The primary reason for such a strong reaction to this game is that the player is killing humans. Were the player killing zombies it would totally be ok.
I've worked in K-12 education in the states for several years and have seen a few one-to-one laptop programs. One middle school purchased laptops for over a thousand students. The same middle school had only one full time technology 'professional'. I now work for a corporation where we have at least one desktop support person per floor. The school district attempted to supplement their small IT staff with what they call TSGs (Not quite sure what the acronym means). TSGs are full time teachers who have shown some limited proficiency with computers and desire a few hundred dollars more per month for a few hours work helping other teachers.
Another problem is, when schools are given money for programs like this they are given very rigid requirements about how that money can be spent. Hardware and software only. This leaves the IT department with pools of money that they must waste before a given deadline. 'Ooh, let's buy a whole bunch of 1 year licenses for adobe products that no one will ever use'. One year later a teacher has a bunch of illustrator documents they can't open because their school doesn't have licensed copies of the software. That's only one example of the kind of boneheaded decision making and incompetence shown by most schools.
The IT people and administration had no understanding of networked computing. Their mindset was a throwback to the Apple II per classroom days. For example, instead of setting up an disk image server (They could've at least blown some money on Ghost), all laptops were imaged by hand by connecting up firewire drives whenever that laptop was flagged as being messed up. These were Macs, how hard is it to set up a file server and have the laptops periodically rsync. Let me repeat, 1 IT person. There was also no audit trail; IPs were assigned by DHCP with short leases and they did not have a database of MAC addresses. If a student did something inappropriate the school had no way to prove it. One teacher I knew even resorted to running ettercap so he could see what his class was doing.
Many of the entrenched IT people would never succeed in this field outside of the K-12 education world and are aware of this. They fight any attempt by outsiders and other teachers to make the technology better and view additions to their staff as threats to subvert their power. These people may have been able to tread water with one or two workstations per classroom but with a thousand laptops they quickly drown. The school administration felt that hiring some outside company to set up the initial image and then throwing money at Apple for support was all they needed. I guess they didn't understand that Apple did not have the school's interest in mind but only wanted to sell more Apple stuff. 'Gee, these iPods are cool. You can make podcasts of your lessons and have all your kids listen to them while they're going home'. One of them even had the gall to say that, 'Apple Remote Desktop would not be appropriate for their site'. Not appropriate, you can't have a thousand computers and manage them like you only have 30.
The problem is this. You need people to run these programs before they even start. Before you get the laptops, you need months to plan a roll out and set up images for your school. Hiring an outside contractor will not get you what you need because they are geared towards business, they do not understand the unique requirements of schools. I spoke to the director of technology who managed the only successful one-to-one laptop program I've seen. He said to me, 'I very quickly realized that the first thing I needed to do was hire a couple of UNIX geeks'. Amen.
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The primary reason for such a strong reaction to this game is that the player is killing humans. Were the player killing zombies it would totally be ok.
I've worked in K-12 education in the states for several years and have seen a few one-to-one laptop programs. One middle school purchased laptops for over a thousand students. The same middle school had only one full time technology 'professional'. I now work for a corporation where we have at least one desktop support person per floor. The school district attempted to supplement their small IT staff with what they call TSGs (Not quite sure what the acronym means). TSGs are full time teachers who have shown some limited proficiency with computers and desire a few hundred dollars more per month for a few hours work helping other teachers.
Another problem is, when schools are given money for programs like this they are given very rigid requirements about how that money can be spent. Hardware and software only. This leaves the IT department with pools of money that they must waste before a given deadline. 'Ooh, let's buy a whole bunch of 1 year licenses for adobe products that no one will ever use'. One year later a teacher has a bunch of illustrator documents they can't open because their school doesn't have licensed copies of the software. That's only one example of the kind of boneheaded decision making and incompetence shown by most schools.
The IT people and administration had no understanding of networked computing. Their mindset was a throwback to the Apple II per classroom days. For example, instead of setting up an disk image server (They could've at least blown some money on Ghost), all laptops were imaged by hand by connecting up firewire drives whenever that laptop was flagged as being messed up. These were Macs, how hard is it to set up a file server and have the laptops periodically rsync. Let me repeat, 1 IT person. There was also no audit trail; IPs were assigned by DHCP with short leases and they did not have a database of MAC addresses. If a student did something inappropriate the school had no way to prove it. One teacher I knew even resorted to running ettercap so he could see what his class was doing.
Many of the entrenched IT people would never succeed in this field outside of the K-12 education world and are aware of this. They fight any attempt by outsiders and other teachers to make the technology better and view additions to their staff as threats to subvert their power. These people may have been able to tread water with one or two workstations per classroom but with a thousand laptops they quickly drown. The school administration felt that hiring some outside company to set up the initial image and then throwing money at Apple for support was all they needed. I guess they didn't understand that Apple did not have the school's interest in mind but only wanted to sell more Apple stuff. 'Gee, these iPods are cool. You can make podcasts of your lessons and have all your kids listen to them while they're going home'. One of them even had the gall to say that, 'Apple Remote Desktop would not be appropriate for their site'. Not appropriate, you can't have a thousand computers and manage them like you only have 30.
The problem is this. You need people to run these programs before they even start. Before you get the laptops, you need months to plan a roll out and set up images for your school. Hiring an outside contractor will not get you what you need because they are geared towards business, they do not understand the unique requirements of schools. I spoke to the director of technology who managed the only successful one-to-one laptop program I've seen. He said to me, 'I very quickly realized that the first thing I needed to do was hire a couple of UNIX geeks'. Amen.