UK Schools At Risk of Microsoft Lock-In

Robert writes "UK schools and colleges that have signed up to Microsoft Corp's academic licensing programs face the significant potential of being locked in to the company's software, according to an interim review by Becta, the UK government agency responsible for technology in education. The report also states that most establishments surveyed do not believe that Microsoft's licensing agreements provide value for money." In a separate report, Becta offered the opinion that schools should avoid Vista for at least another year, since neither Vista nor Office 2007 offers any compelling reasons for schools to upgrade.

Another Problem

[Red_Foreman]

In a separate report, Becta offered the opinion that schools should avoid Vista for at least another year, since neither Vista nor Office 2007 offers any compelling reasons for schools to upgrade.

Another problem is that the "dynamic network tuning" will not work with all routers and switches, causing a massive increase in cost to replace the network hardware.

More a problem with the UK than US?

[b0s0z0ku]

I've spoken to people from the UK, and it seems that their universities are actually much more Windows-centric than US schools. Could this be because they networked later - the US has a strong Unix base dating from the days of ARPANet when Unix was the only game in town and Windows hadn't been invented yet? (And networking the first versions of Windows was a screaming bitch.)

-b.

Re:Ummm, So what?

[b0s0z0ku]

I appreciate the 'choice' argument, but really - how is 'locking in' a program that exposes students to the software they will use in the real world an issue?

I doubt that Windows will be as popular in 10 years as it is now. That's just the way of things - new technologies come around and old empires decline. Windows is an overcomplicated, bloated, resource-hogging OS any way you look at it. Also, Windows isn't the best OS to teach programming on because of its complexity.

-b.

Forcing MS in schools should be illegal.

[Ant P.]

In my last years of my old school they'd just finished throwing out around 300 perfectly functional 512K Macs and 2 rooms of Acorn computers, for a few hundred Pentium 2s running Win2k.
On a good day the Windows machines "only" took 10 minutes to thrash their way to a login screen, 5 to get past the login screen and another 5 to go quiet. Until you tried to move the mouse. And the right mouse button was permanently disabled in explorer.exe, apparently for "security".
When I'd left they were already halfway through replacing all the hardware because of constant complaints that apps like MS Office took 10 minutes (not kidding) to open. And close. Most people didn't bother logging out because of that, and you can imagine the fun that resulted.

Then I got dumped with more of the same in college... *sigh*

Re:Ummm, So what?

[anothy]

Exactly.

The real difference here is between a vocational/technical school for office workers or secretaries and a real liberal arts education. There's nothing inherently wrong with courses on how to use Office (or any other particular software application), but that's not what most education is supposed to be about, especially not before there's separate tracks kids can choose between vo/tec and "regular".

The same problem can be seen in higher education, at least in the US, particularly in realms like Computer Science. Rather than teaching people how to be real scientists who're focused on computers, they're producing programmers. Programming is clearly an important skill for many of these people, but it's not the same thing. Universities teach intro programming courses now in Java or C++ because those are the marketable things; never mind the fact that they're abysmal teaching languages. Folks who recommend teaching intro courses in C or Smalltalk or whatever are laughed at because those languages aren't "practical".

Re:More a problem with the UK than US?

[JebJoya]

I'm a student at Warwick University in the UK studying Maths, and I have to say that the IT systems around the uni are certainly more Windows-centric than Linux (no Macs at all to my knowledge). As a 3rd year, I'm having to use LaTeX and MATLAB/Octave a lot (essays and modelling respectively), and the dept has 2 computer rooms - one Windows one (always full), and one Linux one with about the same number of computers (normally has 2 or 3 people on the 25 PCs). Now, this may sound like the Windows machines are more popular than the Linux ones - perhaps since students are more familiar with the products, whatever - but in fact there are some other trends. First of all, the Linux machines tend to be used more by older undergrads or postgrads - Octave certainly runs (and loads) a lot quicker than MATLAB on Windows. Second, in terms of room bookings, most courses are taught on Windows PCs (Maths by Computer uses MATLAB, Physics courses use MATLAB or Mathematica) - so students are being taught how to use the Windows tools. The windows centricity is further heightened by the fact that the version of KDE that the computers in the lab use is from 2002/03, and the version of OpenOffice being used is... dated to say the least. Also, we have about 10Mb of storage space on the Linux machines which gets filled when we get about 6 sets of lecture notes in PDF format...

Anyway, bit long and ramble-y, but the gist is that the IT dept seems to focus on Windows entirely, even though Linux is a better tool for many applications (LaTeX being a prime example - on the Windows machines thanks to the distributed software thing you spend about 15 minutes (literally) loading MiKTeX before you can compile :S). But, I'm hoping to put some pressure to at least get some upgrades to the Linux machines as an exec member of the Maths Society at Warwick - I run LaTeX courses in the Linux room and we need to get some better systems :S

Apologies for the ramblings - Jeb.

Re:I can confirm this

[aedan]

I work in Scottish schools. The whole authority went over to Windows as part of the PPP deal about 5 years ago. All the hardware is HP. The system is managed. If you want to have something added to it like a scanner, printer or software it will cost an arm and leg and you can only choose from their catalogue of hardware.

Some of us bring in our own machines with other OS on them but most staff are not interested.

I teach biology, not computing, but I use Apple and Linux machines to do it.

Re:I'm a sysadmin at a school in the UK...

[Derwen]

All applications that our kids use will only work on Windows. Office is the "standard" that they all get taught (yes, I've put OpenOffice on - without teachers wanting to use it, Office is the only thing used). The educational applications that they use every day will only run on Windows (and some maybe on OSX, but we're not rich enough to afford Macs, I'm afraid.)

Ahem. This UK school [schoolforge.org.uk] seems to be very satisfied with its all GNU/Linux set-up, which saved them enough money to take on a new ICT teacher.