Neil Schneider wrote:
I'm also thinking that if the $$$ in savings can be shown and associated with
how many teaching jobs that might save, we just might get some interest. Heck
I'm even thinking of sending another email to the governator to see if there
isn't
anybody up there trying to push some software and hardware savings down
the chain to the States school system. It is going on in Indiana already.
Good luck with that. Our experience over the years has been that they are not
really interested in our help. They don't have time for our help. And they
really wish we would stop bothering them about this helping thing.
Ayup. Basically Linux fails the "Does this make my life easier?" test
for, well, everybody associated with education.
Even worse, they now have federal mandates as to what kind of filters
and access children can have on their network. So, rogue computers and
networks are now trouble for the educational IT staff rather than help.
If there is nothing "behind" the project to help educators use the system,
then
it should be expected to fail. If they have only the interest to teach say
Microsoft
Word and have no other use for such a lab, it will fail. But will they not
understand
the money for the Windows OS licenses, the MS Office licenses, and the added
hardware to run those will equate to a good percentage of one teachers annual
salary? Maybe not but when times are tough, new ideas might become
acceptable.
It's not their money. And if you save money this year, your budget will be cut
next year.
This is the big one. Until there is such an external cut that they have
to choose between Microsoft or unemployment, there will be no change.
Seems like a reasonable argument. Our experience shows it doesn't work in
education. Free is worth less than you pay for it. We probably would do better
offering over priced consulting, lobbying for special programs costing tens of
thousands of dollars for a single source contract. That would attract the
decision makers in education.
Not really. You have to spend way to much money boozin' and schmoozin'
to win these kinds of contracts unless you have a connection to someone
to help you through.
Basically the response to whatever initiative needs to be: "Thanks.
That makes my job a lot easier with no effort from me."
Look, as a CS lecturer, I can't convince most of the other folks in the
department to use version control, automated testing, IDE's, and
virtual machines. And these things genuinely *would* make their lives
easier with just a little bit of effort.
If you can't even get the "sophisticated" folks to jump, how will you
move those for whom the benefit isn't so clear?
-a
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