Social and emotional growth are inherent components of the traditional private boarding school environment, there is no structured emotional growth component. Students are assigned advisors who offer support and guidance however they do not serve as co…

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I’ve been using K12LTSP in classrooms for over a year now. I set up a terminal server and 5 thin clients, did my site. Anyway, I think that Linux is a viable replacement for Windows and (and here I recognize my zealotry) I don’t understand how anyone uses it for useful work when the virus/worm problem is as bad as it seems to be. One of the coolest things is that wherever a kid sits, all their stuff, their files, bookmarks and so on, are there when they log in.

The issue of servers, especially file servers, also gets me riled up. If students can’t easily save their files on a file server, they won’t. Using a computer in a lab is a real drag. I say that we take away the tech’s hard drives and make them use the exact same configuration as the students do. Within weeks everyone would have seemless file sharing.

Yule, I am hearing your concerns about some schools not changing, and one of the things I have analyzed recently is that there are those that consider some school techs to be frozen in some sort of proprietary wasteland … MS training occured sometime prior to the dot.com bust, and for many … that was the jist of the training one will get. If a Windows NT server works … it’s running, you know it well … why change it (the rationale may be)? I guess it’s a combination of factors that decide what technologies are adopted in schools … admin, teachers, tech. preference … and unfortunately, lesser so the students. And of course, there’s the old rhetoric … “no one gets fired for buying IBM”, and like thinking, that makes innovation too risky, and certainly not supported.

My opinion … schools need R&D to some level. They need knowledgeable, flexible techies who can work with visionary teachers.

Current system:
Visionary Teacher: “I’d like to do THIS … is it possible?”
Techie: “No, we cant’ do that … it’s too risky and insecure, and we can’t do it on our current system”.

Future system:
Visionary Teacher: “I’d like to do THIS … is it possible?”
Techie:”Well, I’ve never tried anything like that, but I know it’s possible. I will see if I can get support and advice from my trusted network of peers, and find out what’s possible. Are you able to help me understand how this might look in the actual classroom, and therefore, help me tweak it?”

I’m not trying to put all the blame on the techs. There are various factors … including fact that we often don’t have “visionary” teachers that are literate enough with technology to even know what questions to ask. I’m just trying to demonstrate one particular instance. Obviously, it’s much more complex.

Couros Blog » Blog Archive » What Education Can Learn From Open Source [...]

I’m reading your entry in conjunction with Teach and Learn Online ( http://teachandlearnonline.blogspot.com/ ), aka Leigh Blackall in Australia, who today has a post about firewalls and security (see http://teachandlearnonline.blogspot.com/2005/08/break-down-fire-wall.html ) and how/why this is having an effect (negative) on the education system. I know that in our distance ed. school’s environment, the firewall/ security issue has been a big problem — for a brief period last year, the school’s server was pirated by a porn site because the firewall went down temporarily — and I feel that somehow the kowtowing to Microsoft products and to proprietary software generally is somehow connected to this paranoia around security. Falsely, no doubt, since nothing is as vulnerable as the MS stuff, but somehow the perception is that if you paid a whole pile of money for something, it’s “safer” than the materials available for free.

Rob, I can only hope that your optimism is rewarded and that Linux / open source will win out in the hearts and minds of all those techies and others currently in the system, trained on Windows, and willing to stay in that fold because it’s so comfortable for them… I see all this energy around OSS and innovation in the blogs/ sites I visit, but I see very little of it on the ground, in the distance ed. school my kids are using here.

Despite this inequity, I’m optimistic that the momentum of Linux in Europe, Asia and Africa will create the incentive for training in Linux to be included in post-secondary IT curriculum.