[geeks] Q: Regarding Linux in K-12 education

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 03:38:42PM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> In my community there has been a long-simmering debate on migrating the 
> local school district to Linux (all 1,700 computers, serving almost 5,000 
> users, including administration users). I have found myself arguing 
> AGAINST this idea for various reasons, not the least of which is a dearth 
> of applications on Linux to replace the current apps that run on 
> Windows/OS X. My question to the group is this - does anyone know of any 
> public school district of similar (or greater) size that has gone 
> completely FOSS at least for classroom use?

I have never heard of any. Here in Israel, we have had wide scale deployment
of FOSS, often totally unannounced in schools, but never of Linux versus
windows. 

It has always been the replacement of Microsoft Office with Open Office,
and IE with FireFox. This was done at the elementary school level. 

High School is a different issue. Now to be honest, my information is slanted,
as my middle son goes to the best public high school in the country and my
wife works at one of the top 3 private ones. 

My son uses Microsoft Office and IE at school, but he uses OO and both IE and 
FireFox at home. 

I'm sure there are plenty of computers around running Linux, and many 
running BSD (probably the ARM port of Darwin if you get my meaning), but
not in general classroom or student use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyada

My wife's school uses Microsoft Officeand IE. They are an international
school and offer the IB (International Baccalaureate) degree, an
internationally recognized certificate, equivalent to the US GED (but at
a much higher level).

In any case, I suspect that lesser ranked schools, with lower IT budgets,
and less endowed benefactors,  use OO and FireFox, but none of them 
use Linux.

http://www.aisj.co.il/

If you follow down to the description of the IB, they have a requirement
for profiency in "Mathematics and Computer Science", but AFAIK it does
not include Linux.

IMHO it's a bunch of crap. Not only is Linux not suited for large scale 
desktop deployment for users of this level, it's not of any use when they
get out of school. Look at the employment ads in your local papers. See
how may say "experience in Micrsoft Office" versus how many say "experience
in Open Offfice" or Linux. 

To be really blunt, the only large scale deployment of Linux systems in
the commercial world was the early netbooks and they all have long since
fade into oblivion. I'm look at a cheap "ruggedized" netbook for my
youngest son, (900mHz celleron, 512m RAM, 30g HD), and while it would be
suited for Linux, it comes with Windows XP. 

I'm sure I could install Linux on it but I would not get a refund for the
XP license, and my son would not use it. He knows OO and FireFox, but
not Linux at all, and would have to spend months to learn it.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the situation. 
i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.