On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 7:01 AM, Alan Bourke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Scary amounts of ignorance out there. Surely there are IT teachers in > that school that could enlighten her ? >
I think we can all report different local issues with our school systems. I'll tell you a bit about what I know about New Hampshire schools. Most are underfunded and overwhelmed with "No Child left Behind" and funding cuts for core programs. Increasing social problems (drug abuse, unstable households, unemployment, medical coverage) are often dumped on the schools to cope with. Most schools have computer labs and computers in the classrooms, but typically only one or two techies per school (or per school district) who are swamped with: - breaking down equipment. much out-dated or of poor quality - school administrative automation systems support - increasing unfunded state and federal mandates - school learning systems that require maintenance and tweaking - viruses, trojans and malware - hacking, both amateur and pro - a naive demand from parents that their children "learn" MSOffice and Windows rather than learn to think and to use tools. There are bright spots. The Moodle project got a major add-in with MooFolio (http://www.k12opensource.org/spdc/moofolio/moofolio.html), developed with grant money and sponsored by the Seacoast Professional Development Center, which fulfills a NH state law that students go through school with an "electronic portfolio" of their work. The NEFOSS conferences (http://fossed.blogspot.com/) (formerly named NELS) brings a couple days of educational credits to teachers and technical administrators and provides a wealth of information on FOSS to the student-teachers. The K12LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) lets you take one powerful machine and run a lab full of vintage machines (PII-300 laptops w/ no HDD, for example) running images off the main server and allowing centralized administration -- shades of mini-computers! The Software Freedom Day project (http://softwarefreedomday.org/) was started as a New Hampshire organization, and reaches out to the public, parents, students and teachers included, and lets people try distributions like Edubuntu (http://edubuntu.org) focused on students. The New Hampshire Society for Technology in Education (http://www.nhste.org) runs several education programs for teachers throughout the year. I've met a number of admins through the local LUGs and I can tell you most of the backbones and routers and backend servers are running Linux. Front-end machines are more likely Windows and Macs, for a number of reasons, so there may be more ignorance in the classrooms than in the backrooms. There's a lot of reasons for that. To paint unfairly with a broad brush, older teachers were taught to teach in the 60s and 70s and were people-people not techies. These folks haven't been given the time, opportunity nor motivation to integrate computers into their classrooms. As a younger, Facebook-using, IM-ing generation moves into teaching, I expect we'll see that change. But ignorance can never be completely stamped out. But, I think, with the declining economy, there's never been a better opportunity to bring up a question of Open Source usage up to your local teachers, techies and administrators. You may find an audience willing to listen. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
