Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (46 mails)

[Richard Smedley <richard.smedley03@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2006-04-17 at 17:25 +0100, Thomas Adam wrote:
> > At least, if that was the reason, they can be re-trained :-/
> 
> Not likely.  Have you any idea of the immense scale and cost, not to mention
> time that would take?  You're talking about *academics*.  These people have
> enough to do without retraining.  Heck, if you read the news, you'll know
> most of them have been on daily strikes recently over their pay with respect
> to their workload.  Adding (what I know is conceived as 'unfavourable')
> additional things like this is only going to buck the whole point and trend
> of it.

When/if in three to five years' time they move to MS Vista/ Office .NET,
then staff will need re-training anyway. That would be a good time to 
decide to move to OOo on BSD or GNU and give the same amount of
training :-)

> They are on the backend of things.  They also run Squid on RH servers (I
> should know, I helped them with a few things in the past concerning it).  But
> that's all very well (and probably expected), but it's not pushing out to
> where the real people would benefit from it:  the students.

Indeed. But this is slowly changing at many institutions.

> There is one room in the entire University which has about eight machines
> with dual-boot functionality to RH Linux.  But these are reserved for
> post-graduate studies where Masters' students learn LaTeX via it in (shudder)
> EMACS.  That's a positive thing, but limited.

At many universities LaTeX on *nix is the standard desktop
for maths undergraduates (eg Keele). The situation seems to
vary widely between research universities (admittedly
former Polytechnics tend not to use LaTeX - but more than
half of FE colleges use Moodle: FOSS is used everyhere in
some form).

> > And as Ian Lynch says elsewhere in this thread, change is a slow
> > process, but it is happening. :-)
> 
> Yes, I am aware of that.  I am not as naive to assume it isn't, but when you
> see just how much resistance there is behind the scenes to even *small*
> things like this, it does get a little disheartening.

I can imagine :-/

> What needs to be done is for some unity amongst schools to happen.  I know
> this is being done slowly, and for that I am greatful.  It's all very well
> potentially looking at Linux's use in higher education (University level),
> but if Linux is to have any impact at all on people, I would surmise it needs
> to be one at the Primary and Secondary stages of education.  (And to this end
> I know things are happening to try and get that to be the case).

> > Indeed - although BECTa have yet to reply to m questions,
> > and BECTa's website is lamentable when it comes to mentioning
> > FOSS solutions, it seems that BECTa are actually quite taken 
> > with FOSS - I hope we see some practical fall-out from
> > this interest soon, but I won't hold my breath, just in
> > case ;-)
> 
> Well, do keep us posted as to this.

I'm sure we'll be hearing more on this list :)

> > Thank you for all of your input, Thomas. Nice to see the 
> > traffic on this list, too :)
> 
> You're welcome, and I agree.  Of all the mailing-lists I am on (and have been
> on) this is one of them where I genuinely feel as though I make a difference.

It's the only *nix edu list to have stayed the course in
this country :)
We were lucky Roger and SuSE were so open-minded about
this list not being distro-specific :-)

 - Richard

-- 

Richard Smedley,                                                  RichardS@xxxxxxxx
Free Software Evangelist,
Midland Open Source Technology.                             http://www.most.org.uk/
                                       ``Software Freedom for the Voluntary Sector''