[clug] Linux in education

[Hugh Fisher]

Tim Jones wrote:

> 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?

That seems to be the heart of the issue.

There are two contradictory positions here. We had Fred Pilcher
at the start of this thread and now Brett Wheeler saying that
installing Linux/etc would save schools a lot of money; on the
other hand Sam Couter and Sakari Mattila say that MS are
donating computer resources for almost nothing so FOSS wouldn't
be able to offer any savings.

> 
> 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.

I'm all in favour of Linux and varied OSes for teaching computer
science programmer-thingy stuff.
<http://cs.anu.edu.au/~Hugh.Fisher/writing/wizards-muggles.html>

But for general computer literacy, if the schools are getting
MS software at a good price then I don't see much of a problem.
Kids need to learn a bit about word processing, spreadsheets,
email, and the web; they may as well use MS software to do so.
Andrew Janke wrote:
> My experience in the matter is that kids have no care how they get
> their email/SMS/etc so long as they can get it.  This is to the point
> that my M$ brainwashed niece and nephew who are visiting this week
> didn't even have any clue that they were using OSX and/or Ubuntu this
> last week. All they needed to know was where the Firefox Icon was.

which would suggest that any MS "brainwashing" isn't actually
working.

-- 
	Hugh Fisher
	DCS, ANU