[Wylug-discuss] PDA's in schools

[Richard Wade]

On Thu, January 11, 2007 05:37, Dave Fisher wrote:

> All I'm saying is that advocates (myself included) usually find it
> easier to blame 'badness' (e.g. corporations) and stupidity (e.g. of
> headmasters), than to accept the discipline and shere hard work involved
> in taking control of the situation in order to turn it around.

If we consider that the schools in question are probably running Microsoft
operating systems and applications already, then why would they purchase
Linux-based PDAs? From a very quick glance, it appears as though the
Microsoft-based PDAs would be the best fit for the schools' environment. I
don't see what the problem is with this.

If the schools were running Linux or other open source operating systems
and applications, then they would more than likely have consulted their
existing platform provider (either RedHat or Novell or A.N.Other). In this
case, they would almost certainly have been recommended to look at a
different PDA software platform which gave good integration with the
applications and systems they were running.

So the whole PDA question really boils down to the operating system and
applications being run by schools. Dave probably knows more than many
about this, but I'd guess that it's generally down to status quo in the
LEAs (i.e. we'll run the same stuff that our neighbouring schools do),
what is deemed 'safe' (e.g. 'noone ever got sacked for buying
$bigAcceptableCorporate'), and what skills they can get (e.g. getting open
source specialists willing to work in schools rather than better paid jobs
in ISPs/telcos/devcos). I'm not aware of the type of commercial support
and professional services package offered by RedHat or Novell to education
institutions, but it'd be interesting to compare with an example from
Microsoft. It'd also be interesting to see a total cost of ownership model
over, let's say, 5-8 years, which includes
hardware/network/storage/professional services/support requirements.
--
rik