[school-discuss] Philosophy: Teachers with Admin Privileges or Not

[Daniel Howard <dhhoward@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm having an interesting discussion with another Schoolforger offline 
on whether teachers should have admin privileges on classroom servers or 
not, and it occurred to me that this is a good question for this group. 
 There are several issues contained in the discussion, as follows:

* Classroom servers vs. Centralized Enterprise servers

* Teachers with admin privileges on classroom servers vs. teachers who 
have a limited ability to load OSS apps on an enterprise server

* Freedom vs. Stability

In an ideal world, teachers would have freedom to download any FOSS app 
they'd like to try out (a key benefit of FOSS) without any risk to any 
server, regardless of location.  Reality is that many FOSS titles 
require some level of expertise and there is risk of at least breaking 
other apps in the process, if not requiring a reinstall of the OS.  In a 
classroom server model, they would primarily only risk their own 
classroom server, but in an enterprise server model, they could affect a 
significant portion of the school.

Has anyone in the group tackled this issue before?  One suggestion might 
be that even in an enterprise model, teachers have the option of a 
classroom server to which they can freely add applications. 
Alternately, they can install only those apps that operate within their 
home folder's domain.  What do you folks think?

Best,
Daniel

--
Daniel Howard
President and CEO
Georgia Open Source Education Foundation