Take a look at the posted response from a superintendent from a Canadian school district defending reasons why not to use FLOSS at any levels of significance.
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/2531
Clueless. It looks like Microsoft sales reps got to her first.
And what about the trend toward the LMS? I think, if we’re lucky, we will begin to see education back-pedal on that notion.
Here’s the part that makes me laugh:
“… the student must have the same system at school, from classroom to classroom, and from home.”
I think that Firefox fulfills the need for a common platform quite nicely. It is available regardless of what operating system the student might be used. It can be used to access almost any web-based services (but not all – for some reason web services based on a Microsoft IIS platform don’t seem 100% compatible). Using firefox, student’s can have access to powerful content management systems (like Drupal), connect to course management software (like Moodle), word processing, spreadsheet and graphics software.
Sadly, I don’t think that the institutional decision makers are going to look at it this way, at least not in K-12. Post-secondary seems much more willing to examine the use of non-corporate software solutions. I think that part of the problem is that many of the people who are in charge of setting up technology infrastructure are trained in a corporate IT background, where there is only one sanctioned vendor (which shall remain nameless). They support the administrative information-processing and management side of things adequately, but their ignorance of the educational needs of learners is not only glaringly obvious, but also quite possibly dangerous to the future of education in many educational jurisdictions. (Yeah – there’s a few stories behind this analysis, and quite possibly a good, long rant building up.)