On Fri, 2003-07-04 at 00:41, David Bowles wrote:
Electronic answer papers (forwarded automatically to exam boards) are still a very long way off. Far too many schools have few machines that are powerful or reliable enough to use for this purpose!
Not if they used Linux thin clients - but that's another issue.
My feeling is that exam boards need to challenged now, so as to ensure they are not tempted to go down the proprietary route at some future date.
It was claimed that some exams were biased toward MS products. I don't deal with exams in detail so personally I don't know. The purpose of this thread was to get those who believe this to provide the evidence to Richard. One key test would be for someone to offer several schools say Lotus WordPro or OO.org and have it turned down because they need MS Office for national exams rather than because the software doesn't do functional things they need. The point of taking action is as much to get the issue in the public domain as it is to get M$ or the exam boards fined. We have no money so we need strategies that get publicity at zero or little cost.
However what's going to make the biggest difference to Open Source use in education is the availability of high quality closely integrated open-source systems software,
But that is a different issue and one that is being worked on. We need to attack this problem from many different angles not just one.
Overall, the biggest problem I see for Open Source in schools is the initial 'getting the foot in the door'.
Again some considerable headway is being made and there are a number of strategies involved. Lowering barriers to make a more receptive environment is part of it.
What the Open Source movement really needs is some 'must have killer application' that starts teachers and school ICT staff on their journey up the Open Source learning curve.
Like? The mythical killer app would likely have been found if it
existed. Low cost thin client to get ubiquitous access to the Internet
and general productivity tools is arguably a killer app and we are
working hard to get this into schools. Getting the requirement for
schools on M$ schools agreement not to have to pay M$ for such machines
is part of the strategy. Anything else that frees up the market and
calls attention to anti-competitive practice, the M$ monopoly etc will
only help in that process.
--
ian