[clug] Linux in education

[Sakari Mattila]

The trick is, that Windows comes next to free for universities
and university staff, but not students.  I know four such contracts
in two well-separated countries, Australia and Finland. The applications
and SDKs have a small price. It is difficult to compete with almost
free and "management seminars" with free and no seminars. It is
a long story to explain, what is a "management seminar" without
getting involved the legal profession, hope somebody else does that. 

There is still hope, Vista and multicore hardware may start people
to think again.  What Linux people could do is to keep up-to-date
compatibility list and make ready to run  Linux / GNU / OpenOffice
packages. Easy to install, fast and reliable Linux for laptops would be 
a success. "Installing updates" only once a week, not all the time
like Vista. Running more than a month without hickups, like Unix
boxes used to do. My friends good brand laptop spends more time 
"Installing updates" and restarting than doing anything useful.

Sakari Mattila  
smattila @ tpg.com.au
- - -
> 
> Message: 7
> Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2007 18:06:39 +1000
> From: "Tim Jones" <tim.jones at anu.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [clug] Linux in education
> To: "CLUG List" <linux at lists.samba.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<59a7ca460710030106i2b3c21a8n2eb2662088941c59 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> 2007/10/3, Hugh Fisher <hugh.fisher at anu.edu.au>:
> 
> > ...give the schools and ACT government a business plan:
> > "we will convert all your machines to Linux at $X per
> > desktop and server with guaranteed
> > equivalent functionality...
> 
> But if you converted all the machines, you would have a similar
> situation to now, where everybody only learns one OS (and worse, it
> wouldn't be the most common one in the general workforce).
> 
> I think there are two issues here:
> 
> 1) The cost of proprietary software may be able to be saved by
> switching to a free/open source solution.
> 
> 2) Students will be more computer literate if they use more than one
> operating system at school.
> 
> I don't know about schools in Australia, but in New Zealand (or
> Christchurch at least - I have a friend who is a teacher there) Apple
> seem to do a very good deal with schools, providing both cheap (I
> think free in some cases?) equipment and software. I believe they also
> ran training courses for the teachers, but I can't remember. I'd be
> surprised if Apple weren't running a similar gig here - Does anyone
> know if there actually *is* a lot of spending on proprietary software
> in schools here?
> 
> The varied OSes for computer literacy thing is harder - you'd probably
> need to sink more money into administration to get someone with all
> the requisite skills. But it might be worth it - is a good idea to
> expose kids to multiple interfaces, even if it's just so they learn
> how to use software they've never seen before.
> 
> Tim
> ---
> https://cs.anu.edu.au/~Tim.Jones/