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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."
There is no mandate for NZ schools to use Microsoft software. There is a collective agreement (one of many agreements, including one with Apple), and the schools have always been able to choose the software they want.
Standard slashdot bias and hype. FUD FUD FUD
The school only has 230 students. I have a hard time believing they'd need 192 servers whether they used Linux or not.
Here in NZ, we're so technologically advanced that we're skipping laptops and going straight to "one server per child".
Your argument is that because Linux is not like Windows, it will never supplant it. But, a copy of Windows will never be as good at being Windows-like than Windows itself, so attempting to mimic Windows is a losing strategy.
IMHO there are many ways in which Linux is better than Windows. I am able to work much faster under Linux than I can do under Windows and I find doing almost anything under Windows an exercise in frustration.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The idea behind Ubuntu (and desktop linux in general), is that it is a multi-user OS. Multi-user in the sense that the administrator determines what a user can do, and the user can do anything they want within these limits. There is no need for easily accessible multi-user desktop-shortcuts, because each user should be allowed to set up their own desktop the way they want it. You just have to shift the way you think about your desktop environment a little bit.
If they can't work out how to use MS Word in five minutes when they are used to openoffice then they really won't be trying.
Most of this stuff is so similar that it doesn't matter. When you get down to mail merges or other stuff just about every company does it differently on the same platform so they'll have to learn it anyway.
True, if they are setting up computer systems they'll be at a disadvantage - you have to know the Microsoft platform to understand that you choose "local printer" when you want to connect directly to a printer on the network (and a thousand other quirks).
By the way, I've heard EXACTLY this argument before about why schools should be full of Apple computers. It really has very little merit. If you are talking about a single semester technical college course it has merit, but for general situations it doesn't.
In a ten year time scale we went from MSDOS to XP in business desktop computing. There is no point at all in directly targeting a specific business desktop environment in the early and middle years of school and not much in the late years.
Yay! By that logic most people would fail in the real world of business.
You know when I went to school, we had a real world business system from Microsoft. We had Microsoft Works for Xenix and Microsoft Works for DOS. State of the art systems as Microsoft surely called them back then.
It's no use teaching children about feature 5432 of version 54.22.154.12.b of some software product as it will disappear or be made obsolete by some other function in the next version, often by the time the teacher actually gets ot teach what he has learnt.
What does matter is teaching what those programs are about. What is a word processor? What are the typical features of such a piece of software? It doesn't matter if you teach that with Microsoft Word 95 or Open Office, in fact Open Office has the advantage of being available to the children.
No matter what software product you will use as an example, by the time the children start working, it will be long obsolete.
Agreed. I don't know how big their network is, but I expect at least:
8 Us for Switch
8 Us of Patch pannels for Ethernet.
8 Us for PBX patch pannels
8 Us for the actual PBX + Accesories (Eg. ATAs, GSM -> SIP GWs, etc).
10 Us for UPS
6 Us for Audio system.
8 Us for Servers
4 Us for routers
20 Us for DIsplay/keyboard (2 Displays/kb on 2 different Racks)
10 Us for Power strips (across all racks)
And I'm missing a lot of things, probably.
That is 90 Us.
Off course, the first 10 or so Units in a Rack are rarely used, since they are not comfortable. If you add some space between equipments (It's good practice, also, many systems are not rackable, and they take up more space). That can take you to, let's say, 120 Us. Plus, some room for expansion.
4 Racks seems like a good setup to me.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
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.
1. The school is projected to grow to 1500 pupils over the next few years
2. The server room thing was the standard said they needed 8 racks of servers, instead they just needed 4 servers taking up less than half a rack.
"To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.
Rubbish I work in a NZ school as an IT admin and schools have to sign up each three years (was each year). Only these schools are included in the deal and they have to activly sign up to it. This is the usual Slashdot FUD, if they don't sign up then the school is not included in the agreement and the government pays nothing. There are simmilar deals as stated above with Apple and even at one point a major linux distribution/support provider. As far as I can tell this deal is no longer open to new schools but is still maintained for those that did sign up.
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.
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