than two months, despite a deal between the New Zealand government and Microsoft that effectively mandates the use of Microsoft products in the country's schools. Albany Senior High School in the northern suburbs of Auckland has been running an entirely open source infrastructure since it opened in 2009. It's using a range of applications like OpenOffice, Moodle for education content, Mahara for student portfolios, and Koha for the library catalogue. Ubuntu Linux is on the desktop and Mandriva provides the server. Interestingly, the school will move into new purpose-built premises this year, which include a dedicated server room design based on standard New Zealand school requirements, including four racks each capable of holding 48 servers for its main systems. The main infrastructure at Albany Senior High only requires four servers, suggesting an almost 50-fold saving on hardware requirements."

Comments

Re:FTA

[thoughtfulbloke]

And you would be exactly correct. To provide some added context, when the government was negotiating the 2007-2009 volume licence period, it was not economical to get a full New Zealand wide licence for schools for Microsoft Office for the Macintosh so that part of the licence was dropped. The recommendation was to substitute iWork (via an NZ wide licence negotiated via Apple) or Open Office (or buy individual MS for Mac licences). The Ministry of Education works out how many copies are in use, and if it is worth a nation-wide site licence.
Keep in mind that, in New Zealand, the software that is used in schools will ultimately be paid for by the Ministry of Education either through a general licences or as part of the budgets devolved to schools, so it is in the Ministries interest to minimise the overall cost.
And, as a semi-aside New Zealand has been the least corrupt country on Transparency International's index pretty much every year since 2003 (some years were ties with Denmark), and the volume licence was an example of the Government serving the needs of individual schools well (who were going to use MS stuff anyway), rather than a corrupt deal.

Re:Mandelbulb porn sighted!

[hey!]

Really?

The "peripatetics" we so named because Aristotle taught his students by strolling around and chatting.

The "stoics" were named for the *stoa* or marketplace, bucause that's where they used to shoot the shit.

The "cynics" used to lurk under bridges, from whence they could hop out and intellectually ambush the unwary traveler (making them the first *trolls*).

The one thing you'd never see in ancient Greece is a group of students sitting in a rectangular grid of seats all doing identical work in parallel. That would have been seen as very strange indeed. Now we can't lay this entirely at Bismarck's feet, because it goes back further, to the need to impart Latin grammar to large number of aspiring but not too wealthy students (thus the "grammar school"). You wouldn't teach a gentleman that way, he'd have a tutor.

This class distinction remains in education today. Look at a top tier "prep" school that cater to the economic elite of this country, and you'll see a model which (unlike the standard classroom) would have made sense to the Greeks: a small number of students, maybe half a dozen, sitting around a table and having a discussion with a professor. That's because the results really matter; the aim is to produce an elite class. The method used to train our elite could be done walking around, or hanging around the marketplace, although lurking under bridges. They're supposed to be able think for themselves, but only within certain confines (i.e. not questioning the existence of an elite).

I'll go back under my bridge now.