[SLUG] Linux In Schools

[Rob Hall]

The whole debate about Linux in schools is an interesting one. I get the
impression that most teaching staff (and I can only talk about my
personal experiences in Secondary, Sixth Form and Primary) are afraid to
either use ICT generally and are completely thrown even if their
screensaver cuts in! This then gets passed down through the school
management and they make the decision to throw money after the M$
solution because it is "familiar to the teachers" - nothing to do with
its suitability for use. This despite the fact that the same teachers
can, with some training, use flaky specialist software on a M$ platform
and could probably do the same things under Linux.

I would love to see our college use Linux more, particularly in a
fileserver role (I've got access to a whole bunch of older dual PII
machines which would make lovely fileservers and we are running out of
space with the new DIDA courses) but it has been turned down with a flat
no. I think that network management staff are also afraid of Linux if
they have been hammered out of the M$ box as it is something that they
just don't understand.

I hope that there is a bit of a sea change and that people like myself
(M$ or Linux, bovvers me not) can get the message across to senior
managers that we can reuse resources and we don't just have to keep
chucking money at hardware - bung a bit more towards adding to the
training of MCSE cloned Network Managers and the teachers so they too
can see the Linux light and we might just get there.

I am tempted to run some INSET with a room full of Fedora Core 5
machines just to show them that they can do pretty much what they do day
in day out but for a lot less money.

Now about that PII cluster that I dreamt up the other day......

Rob Hall