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



On Sun, 2007-10-21 at 23:00 -0400, Daniel Howard wrote:
> Busy as usual Jim, but got lots of good ideas from schoolforgers in the 
> process. 
Yep. Read 'em all. 

>  Marilyn is atypical, but unless we find a way for the teachers 
> and students to experiment, she'll remain atypical.  And I don't think 
> she should be, I'd rather she be typical moving forward.

The only "safe" way for the experiments is a "lab" setting. I don't mean
setup a computer lab, but use the lab science principles, isolate,
observer, test, measure, repeat. In computers, the key lab step 1
process is isolate. 

Again, because the cash out of pocket is $0 to test bed FOSS toys, er, I
mean, _tools_ :) all that is really needed is a single test machine. 

Bear in mind, most large setups (schools, corporations) have a single
super-user password for nearly all if not absolutely all) machines. This
is why they can't give out the admin password to teachers. EVER! 
> 
> Lots of 'ifs' and 'shoulds' in your responses in the last note Jim, and 
> as you know I'm on the ground with the troops, and I deal with the way 
> things are, regardless of how it should be, but mindful of how we'd like 
> it to be.  Yes our system is challenging at times and has lots of issues 
> that may or may not be common (and I try not to air too much dirty 
> laundry), but as I reminded Jim in a previous email, if some parents and 
> teachers and a principal hadn't taken control of a non-functional system 
> in our school from the admins and jumped out of the box, he wouldn't 
> have had the architect's job.  A little rebellion from your users can be 
> a good thing, and could lead to a new paradigm, as it did in Atlanta.

Absolutely correct. If the parents had not done a bit of mutiny Atlanta
would not currently be the second largest installations of Linux systems
for student use in North America. Only the state of Indiana has more
Linux systems in front of students.

But the Brandon PTA did not "take control" of a non-functional system
exactly. They generated a parallel system outside of the control of the
school support infrastructure right down to a separate wiring system.
This was the only way that they were able to demonstrate that the FOSS
stuff worked AND keep the current admin staff from unplugging it (they
did anyway, but Daniel tells that story better than me :) In order to
get more non-sysadmin people (the  Williams and Daniels and Marilyns) to
be safely able to testbed and experiment, a semi-parallel system is
needed. If the core of the test box is sysadmin installed (but using a
disposable root password and still networked for live student use) then
control handed to the teacher technophiles and a modicum of sysadmin
support made available, then everyone wins: the teachers get to test out
new tools, the sysadmins don't get a nightmare dropped in their lap by
the teachers, and this serves to foster a better interactive partnership
between the tech support and teaching staff. We are on the same team
after all. 

The students, of course have the same personal space application
privileges as the teachers. Those that are capable of make use of it
should be tagged for extra projects! I was one of those kids that ran
the media equipment because I could figure out what to do when it
failed. The geek in me was encouraged by a more flexible school system
process (30 years ago).

So to sum up: If I had to give a blanket Yes or No to "should teachers
have admin passwords on the computers in their classroom" I would have
to say No because the infrastructure is not in place to support the
needs of that situation. If the question is qualified to include the
knowledge of the existence of the required safety net for the teachers
who want to test bed new application, I would give a hearty YES!
> 
> James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > Again, the classroom is generally not a test server environment. That is
> > where the plan is for the teacher to look the most competent and having
> > students wade through buggy software is just a respect-loosing process.
> 
> Keeping in mind the classroom server we're talking about serves only the 
> teacher's room, I eagerly await Marilyn's response to this one...
> 
> > In the situation where only a single class uses a single machine,
> > rebooting to access a known stable image is OK. But for larger scale
> > situations it is completely unacceptable for teacher A to reboot the
> > server that teachers B-F are using!
> 
> Agreed to the latter (was never supporting that idea) and halleluia to 
> the former Jim!
> 
> Daniel
> 
> 
> -- 
> Daniel Howard
> President and CEO
> Georgia Open Source Education Foundation
> 
-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC        
770-493-8244                    
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7

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