lca2011 – Fri session 5 – Open source in education

Open Source in Education – ASHS One Year On by Patrick Brennan

  • Followup to last year
  • greenfield school – flagship school – no classrooms, learning commons, 2 floors of open plan
  • 2011 enrolments 740 – 16-18 year olds
  • open for teaching 4 days per work, 5th day do “impact projects” eg work to raise money for charity, local video storage system
  • Ubuntu Desktops, teacher laptops
  • Xero for account
  • Mandriva Servers
  • Terminal servers for edge cases
  • Cloud Apps
  • Single sign on
  • Windows remains for building management
  • Education space Microsoft ffocussed
  • Heavily subsidised by the MoE and Microsoft
  • Established Norms / established design refs
  • Perception that students should train with “real world” tools
  • Free as in beer vs free as in freedom
  • Licensing costs – NZ Govt / MS Subsidised – My Opinion underhanded monopoly
  • Learning tax – expensive for software at home – leads to piracy
  • Web filtering
  • MOE funds watchdog to 10Mb/s
  • $5000 to install Cisco device supporting 100Mb/s
  • Coast to support watchdog to 1Gb/swith existing FW $0
  • “Dill” provide no installed OS on desktops
  • Teachers working out how to do with tools, sharing techniques on eduwiki with other schools
  • No learning tax yields freedom
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