Re: [Fwd: Re: [seul-edu] RE: [why schools don't adopt OSS]]

[Dave Prentice <dprentice@uno.edu>]

My 2 cents:
    As a teacher in a 1600+ student public school, I find that most
technology decisions are made for reasons of image and politics. For
instance, the technology situation in my school district is a mess. The
solution? The district administration decided to name one teacher per school
as the Technology Coordinator. Each of us T.C.s has to serve as the liaison
between our school and the tech support department. If anything acts up, we
are supposed to check it out. Tech support will not respond to service
requests from anyone but us. Despite getting all this additional
responsibility, we still have to teach the same class load as all the other
teachers, and get no more money or designated free time to handle the
responsibilities. The higher-ups look good because they came up with a plan,
but it's shadow without substance.
    More image manipulation: the district just spent tens or hundreds of
thousands of dollars getting a bunch of new computers for my school. The
local news media come out and take pictures of all the new equipment. Isn't
it great? We're spending all this money on our kids! Meanwhile, I have set
up a 20-machine Linux network in my classroom using old donated equipment,
at ZERO cost to the district -- and it works just as well as all the new
hardware. But will anybody from the district or the media even come look at
it? No, because it's not new and flashy. They'd rather get publicity for all
the money they spent than all the money they DIDN'T have to spend. What a
waste of money! It's all politics.
    The point is, decision-makers are very often influenced by what LOOKS
best, not what IS best. If we want to make an impact, we need to come up
with something that looks and sounds good to the public and to the teachers
that will use it, then find ways to publicize it. We need to show that OSS
can do anything that high-cost software can do, only better and cheaper.
Also, as others have hinted at, we need to offer more or less a turnkey
distro for the sake of the personnel who have to do the installations. An
education distro should install on just about any hardware, be virtually
hassle-free on installation, and have lots of useful features built in so
that teachers can use them with little or no extra training. For typical
teacher/classroom machines this would require at minimum a GUI such as gnome
or KDE, a word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation software, and
web browser. All of these should work like the Win programs teachers and
students are used to.
    The key to success is getting the public's attention so they will
pressure the decision makers. A tall order indeed.
Dave Prentice
prentice@instruction.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Loss <drloss@home.com>
To: seul-edu@seul.org <seul-edu@seul.org>
Date: Tuesday, November 27, 2001 10:31 AM
Subject: [Fwd: Re: [seul-edu] RE: [why schools don't adopt OSS]]


>-------- Original Message --------
>
>From: Jim Thomas <jthomas@bittware.com>
>To: seul-edu@seul.org
>Subject: Re: [seul-edu] RE: [why schools don't adopt OSS]
>
>Jay Sun wrote:
>[snippage]
>> However, schools waste fair amount of money at same time,
>> especially at district administrative level in public schools.
>> you are right that schools use other people's money, so there
>> are a lot of things that are purely political, and the OSS
>> just don't make much sense in those situations.
>
>I keep hearing this (that public schools spend other people's money) and
>I feel compelled to respond to it.  I agree - it's very difficult to get
>a public school (in the US at least) to adopt open source.  The "free"
>argument doesn't go very far.  We have to tout *other* benefits of Open
>Source to get into that sector, such as stability, viral resistance, an
>actual security model, and capabilities.
>
>It might be easier to start with private schools - especially non-profit
>denominational schools, which operate on tight budgets and are somewhat
>smaller than the public behemoths down the street.  These people really
>do care about saving money, and they are not hobbled by large
>bureaucracies either.  Once enough private schools adopt OSS, we can
>collect their case studies and have a body of evidence to present to the
>public sector.  Perhaps these arguments  apply to for-profit private
>schools too, but I think this is a smaller slice of the pie.  I say
>start small and build momentum.  This approach lets us work out the bugs
>before tackling the giants.
>
>Unfortunately, this strategy takes more time, and we're trying to
>"strike while the iron's hot."
>
>I still think the community needs to come out with an Education
>Distribution to ease installation.  As I see it, there are three types
>of installations required in an edu environment: student machines, staff
>machines, and servers.  When you install RedHat, it prompts for the type
>of installation and suggests Workstation, Server, etc.  This doesn't
>make sense for an edu distro.
>
>Right now it is no easy task to set this up.  The packages are
>available, but not on a CD.  The installation procedure goes like this:
>1) Choose one of a myriad of available installations
>2) Install it, choosing packages from a tremendous list of confusing (to
>the uninitiated) options (what does ypbind do?  do I need it?)
>3) Locate educational packages
>4) download and attempt installation, only to discover dependencies
>5) Figure out what those dependencies are
>6) Locate the package that will satisfy the dependency
>7) Go back to step 4, and repeat as more dependencies are discovered.
>8) Confiure the application
>
>This is a lot to ask from a person with little or no *nix experience.
>An edu distro would reduce these steps to
>1) Get the edu distro
>2) Choose student, staff, or server installation
>3) Choose applications (which should be well described)
>4) Customize the configuration (but it should work pretty well without
>this step).
>
>A student installation would include:
>Web/email client
>Office suite
>Educational apps (select by grade level and subject)
>Games (this may be important for fostering acceptance)
>What else?
>
>A staff installation would include:
>same as student install plus
>courseware
>gradebook
>Internet usage monitor
>Account management SW
>What else?
>
>The server installation would be tailored for school use.  There could
>possibly be more than one type of server too, such as a lab server (NFS,
>NIS, DHCP) and a gateway server (firewall, httpd, email server,
>squid/squidguard).  A library app (such as Koha) should also be
>available for the server machine.
>
>I have installed Linux at a private school, and the effort has largely
>been successful.  Linux has still not achieved acceptance by the staff,
>but I'm still working on that.  I'd like to introduce linux to other
>schools too, but managing the one I'm involved with now still requires a
>huge committment on my part (and I'm just a volunteer).
>
>
>--
>Jim Thomas      **    Principal Applications Engineer ** Bittware, Inc
>703.779.7770    **    jthomas@bittware.com **  http://www.bittware.com
>The secret to enjoying your job is to have a hobby that is even worse.
> - Calvin's dad
>