[ILUG] Typical - Schools / vendor lockin.

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Wed, 09 Apr 2008, Cian Brennan wrote:

> In my experience, teachers have little knowledge of windows either. The average
> teacher(much like the average person) knows what buttons to press in what
> order. Getting that on linux is trivally easy

Firstly, this might be a reason not to move from linux to windows, but it
isn't a reason to go through the upheaval and cost of changing to linux.

My experience FWIW, is that it's a very mixed bag.  There are teachers who
know very little (they're usually happier with the same thing as they have
at home).  There are also a huge number of teachers who know how to use all
sorts of things like AutoCAD, Photoshop, Literacy Software, Microsoft
Office, CMIS, etc.  If they're all familiar to varying degrees with Windows
(or macs for that matter), there would want to be some major gain to be
had from moving them over to linux.  What is that major gain?

As I said before, I'm not sure one way or the other but I can see a lot of
strong arguments against using linux (as opposed to free software) in
schools and I feel someone should present them.

Gavin