RE: [suse-linux-uk-schools] OSE Conference
Hear, hear! Stephen Keene ICT Co-ordinator Bury Grammar School (Girls) Bridge Road Bury Lancs BL9 1YH 0161 797 2808 I'm sorry I can't let that slip past me.... 1st: Any pupil leaving school today should have had some 'Windows' experience. However, I don't believe that ALL their experience should be MS Windows. To get on my band box 'We are educational institutions, not training institutions' Why don't Colleges and Universtities teach MCSE skills rather than GNVQ and degrees? (Cost of course would be considerably more....due to the cost of MCSE trainers...) Those who know me, will realise that I am not a blind supporter of Acorn, and I have been pretty fierce with my criticism of them going back many years... However, I could teach 'Computing' and quite a lot of 'IT skills' today using ZX81, or BBC B computers. No, there would be some tasks that would be better done with more modern machines - and some that would be impossible - but not many! The basics of programming - modular code, variables, loops, conditions etc are no more easily taught and learnt on an Acorn, PC or Linux. The appearance of Windows311 with different icons in different positions is completely different from W95 interface. Are you saying that schools that used W311 from 1990 to 1995 were up the wrong tree (because the tree hadn't yet been invented)? IT is very poor in many schools (read the inspection reports) and the MS/RM marketing machine made this an Acorn/MS issue. In fact the issue has always been one of the lack of expertise and staff. There are still some schools today (not ours - for what we believe are good reasons) that use entirely Acorn machines - and the IT is simply exemplary in every way - and their results prove it. With the potential break up of MS I suspect we will see a number of different 'desktops' appearing common as LINUX run MS applications using WINE, Acorn using Citrix, Litestep and BeOS etc. MS Office is a great product - but whether or not Star Office couldn't do everything that's required and save a great deal of money is one which BECTA should be actively investigating and promoting. I am particularly concerned about the MS licencing scheme which demands ALL computers in the school to be licenced for every qualifying MS application regardless or not of whether Linux or BEOS or any future OS will run on them - as this 'locks' schools into MS products in a rather different way that schools were 'locked' into Acorn products. -- Alan Davies Head of Computing Birkenhead School
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S Keene