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

[Justin <jriddiough@xxxxxxxxx>]

> 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.  
From many years of doing technical support, I think that locking down 
anyones desktop almost leaves them feeling oppressed, with a light tinge 
of spite for the administrators that wont let them do anything.  This 
can create a little culture itself where the users figure out their own 
little tricks and share them amongst one another.  By the time this 
leads to something serious breaking, which it usually does, the 
administrator will have no chance at figuring out where the 'workaround' 
people were using started.  "Oh, so and so down the hall told me this is 
how he did it"...

In the cases where someone breaks something by trying to install new 
software, if it looks like their intentions were genuine and it was a 
legitimate application - this means that the teacher is actively looking 
for ways to improve the class, and is a sign that they care.  It's not 
fair to punish them for that, and it's likely that those are the types 
of teachers that (perhaps secretly) look up to the administrators as 
magical gurus :)  If it's at all possible, an admin should help the 
teacher explore and try out what it was that they meant to try out.  If 
the teacher seems to enjoy tinkering around and figuring these things 
out, they probably should visit this discuss list.

These comments don't reflect where things are now, but a possible future 
scenario -

Applications such as Xen or VMWare will someday allow creating a sandbox 
environment very simple and straightforward.  Enough that there could be 
system images available for different types of experimentation (server, 
workstation, etc.) 

With K12LTSP growing in popularity, it might even make sense in some 
situations for a teacher to maintain a small collection of images on the 
server.  It's an interesting change in thinking, going from 'one 
operating system per computer' to being able to run as many as drive 
space and memory permit.  One of my first thoughts was that running as 
virtual machines: 10 Windows systems would cost 10 licenses (not even 
considering the licensing terms, whatever they are - one Windows OS per 
computer, if you are storing 10 images as files, what is that?  Is that 
considered 10 installations of windows, or is that only if you are 
running them at the same time?  Maybe a bit off topic here..)  where 10 
GNU/Linux systems would still be...free. 

Contemplating that it becomes a pretty thoughtless process to start up a 
new system and use it for any purpose - and applications themselves may 
be released as images that can be plugged in and turned on, why not?  
Could this lead to a possible change in what the administrator & teacher 
roles are in IT?