This is why LTSP makes so much sense. You plug in a random crappy machine and either you can get it to remote boot via PXE or a boot CD/floppy or you can't. If you can't, you throw it away. And pretty quickly, the problem becomes space and electricity, so you can just stop accepting the ones that won't PXE boot.
Getting technology that works reliably into the classroom *is* that big a problem. 10 years ago most teachers wouldn't know what to do with computers. Now they do. This whole "internet" thing has pretty much caught on. Almost all teachers know what they would do with them (I've interviewed about 50 and found 2 that didn't).
Your pencil analogy is a good one. Computers are not, in any way, sufficient for teaching, but just as it would have been absurd 30 years ago to have classrooms that didn't have pens, paper and chalk in them, it is similarly absurd now to have classrooms without computers. If you tell a kid to write a paper and (s)he has a computer at home, it's going to seem silly to write it by hand at school.
If you put computers in a school you do need to be committed to keeping them working and NOT to add to the school's tech staff's workload. LTSP Thin clients make it possible to essentially do a drive-by and put in place equipment that is reliable and needs almost no continued maintenance. Teachers need to know little more than how to log in, that the "Applications" menu is at the top of the screen, and that "word processor" means "word," "presentation" means "powerpoint" and "Spreadsheet" means "excel."
Very few schools have personal computers for students. They have impersonal computers. A kid sits down and nothing is there. No files, no bookmarks, no picture of their car, cat, or girlfriend on the desktop. That is not the way that people use computers. LTSP solves this too by giving every kid an account, so they get all of that stuff anywhere they sit.
Isn't the F/OSS community capable of having a better spokesman?
I think there are several examples of better F/OSS advocates, and even a few who do educational research.
Or at least reasons that refer back to letting students tinker with applications so they can see how the code/math/grammar checker works? And that teachers can customize the code to tailor fit the school's needs? And... actually, now is when I stop preaching to the choir.
No. That's exactly wrong, and exactly why most people in schools if they can even understand that it's legal to copy F/OSS, they're sure that there's some other catch, like if they want it to work they'll have to become computer programmers. As someone else pointed out, it's unrealistic to think that many high school students are going to tweak a grammar checker. (Most of them don't have a very good understanding of grammar in the first place, hence the need for a grammar checker.) It's patently absurd to suggest that teachers will. Have you met any teachers?
Moodle's UI is much cleaner and intuitive. I give my students (future K-12 teachers) less than 30 minutes of training and they're able to make it go. The fact that it's OSS means that, unlike Blackboard or WebCT, they'll be able to use it when they get to whereve they're working.
Just to make sure, I got the University to host Moodles for anyone in the state.
A setup that I have that has been surprisingly useful is having a wireless mouse and keyboard that I keep on my conference-table-desk. I normally work on the monitor with wired keyboard and trackball in front of me. My desk is L-shaped, so when someone comes in and I need to show them something, I have a second monitor that's on that part of the desk that they can see easily (it usually has just my MP3 player, clock, and GAIM). Better still, I can give them the mouse and keyboard so that they can use my computer without having to give up my seat. It sounds simple, but it's very convenient. Having someone sit at your desk is uncomfortable for everyone. This solves that problem handily.
I haven't really seen this argument in the responses that I've read thus far. Here's a section from a piece I've written for a magazine for people using technology in schools:
Proprietary software is inconvenient. It is inconvenient to purchase additional licenses when you buy new machines. It is inconvenient to negotiate a new license agreement each year. It is inconvenient to have multiple versions of a package on campus because you cannot afford to upgrade all of the computers when a new version comes out. It is inconvenient for a technology coordinator to be forced with an ethical dilemma when a teacher buys a computer and asks for a piece of software to be installed. It is inconvenient that we cannot provide students with the same software that they use at school for their home computers. It is inconvenient when a vendor who previously provided a package free to schools changes the license agreement after considerable training time and money have been spent on it. It is inconvenient when a software vendor audits a school district asking for proof that every piece of software has a proper and valid license. Thanks to the work of Stallman and thousands of others these inconveniences are becoming increasingly unnecessary.
It's almost off-topic, but I really don't understand how people use Windows with the virus problems. My mom's computer got all kinds of crap on it, in spite of my installing firewalls and everything else I knew to do. (Admittedly, I've been running Linux on my desktop for a decade and am probably not a very good windoze sysadmin, but I'm probably better than 99% of the population.) Mom's running Fedora now. My sister's brand new machine was slow to the point of unusability. The solution was to turn off Norton. That's likely to be a short-term solution. . . .
Make a small bootable image and include TheOpenCD TheOpenCD. This will give them software that they can use without taking the big plunge.
People don't know how to boot off a CD. You'll need to include directions for that, and it's difficult, since every BIOS has a different method.
Also, tell people that they should keep it around even if they don't understand it. A friend recently re-imaged her computer (at Dell's recommendation) because some DLL was missing or something. The data on their disk could have been saved with a bootable CD.
A misconception that I've recently heard is that OSS isn't worth anything if you're not a programmer. Not sure how that plays into your card, but it was a new one on me.
Agreed. I know that I would buy three times as many CDs if they cost half as much. Similarly, $1 for a MP3 file is is way too much. For $.25 each I'd buy lots of them. For $1, I won't buy any.
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This is why LTSP makes so much sense. You plug in a random crappy machine and either you can get it to remote boot via PXE or a boot CD/floppy or you can't. If you can't, you throw it away. And pretty quickly, the problem becomes space and electricity, so you can just stop accepting the ones that won't PXE boot.
http://learn.occ.utk.edu/~pfaffman/utk/proposals/cscl2009/ltsp-research-platform.pdf
Getting technology that works reliably into the classroom *is* that big a problem. 10 years ago most teachers wouldn't know what to do with computers. Now they do. This whole "internet" thing has pretty much caught on. Almost all teachers know what they would do with them (I've interviewed about 50 and found 2 that didn't).
Your pencil analogy is a good one. Computers are not, in any way, sufficient for teaching, but just as it would have been absurd 30 years ago to have classrooms that didn't have pens, paper and chalk in them, it is similarly absurd now to have classrooms without computers. If you tell a kid to write a paper and (s)he has a computer at home, it's going to seem silly to write it by hand at school.
If you put computers in a school you do need to be committed to keeping them working and NOT to add to the school's tech staff's workload. LTSP Thin clients make it possible to essentially do a drive-by and put in place equipment that is reliable and needs almost no continued maintenance. Teachers need to know little more than how to log in, that the "Applications" menu is at the top of the screen, and that "word processor" means "word," "presentation" means "powerpoint" and "Spreadsheet" means "excel."
Very few schools have personal computers for students. They have impersonal computers. A kid sits down and nothing is there. No files, no bookmarks, no picture of their car, cat, or girlfriend on the desktop. That is not the way that people use computers. LTSP solves this too by giving every kid an account, so they get all of that stuff anywhere they sit.
I think there are several examples of better F/OSS advocates, and even a few who do educational research.
No. That's exactly wrong, and exactly why most people in schools if they can even understand that it's legal to copy F/OSS, they're sure that there's some other catch, like if they want it to work they'll have to become computer programmers. As someone else pointed out, it's unrealistic to think that many high school students are going to tweak a grammar checker. (Most of them don't have a very good understanding of grammar in the first place, hence the need for a grammar checker.) It's patently absurd to suggest that teachers will. Have you met any teachers?
Moodle's UI is much cleaner and intuitive. I give my students (future K-12 teachers) less than 30 minutes of training and they're able to make it go. The fact that it's OSS means that, unlike Blackboard or WebCT, they'll be able to use it when they get to whereve they're working.
Just to make sure, I got the University to host Moodles for anyone in the state.
A setup that I have that has been surprisingly useful is having a wireless mouse and keyboard that I keep on my conference-table-desk. I normally work on the monitor with wired keyboard and trackball in front of me. My desk is L-shaped, so when someone comes in and I need to show them something, I have a second monitor that's on that part of the desk that they can see easily (it usually has just my MP3 player, clock, and GAIM). Better still, I can give them the mouse and keyboard so that they can use my computer without having to give up my seat. It sounds simple, but it's very convenient. Having someone sit at your desk is uncomfortable for everyone. This solves that problem handily.
I haven't really seen this argument in the responses that I've read thus far. Here's a section from a piece I've written for a magazine for people using technology in schools:
Proprietary software is inconvenient. It is inconvenient to purchase additional licenses when you buy new machines. It is inconvenient to negotiate a new license agreement each year. It is inconvenient to have multiple versions of a package on campus because you cannot afford to upgrade all of the computers when a new version comes out. It is inconvenient for a technology coordinator to be forced with an ethical dilemma when a teacher buys a computer and asks for a piece of software to be installed. It is inconvenient that we cannot provide students with the same software that they use at school for their home computers. It is inconvenient when a vendor who previously provided a package free to schools changes the license agreement after considerable training time and money have been spent on it. It is inconvenient when a software vendor audits a school district asking for proof that every piece of software has a proper and valid license. Thanks to the work of Stallman and thousands of others these inconveniences are becoming increasingly unnecessary.
It's almost off-topic, but I really don't understand how people use Windows with the virus problems. My mom's computer got all kinds of crap on it, in spite of my installing firewalls and everything else I knew to do. (Admittedly, I've been running Linux on my desktop for a decade and am probably not a very good windoze sysadmin, but I'm probably better than 99% of the population.) Mom's running Fedora now. My sister's brand new machine was slow to the point of unusability. The solution was to turn off Norton. That's likely to be a short-term solution. . . .
People don't know how to boot off a CD. You'll need to include directions for that, and it's difficult, since every BIOS has a different method.
Also, tell people that they should keep it around even if they don't understand it. A friend recently re-imaged her computer (at Dell's recommendation) because some DLL was missing or something. The data on their disk could have been saved with a bootable CD.
A misconception that I've recently heard is that OSS isn't worth anything if you're not a programmer. Not sure how that plays into your card, but it was a new one on me.
Agreed. I know that I would buy three times as many CDs if they cost half as much. Similarly, $1 for a MP3 file is is way too much. For $.25 each I'd buy lots of them. For $1, I won't buy any.