[ILUG] Typical - Schools / vendor lockin.

[Cian Brennan]

On Wed, Apr 09, 2008 at 06:06:00PM +0100, Gavin McCullagh wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, 09 Apr 2008, Andres Jimenez wrote:
> 
> > - It's  free as in "free speech" (=open). So you can actually
> > learn/tech how it works (rather than just take the maker's words for
> > granted)
> 
> Do you think this could really be a priority for a school when the
> curriculum doesn't even include computer science?  Schools don't officially
> teach computer science (and if they do it's not recognised), so how useful
> is source code?
> 
Given a choice between state sponsored teaching of open or closed technologies,
I would think it should be fairly clear cut that we should aim towards open
technologies.

> > - It's free as in "free beer". So students don't need to spend any
> > money (or break any law) in order to use it
> 
> As JH said, schools are not necessarily breaking any laws now.  The cost
> involved in administering and training teachers to use open source could
> well outweigh the benefit of using it.  This is the same debate that is had
> in businesses and it simply isn't as clear cut as people are making out.
> 
You're talking about schools, he's talking about students. Even if the school
can afford enough copies of MS office, up to date machines to run a recent
version on, and so on, your students almost certainly can't all.

> > I agree that most teachers have no knowledge of linux, so little
> > knowledge they can pass to the kids. But that's doesn't mean the "tool"
> > is bad. My mother cannot use a cell phone. Does that makes cells phone
> > bad or useless tools?
> 
> It means the tool may be unsuited to them.  If your mother is expected to
> teach other people to use phones, I'd say she should do so on a phone she
> herself knows how to use and is confident with.  Would you not agree?
> 
Teachers don't need a large amount of knowledge of linux. I've never seen
anything more done in a school than web browing, or using office or the like.
Most of these tools are almost identical, irrespective of platform.

There's the other rather large point that linux will continue to run quite
happily on machines that owuld have long since been thrown out as too
slow/underspecced for windows use, with an up to date browser/office suite.

> Gavin
> 
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