Re: [school-discuss] Korea brings homegrown open source to schools

[Daniel Howard <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Great article Doug, I forwarded this to another parent who doesn't like the 
idea of his child's elementary school moving to Linux because "Microsoft 
Office is what they'll be using when they grow up".  Along with the 
article, I noted that when I was in elementary school, we watched TV on 
US-made TVs and listened to vinyl records on US-made record players, 
neither of which exist anymore...

By the way, I set up a conference call yesterday with our four principals, 
who are either switching to Linux K12LTSP or considering it, and two other 
US principals who switched to Linux/K12LTSP for their schools, and as 
expected they only had good things to say about it.  Some of the 
interesting comments that came out of the conversation:
        1.  One K12LTSP principal said a hidden benefit of Linux/OSS was 
that it provided for more 'inquiry-based' learning, since her high school 
students could examine the code and even work with it if they chose.  This 
resonated well with our principals since most of them are working on 
international baccalaureate (IB) status for their elementary schools.
        2.  The other K12LTSP principal said he still had Windows 95/98 
PCs at his school in order to run legacy Windows software, but that he 
would not let them be connected to the Internet as a measure to prevent 
viruses and other malware.  The Linux thin clients are the only ones that 
can access the Internet.
        3.  Another important comment, since our principals have schools 
in fairly high income districts, was that one of the K12LTSP principals 
also had mostly students from higher income families, and could have put 
any system they wanted in place, cost was not really the issue, performance 
and reliability were, and that's why they chose Linux/thin clients.

Daniel

At 08:35 AM 6/23/2005, you wrote:
> http://news.com.com/Korea+brings+homegrown+open+source+to+schools/2100-7344_3-5755892.html 


Daniel Howard
President and CEO
Quadrock Communications, Inc
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678.528.5839 fax
404.625.1593 cell