Talk:Orwell High School, Felixstowe
From Schoolforge-UK
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I’m a student
I’m a student at Orwell and my experience of open source through school hasn’t won my heart or mind. I have Mandrake on my laptop, but at school it was a nightmare. After struggling with a poorly implemented system for the last 2 years (my GCSE years), I have returned to do my A Level studies to find, not really as a surprise, that we’ve switched back to Windows. So much for the “potential cost-savings”.
The problems wasn’t really with system, which could have been a great move, but the fact that the school did a direct change, without training the students or *teachers*. Basically we had Windows, then the summer holidays, then Linux. That was it. Get on with your work. Stop asking silly questions.
So we’re left to do coursework on computers that would freeze up every 5/10 minutes, if you could get them past a thing saying ‘Insert boot disk’. And they had a strange habit of booting as Windows 95. Not something you expect from a Linux machine.
Inevitably, the overworked head of IT - and only teacher that had a clue - left before the end of this year. So did the technician (that’s right, there was only one). So that’s left us with a half Linux half Windows wreck of an IT system. And shit grades.
Yeah. UglyJoseph
A chance to discuss specific system problems
Thanks for making the effort to post your comments and it is appears that you have had a frustrating time. While I cannot comment on the specific situation that you experienced it is a fact that one of the strengths of FOSS is that is very reliable and thus can enhance the student experience. Reliable and usable mixed networks of Windows and Linux are a reality enjoyed by many.
It seems clear that you identify issues with the specific circumstances, change management and technical faults rather than criticising the use FOSS for education use itself. Is that a fair analysis? Such problems are not specific to FOSS by any means. If the many advantages of FOSS are to be experienced by more then issues such as this need to be addressed 'head on' in order improve provision. Thus I hope that we will hear more on this page or on the mailing list? Perhaps you could find out more about what happened yourself.
It is telling that you think that it FOSS can be a 'great move' and you mention using Mandriver on your laptop indicating that that you find FOSS useful and usable. If that is the case perhaps you could shed a little light on your experiences. We would really value contributions from yourself and other students, after all you are the reason we are here (woah, that sounds trite).
I realise that is in no way an answer to your points but I hope it at least indicates that we are 'listening'.
Specific system problems...
The problem wasn’t with the fact that we moved to Open Source, but that the move was organised so poorly by school management. If teachers had received the proper training and been introduced to the system, then Open Source could have been everything we were promised. Unfortunately it wasn’t.
The main problem for me was that everything changed so suddenly that we were all left trying to get used to KDE, that we ended up with our work taking a back seat. Simple things like shortcuts not working caused wasted time, for example, to open The GIMP, I would have to log out, reboot into Failsafe and manually enter the ‘GIMP’ command, which easily took 5 minutes. As well as the obvious bugs, the system was too restrictive to students, to the point that we weren’t even allowed to move desktop shortcuts.
Sudden Change
I think the sudden change is more at the root of the problem than training. Its unlikely that any school would have the time to do the sort of extensive training programme needed for a complete change to its IT systems, even if this was a change on the same platform. If you feed in the change gradually people have time to learn. Also do the non-critical bits first and the bits users don't see. I doubt anyone would have had much of a problem if at first you had say E-mail and web services migrated to Linux and got used to the thin client approach with say a cyber cafe in a non-critical are. Moved to Firefox and OpenOffice.org on existing Windows PCs. Sounds like there were configuration issues too. That could just be inexperience of installing in an unfamiliar environment for the first time but again you mitigate against such problems by doing things incrementally ensuring one thing works before going to the next stage. Since there are some schools and fairly large corporations - eg Sun that run in a largely MS free environment it must be possible but getting from a to b requires a lot of careful planning and some detailed risk assessment.
Lockdown and Schools
Just to pick up on one comment above ["we weren’t even allowed to move desktop shortcuts" Ed] - lockdown is a school philosophy, not one of operating systems. RM has made a lot of money by providing lockdown solutions for Windows in schools, as has Sentinel (now RM owned!) and various others. Lockdown is done to prevent users maliciously or otherwise damaging systems at a software level and making them unuseable for successive users of the machine.
It is commonly implemented in many organisations that hotdesk, not just schools, for exactly the same reason. My personal preference is to use security settings to prevent damage that would prevent or inhibit successive users and otherwise let students experiment as they will; in Windows not a lot can be left unlocked, but Linux and Unix, as true designed multi-user environments, much flexibility can remain without any impact on other users. In schools however this has put a load on a teaching population often struggling to keep up with ICT and the pupils, by pupils having different desktops, start menus etc., so many schools still prefer full lockdown.
Back on track...
I can happily say that things are running much more smoothly now. We’re back to MS Windows, but in my opinion it’s worth the licensing fees. Also, things have got decidedly better with the arrival of a new head of computer related things last year.
I found out the other day that it cost £80,000 to implement the cutter projects’ “free” software. What a rip off. I was told that even the proprietary software we’re now using was far cheaper to implement and licence than that.
Although I think that Open Source is a very powerful competition on Windows, it isn’t suited to a school environment. Perhaps Macs next time? XD
Licenses will cost more
£80,000 seems an unlikely cost for this project. Take out the hardware and installation costs, as this would be similar for either system, do you seriously think consultancy would cost, say £60,000? Free is about freedom to change and own the software you use, which you don't have now. Yearly license fees will mean less money the school could have used to provide better education for you. The majority of businesses are already using FLOSS in some form or other and schools are only teaching Microsoft. This is hardly preparing students for work.
