Open Source Schools' Miles Berry offers a radical response to the ICT funding cuts

[SYNACK]

@pete the 'bootable playground' for teaching IT is exactly what is needed. After that we need the quality tecahers and a sane study guide but nothin can happen until that network room is liberated!! Thanks

You've got your eggs laying chickens, if the network is 'liberated' before the skill and plans exist to use it there will just be a mountain of trouble instead. The networks are the way they are because of laws and policies.

 

I don't understand why you seem intent on getting angry at the messangers rather than the source which is the govenment and school leadership. Getting mad at people who for a large part don't have the authority to make that kind of change (even if they did agree with it) does not make logical sense.

 

There just seems to be a bit much axe grinding doing on here for comfort. Everyone is entitled to their own views but please rage against the machine and not the individual cogs that are stuck in the middle.

[GrumbleDook]

@spannerman2

If you can tell me how not to be in breach of the DPA when relaxing the network when you don't have resources (money, skilled people and/or time) to make significant changes to the infrastructure then I am sure we would all be interested.

If you could even give me a complete walkthrough (including the change management needed) to move from A to B that would also be really good ... after all, I am sure you wouldn't want school support staff who are following your mantra to get too worried about just flicking a switch without telling anyone what the changes are and how to deal with it?

[spannerman2]

@localzuk just read your latest reply..I'll reiterate..the school is there to serve the purpose of teaching and learning. If the needs legal or otherwise of any IT structure obstruct this then a different model is needed to enable it.

I have been a pro-sysadmin so I know exactly what the problems are that's why I know the current model (that supports your job) is the wrong one for educating.

Maybe you would be happier in a bank?

[jamesb]

I have the very strong feeling spannerman2 didn't get on with the technical staff while he was a teacher/sysadmin. There're definite hints of an axe to grind, and a lot of vitriol against network managers/technicians being spouted.

[pete]

@pete the 'bootable playground' for teaching IT is exactly what is needed. After that we need the quality tecahers and a sane study guide

 

You have a poor grasp of how projects get funded in schools at the school level. White elephants abound at the regional and national level, but on a per-school basis it's much more pragmatic.

 

Decent teachers create the demand for things - you need them first. Apathetic or indifferent teachers won't push for it, so any sane headteacher will look at the opportunity cost and rightly say "No-one has asked for this or given me a business reason to go ahead with the project, whereas $other_dept have been pushing for $equivalent_costing_thing for years and can show how it will improve $whatever_metric (behaviour, results, individual attainment, quality of teaching or whatever)."

 

but nothin can happen until that network room is liberated!!

 

Liberated from who? I can't help but think of the revolutionary who overthrows a regime, believes it's the dawn of a new era and then gets upset because people are complaining their toilets aren't flushing and the post office appears to be on fire rather than agreeing how wonderful it is now.

 

Stuff still needs to be maintained in good order. That lab will be used for conventional lessons who couldn't give a toss about anything other than (say) French verbs. They just want a reliable, working computer that will behave the same as it did yesterday.

 

So someone needs to design and maintain whatever method ensures whatever the 9am class do with the kit doesn't impair the 10am class' use of the room. You can arrive at it in different ways, but being able to deliver that is paramount. Time spent faffing because "X" isn't working is lost teaching time unless you're specifically covering "X" and how to de-faff it.

[spannerman2]

@grumbledook Fair point, i am working quite hard on just the thing you describe..a walk through for my imagined network nirvana

Computerworld will allow me to use my blog to set this out in posts over the coming weeks. It will be shot down in flames no doubt but I am really encouraged by the positivity of some of the comments on this thread..I just feel this is the right direction to go.

 

ps I don't want to shoot the messengers, the hard working network tech is just a cog in the wheel set in motion by the syllabus makers and gov-no-brainers but revolutions come always from below and the techs are the ones who will actually make stuff happen, so stirred up techs are in a better place than sleepy hollow techs.

[localzuk]

@localzuk just read your latest reply..I'll reiterate..the school is there to serve the purpose of teaching and learning. If the needs legal or otherwise of any IT structure obstruct this then a different model is needed to enable it.

I have been a pro-sysadmin so I know exactly what the problems are that's why I know the current model (that supports your job) is the wrong one for educating.

Maybe you would be happier in a bank?

 

Idealism rarely works. Look at communism, look at patriotism, look at any number of 'ideals' that have tried to be put into place by people who ignore the details whilst trying to push a 'big picture'.

 

You are quite happy with getting rid of the legal structure that exists, but ignore the consequences to issues such as child protection, data protection, health and safety etc...

 

You also ignore the knock on effects of a 'liberalised' network. The increased maintenance required, meaning more damage to teaching time etc... Don't give me 'there are tools to do it which reduce this' but this doesn't cover things like application deployment, group policy updating etc... which are made more complex in these situations.

 

So, without any actual implementation ideas, your idealistic 'utopian' view of a network is pointless i'm afraid.

[SYNACK]

@grumbledook Fair point, i am working quite hard on just the thing you describe..a walk through for my imagined network nirvana

Computerworld will allow me to use my blog to set this out in posts over the coming weeks. It will be shot down in flames no doubt but I am really encouraged by the positivity of some of the comments on this thread..I just feel this is the right direction to go.

I look foward to seeing how you go about addressing the very valid real world concerns brought up by this thread in your future blog posting, the solutions - if feasible - should be very interesting.

ps I don't want to shoot the messengers, the hard working network tech is just a cog in the wheel set in motion by the syllabus makers and gov-no-brainers but revolutions come always from below and the techs are the ones who will actually make stuff happen, so stirred up techs are in a better place than sleepy hollow techs.

I'm not sure insulting what the very techs you wish to recruit do and their motives is the best way to win hearts and minds for the army you wish to raise to further your revolution. I think that the continuation of your blog series with real word solutions and practices may hold merit though at least in part. Getting a solid proposal on the subject together which addresses the realities of the situations is almost certainly the best way to further your viewpoint and aims.

 

Oh and please try to keep vendor hate out of it, the Windows network comment was a bit much as many people run perfectly viable networks on it. Besides we prefer our vendor hate in nice little two party wars in the IT world, please adress you views in a X vs Y form (just kidding about this last part).

Edited September 2, 2010 by SYNACK

[pete]

but revolutions come always from below

 

No, revolutions come from pony-tailed, latte-drinking $word_I_can't_use_on_here who use those below them as cannon fodder while conveniently being elsewhere when there's dirty work to be done.

 

Said PTLDMFs elevate themselves at the expense of the cannon fodder and soon grow fat and frown on anything revolutionary because it risks their newly attained positions. After hooking on parasite-like to the old regime, they'll defend it against all comers.

 

If there's a sysadmin uprising, everyone's getting thrown on the pyre. Especially consultants

[spannerman2]

harsh

[GrumbleDook]

I have the very strong feeling spannerman2 didn't get on with the technical staff while he was a teacher/sysadmin. There're definite hints of an axe to grind, and a lot of vitriol against network managers/technicians being spouted.

 

Not really ... considering the knowledge he has about a wide range of things and some of the stuff he has spoken about in other places it is not about axe grinding, more frustration at inflexibility that happens in some schools (yes, sometimes due to the support staff, but also due to other teachers and to manglement!)

[GrumbleDook]

@grumbledook Fair point, i am working quite hard on just the thing you describe..a walk through for my imagined network nirvana

Computerworld will allow me to use my blog to set this out in posts over the coming weeks. It will be shot down in flames no doubt but I am really encouraged by the positivity of some of the comments on this thread..I just feel this is the right direction to go.

 

ps I don't want to shoot the messengers, the hard working network tech is just a cog in the wheel set in motion by the syllabus makers and gov-no-brainers but revolutions come always from below and the techs are the ones who will actually make stuff happen, so stirred up techs are in a better place than sleepy hollow techs.

 

I look forward to reading it ... and being someone who does knock it ... but with the constructive criticism of a realist, not of a blocker. It is usually a middle-ground that evolves anyway so we always need one or two on the outside, screaming in at the masses. Just be prepared that whilst you are looking at technical change to free up technology for teachers, if it does not at least link in with change in the approach from school leaders and support for staff with adapting to the changing world it will fall.

[spannerman2]

Even more radical response to cuts, read my blog Spend more, not less on school ICT - Spannerman's Edublog

we should spend much more

[PiqueABoo]

Umm.. I'm not attempting to be hostile but it's Friday so I'm tired/grumpy and I'm seriously struggling to extract the point from that. Best I can manage is "we need to spend more to get [unspecified magic IT], otherwise we'll be stuck with 10 year-old ICT concepts". Is that close? And if so, well first I think most of them are much older than that, and second what are the significant new concepts we're not paying for? Take away the shrinking geometries and subsequent increase in portability, strip off the 21st-Century marketing, and where is all that innovation?

[X-13]

What sort of knowledge would be required to manage this sort of thing? I would love to move to open-source but after reading this I'm doubting my ability.

 

*note I said knowledge, not qualifications. I've had enough of exams.

[dhicks]

What sort of knowledge would be required to manage this sort of thing?

 

As others in this (rather long) thread have pointed out, you probably shouldn't aim for a "big bang" switch to Linux workstations over one summer holiday or something, you should aim for gradual change - aim to introduce self-contained "appliance" applications and servers in to your system. Examples I can think of offhand: file servers (Samba), print management (PyKota, Samba again), Internet gateway / filtering (Squid) and email / webmail (SquirrelMail, RoundCube, etc). You can just plonk a server (or VM, obviously) on your network and set it up to do whatever task your aiming to get done, with no rush or change needed to any other parts of your system. You'll find that there's already a whole bunch of such appliances alread available and ready to go (actually, commercial products often have an open source version at their heart, and if you search carefully you can generally get most of the commercial functionality for free), often packaged as VM images.

[X-13]

Thanks, dhicks.

 

I just got one HT to agree to letting me but an open source computer in the staff room for teachers to play with, so I'll guess I'll see how it goes from there.

[dhicks]

I just got one HT to agree to letting me but an open source computer in the staff room for teachers to play with, so I'll guess I'll see how it goes from there.

 

Just having one computer with different software on, open source or otherwise, isn't going to be much use to anyone. There's a bunch of Windows-based open source / free applications which come in handy in schools (Paint.NET, Audacity, GIMP, Freemind, etc) - your best bet is probably to install the contents of the Open CD on all your workstations. I doubt there's much point in a Linux-based desktop machine running different software to every other machine - better to spend your efforts installing a server and sorting out some web-based applications that can be used throughout the whole school.

[X-13]

Just having one computer with different software on, open source or otherwise, isn't going to be much use to anyone. There's a bunch of Windows-based open source / free applications which come in handy in schools (Paint.NET, Audacity, GIMP, Freemind, etc) - your best bet is probably to install the contents of the Open CD on all your workstations. I doubt there's much point in a Linux-based desktop machine running different software to every other machine - better to spend your efforts installing a server and sorting out some web-based applications that can be used throughout the whole school.

 

This is a test. I'm not telling the staff I plan to switch it all over yet.

 

This is being done under the guise of seeing if they like the software and think it could be useful for lessons.

 

I'm going to see what comments/problems staff have and work out a plan of attack from there.

 

 

Before they know it... it'll all be FOSS.

 

[gshaw]

Most of the open source apps have Portable equivalents anyway so just whack those on a share, add shortcuts to your redirected Start Menu and away you go then when you build your next image put them all on (or deploy via your distribution tool of choice)

[X-13]

Most of the open source apps have Portable equivalents anyway so just whack those on a share, add to your redirected Start Menu and away you go then when you build your next image put them all on (or deploy via your distribution tool of choice)

 

Aha... Didn't know about that.

 

I'm going to bring that up with the HT tomorrow.

[gshaw]

Aha... Didn't know about that.

 

I'm going to bring that up with the HT tomorrow.

 

PortableApps.com - Portable software for USB, portable and cloud drives

 

You don't need the launcher if you don't want it, just run the EXE

[GrumbleDook]

One of teh strategies for planned migrations to OSS is to have a few test machines which run on Windows OS but have the proprietary and OSS equivalents of various software packages. Have a few handouts explaining the similarities between the two (eg MS Office and OOo) and ask people to evaluate them. Have some test files around for editing with Inkscape or Audacity ... it helps to break the barrier down of why people don't want to use OSS stuff.

 

The OS it runs on is not that important to the basic user in many cases ... they just want to know how to do certain tasks and which apps to do them in.

 

If you move to *nix then again, it is just about helping people find their way around, but I would get people to use OSS apps first.

 

Stress the similarities in the applications though ... and how easy it is to swap from one to the others ... this fits in with the idea of transferable skills and reduces another barrier you may have (too hard to change).

[X-13]

Grumble, that was what I was planning to do. The OS change would be a final thing, more as an added cost reduction.

 

Thin clients is what I want ideally, we just don't have the budget to replace everything. [Everything is old, slow, second hand/donated RM all in ones.]

[dhicks]

Thin clients is what I want ideally, we just don't have the budget to replace everything. [Everything is old, slow, second hand/donated RM all in ones.]

 

Those RM all-in-one cases are well-designed, and they do take standard motherboards - you could fit new motherboards to all your machines. As I've said in several other threads just recently, making an old computer in to a thin client won't improve graphics performance - you still need reasonably modern, capable graphics locally to render things like YouTube video and so forth. If you're going to have a relativly capable processor and graphics locally then you really might as well run web browsing locally, too. A Linux distribution with a browser and RDesktop should still (I think) be small enough to boot via PXE, so you could have diskless clients and just boot from the network.