Britain Advises Against Vista, Office 2007 for Schools 300
An anonymous reader writes "The British government's educational IT authority has issued a report advising schools in the country not to upgrade their classroom or office systems to Windows Vista or Office 2007. According to this InformationWeek story, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency says costs for Vista and Office 2007 'are significant and the benefits remain unclear.' Instead, Becta is advising British schools to take a long look at Linux and open source suites like OpenOffice.org."
Well Done chaps (Score:5, Interesting)
Where it fits in (Score:5, Interesting)
The interesting thing is the timing.
Every single technology-aware teacher in Britain is at the BETT show at the moment - the trade fair for the educational IT industry. And the Eee PC is the star of the show. Rebadged it may be under various resellers' names, but it's the same old Linux-based Eee PC, complete with OpenOffice and - more significantly - 802.11g and Firefox, ready to access any number of educational webapps. Of course, it doesn't hurt that in a time of reduced Government spending, the Eee is also ridiculously cheap.
So along comes Becta and says "actually, you should look at free alternatives to Windows/Office". When they said that three years ago, everyone went "uh-huh" and carried on buying what they'd always bought. This time, there's an alternative. This is the first serious challenge to Microsoft in UK schools since the demise of the Acorn Archimedes.
Schools may not be the only problem - a UK view (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-7210652,00.html/ [guardian.co.uk]
The supported use of FOSS software could make a radical difference. Recycled hardware running free operating systems and applications could reduce the cost of student PCs to almost zero, and truly put computing within the reach of every child.
I have several computers at home that my children use for school-related activities. TOTAL cost of each (hardware, OS, office suite, image manipulation) is that of the monitor. These boxes are absolutely fit for purpose, and would otherwise be landfill.
My children regard computing at home as a commodity, which funnily enough, it is, if you step outside the wierd monopolistic force-bubble that is our educational computing practice.
The only excuse for the situation in our schools, the only reasoning that could possibly hold water, is 'They should use what they'll use at work'. This is short, snappy, and is accepted easily by those only peripherally involved in the question. I don't think it bears examination though. Some thoughts:
A trite one:
I don't believe any otherwise suitable candidate has ever been passed over because they were trained on the wrong spreadsheet, but if they were they should count themselves lucky to have escaped. They are more likely to be passed over if they didn't do well on the coursework because their parents couldn't afford to give them access to a PC.
A less trite one:
Office 2007's new UI, if it achieves the any sort of foothold on corporate desktops, will render all experience of word processing at schools until now totally obsolete. Or will it? No of course not - conversion courses will help the latest intake drive the latest software.
If this change can be handled between versions of the same product, then exactly the same case can be made for conversion between products. So (for example):
Train on OpenOffice (or other product if it's free at least for educational and domestic use, and runs on a free operating system.) With the money you save on buying no Microsoft Office or Windows licences build and deploy short conversion courses for people about to leave school, getting them up to speed on the current commercial favourites. This would spit out kids with more up-to-date experience of the commercial softwarescape than the current policy.
The benefits of this approach come from breaking the lock-in: commoditisation spreading children's access to computing in a way that otherwise only massive subsidy could (fail to) achieve; our children, their teachers and parents able to take advantage of the freely-given, high-quality work of a global community, while ending their education better trained on the latest commercial tools than they are today.
Re:Negotiation ploy (Score:5, Interesting)
From the report, only 20% of computers in the schools are even capable of running Vista and Office.
Re:Not that surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
To cut a long story short, the school now has a custom-built server running Linux (CentOS 5) with RAID 1 mirrored drives in trayless caddies AND a spare 'cold swap' chassis that the school computer technician can use if the main server dies (which can then be repaired at leisure). Total cost was around £500
So there is hope.
OpenEducationDisc (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not a good start of the year for MS (Score:3, Interesting)
However will this year continue, for MS? I hear that a lot of disillusioned users of Vista just decided to get macs. A little number, perhaps, but still an erosion of Microsoft marketshare. And then there's Firefox that's increasing its marketshare every month a little bit.
Good for the US economy!!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
I would like to point out that Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Novell, FSF, Linux Foundation are all based in the US. So good for US.
Re:Is OpenOffice.org really any better? (Score:4, Interesting)
Office isn't very good, and for OOo to do *worse* than it is a pretty miserable achievement. We need to get some fresh faces involved with the project to either clean things up (a la Firefox), or start from scratch to build an application that's got an overall "friendlier" appearance.
"Lack of features" isn't even the biggest issue here. Despite being much "simpler", I find AbiWord to be vastly superior to OOo, even though its featureset is comparatively limited.
The GIMP has been stumbling along for years upon years, and has never really managed to reach a state of usefulness to designers. However, in a very short period of time, two guys wrote an f---ing amazing shareware "Photoshop substitute [pixelmator.com]" for Mac OS. Granted, it's not photoshop, but unlike The GIMP, or OOo, it's fast, has a good UI, and even though it lacks some of Photoshop's more advanced features, it's more than adequate for my needs.
It's not open-source or cross-platform, but seriously..... two guys wrote it in their spare time!
I'll also ignore that comment about teaching primary schoolers LaTeX. I'm a reasonably savvy university student, and I find LaTeX absolutely unusable. It's got to be one of the most difficult and convoluted pieces of software in widespread use. It's great in concept, but make one tiny syntax error, and the compiler blows up with a 2-page long indecipherable error message. Most C compliers have better error handling.
Re:Is OpenOffice.org really any better? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's what I do routinely for relatives ; want a word processor ? Sure, here is my OO.o CD, I'll install it no problem, my pleasure. Oh, you meant MS Office ? I can install it for sure, but you hand me the money first so I can go and buy the boxed version. Find a WHAT ? Nope, sorry, no way, I'm not breaking laws for you. OO.o will do ? Fine, let's go.
So far, all the persons I equiped with OO.o have stuck with it. None have reverted to MS-Office. Maybe they resent me, but that's a proof that they didn't really needed the real thing. And if you ask me, most weren't even needing a full Office suite in the first place. But somehow after a while they grow accustomed to OO.o and wouldn't change for fear of losing documents. And they really get quickly the 'export to PDF' because they're sure that all their contacts will at least read what they typed, with no final-line-jumping-on-a-new-page-depending-on-the-default-printer-driver-choice quirk.
Re:Is OpenOffice.org really any better? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd be very interested to hear people's thoughts on this because I'm guessing it will bring out all sorts of interesting suggestions for improvements that have never occurred me.
Ribbon (Score:2, Interesting)
Really, I should've mentioned Adobe's recent products, which are more of a direct rip-off than the iWorks stuff. I guess I'm just more sensitized to iWorks since I've been using it (and been very impressed by it).
Re:Is OpenOffice.org really any better? (Score:3, Interesting)
on a side note, the number of kids bringing in odf documents has been slowly but surely increasing. just something that i've been finding interesting.
porl
Re:Negotiation ploy (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, can we have 'obvious reaction' mod points.
This is as insightful as banging on about a Beowulf cluster.
It's a sensible report about real stuff.
Why should my kid get taught that computer == Microsoft? She uses openoffice, firefox etc at home and gets on fine for her work. Why should her school haemorrhage money at Vista when it is not necessary?
They've got better things to spend money on. Like teaching the teachers how to use Ubuntu
Re:Is OpenOffice.org really any better? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the biggest disconnect with MS Word is what it's capable of compared to what it's good at. I constantly see people trying to make MS Word do things it doesn't do particularly well and getting frustrated in the process.
Credit where it's due: MS Word is a good word processing engine. You can type things, check your spelling (it's often right), check your grammar (it's often wrong), and print. These are good things that MS Word does well, as long as your document isn't too long.
MS Word is capable of tracking changes in a document so you can know who made what edits and when. This does not make it a document versioning system, yet that is often how I see it used. It's a nice feature for a writer or a small workgroup but entirely ineffective for a larger group or over a longer time. And it will bite you hard if you send documents externally in native MS Office formats without killing all the evidence of previous edits.
MS Word is capable of generating tables and embedding graphics or spreadsheet objects. It's just not very good at it. Between different users on different systems (or the same user on the same system) it seems to have its own mind about how things should be displayed. Anything embedded can change on a whim, and will change provided you open the document often enough. Which feeds right into the next point.
MS Word is capable of doing document layout. But it's a complete nightmare. Lines disappear and reappear; text boxes change size and shape for no apparent reason; fonts randomly switch from 10-pt sans to 12-pt serif because they feel like it; auto-numbering decides it knows better than you what numbers go where; and objects resize and replace themselves entirely according to their own rules (which are confidential and proprietary).
MS Word knows better than you what you want to do with it, and if you want to something else, well, you're obviously mistaken. It really makes me miss the days of WordPerfect 5. I appreciated and made good use of the fact that I could see the codes embedded in the text, could tell from the codes when something would be bold or italic and not have to worry about text randomly changing format later
Re:Please Compare "Like" for "Like" (Score:3, Interesting)
You think people sit around writing macros for themselves? Maybe some, but every company i've worked for in the last 10 years has had (literally) hundreds, even thousands of documents on file servers with embedded macros for use by the entire company.
The Accounting departments are particularly notorious for this, as are Human resources. They have create macro embedded documents for vacation request forms, health care and insurance forms, Expense reports, travel requests, Yearly occupational reviews, etc...
One company I worked for had macro'd excel sheets for shipping and receiving, inventory, RMA and other processes.
You're absolutely right that there is a minority of specialized MS Office users who *WRITE* those macro's, but legions of everyday people use them. It's this kind of thinking that keeps OpenOffice where it is. "Oh, only 10% of people might use that, so we can ignore it". Ignore enough 10%'s and you don't have much left.
Vista and Office 2007 (Score:2, Interesting)