[K12OSN] Re: LTSP presentation to all Alberta Ed tech leaders conference

William Fragakis william at fragakis.com
Tue Oct 17 20:04:47 UTC 2006


Change will come, albeit, more slowly than you desire.

1) Vista is going to hand them a bill that will make them sit up and
notice. In our district, very few if any existing machines can run the
full blown version (Aero?) of Vista. We haven't even completely migrated
off Win 98! They may be getting free copies of Vista but they aren't
getting free PCI-E slots or 1 gb ram sticks. (OTOH, viruses and spyware
are still free.)

2) At some point, the success stories from the smaller installations
will add up and uncomfortable questions and comparisons will be made:
"Why does xyz district have twice as many PCs per student than we do?"

3) What must be done - change has to come from outside the
"establishment". Very often, it's higher government and private
officials who understand that your students need to be prepared to
compete with their peers from all over the world and 45 minutes a week
in computer lab isn't going to cut it.  Spend time lobbying them and
convincing them of the approach. Go to the boss and if that doesn't
work, go to their boss.

4) Take doubters to a school where OSS is installed. Simply, people
won't believe it till they see it. We've seen time after time people
come to our school not quite grasping the concept until they see
classrooms full of computers. Quite frankly, the servers could be
running off hamster wheels instead of Pentiums and they wouldn't care.
What they see are students in front of working computers.

5) Don't make it about the technology or the cost savings. Make it about
getting as many computers and software in front of the kids as possible.
Eyes glaze when we start talking about clients and kernels. Student
results, test scores, teacher satisfaction are what matter. Find out how
the smaller districts that do have OSS are doing in testing and compare
it to the districts with proprietary software. That's the comparison
that they can't fight.

There will be a tipping point, no doubt. OSS is fundamentally, like
education, a collaborative process.

best regards.
William Fragakis
morrisbrandon.com



On Mon, 2006-10-16 at 10:09 -0400, k12osn-request at redhat.com wrote:
> 
> Message: 9
> Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 17:38:23 -0400
> From: bear2bar at netscape.net
> Subject: Re: [K12OSN] Re: LTSP presentation to all Alberta Ed tech
>         leaders conference
> To: k12osn at redhat.com
> Message-ID: <8C8BEB9601C66EA-A64-4D4E at FWM-M10.sysops.aol.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
>   Having done battle with the Minister of Education and on down with
> all the school boards in Quebec I lend my entire support to the
> comment made. Not only are the boards "locked in" to M$ but there are
> incentives from M$ to make sure that they do not change.
>  Having experienced this personally I can say that it will take
> significant pressure to open the large boards to linux, that said the
> battle goes on...
>  
>  norbert
>     
>  -----Original Message-----
>  From: m3freak at rogers.com
>  To: k12osn at redhat.com
>  Sent: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 12:23 PM
>  Subject: Re: [K12OSN] Re: LTSP presentation to all Alberta Ed tech
> leaders conference
>  
>   On Thu, 2006-10-12 at 09:10 -0500, pogson wrote:
> > I did teach in AB briefly. It is not a very Linux-friendly province.
> The
> > educational leadership does not listen to the grassroots much and
> the
> > bosses are pro-Microsoft. AB Education gives stuff away to schools
> that
> > only works with Windows/MacOS, for instance. 
> 
> It is my humble opinion (based on personal experience, mind you) that
> getting Linux or other F/OSS into big school boards is essentially a
> lost cause.  The IT departments have too much vested interested in
> keeping Microsoft, and higher ups are too scared to implement anything
> else.  Oh sure, motions are made to investigate other options, but
> that's all they are.
> 
> I haven't heard of a single big school board in Canada switching to a
> Linux environment (be it LTSP, K12LTSP, Thinstation, etc.).  However,
> when one of them finally does, the rest will quickly follow, or as
> quickly as their budgets will allow.
> 
> Until that time, it's the small boards that will continue to change
> over.  Those boards and their students will be better off, of that I'm
> 100% sure.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Ranbir
> -- 
> Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu
> Linux 2.6.17-1.2187_FC5 i686 GNU/Linux 
> 12:14:57 up 1 day, 11:21, 2 users, load average: 0.05, 0.15, 0.16 
> 




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