In the new year I hope to distribute Open Office to pupils who cannot afford the 200 or so that Microsoft wants for MS Office. I have had no trouble installing Open Office and as it is open source there is no cost....which is an improvement It can also load and save MS formats so the work is interchangeable with documents produced at school on the expensive MS software.

The government's framework for ICT is an uninterrupted paean of praise for Microsoft's products. The argument used is that because Microsoft is so widespread there is no need for students to know about any other system. It is fine for a substantial chunk of the educational budget to be handed over to the fat cats of this global corporation while the government lavishes free advertising on them at our expense.


This is in any case a fake argument. Microsoft may be all-poweful now. IBM once was. Schools could have ignored anything which was not IBM “because pupils would never need it in the real world” and be left looking pretty stupid now. Pupils who can only use Microsoft taught by teachers who can only use Microsoft is Bill Gates' wet dream but it is an educational nightmare.

Open source software also has more educational value than Microsoft because pupils who want to know more about the software at any level can find out more without coming up against a brick wall of “business secrets”used by the corporations to protect themselves against rivals. More advanced students can even download the source code for the programs.

What do you think?

I agree, but then one would expect me to as I am part of the Marketing volunteer team for OpenOffice.org

Still, its rather difficult for Government to have a "best value" policy and ignore the fact that OO.o gives pretty well the same functionality and at least as good support as MS Office at absolutely no cost to the British Taxpayer. IMHO, the Gov should be ensuring that every school has at least a library copy of OO.o for lending out to the community. There is a social inclusion policy and if the Gov really thinks that there are features in MSO that schools need, they should be identifying them and E-mailing the list to discuss@openoffice.org. Better still fund projects to make good any such deficiencies, it would be a lot less expensive to do that than to globally pay even £10 a license for MSO given the economies of scale.

Oh, and the XML file format of OpenOffice.org is a recognised open international standard so on the grounds of the EU interoperability directive, that is another reason for the Gov to actively support the OpenOffice.org project. If we can afford £100m a year on ELCs, a few 100k on a project that is likely to save much more than the investment seems a bit of a no-brainer.


Regards,

Ian

There are powerful and profound reasons for supporting alternatives to the Microsoft way.

Those who think that open source products are inferior, because they are free, should consider that both the Internet and the World Wide Web are effectively open source developments.

Since 1997, the UK government has spent vast amounts of public money on ICT in schools - most of this has gone to commercial organizations, yet there is little to show for it. Many schools use up the bulk of their funding just to stand still, by paying annual license fees or managed service costs to the likes of Microsoft and Research Machines.

This is not only bad value financially - it perpetuates the user's dependence on the supplier (usually a monopolist).

If we start to use, say, OpenOffice.org, then we may need to adapt to the different interface. Well, Microsoft makes us do this already, by bringing out so-called upgrades, that usually require us to replace perfectly functional hardware. It does this, because it needs our money to sustain its vast workforce. If that is UK public money, then its disgusting - instead of paying this annual tribute, we can spend less on something that we all own.

Computing is international - in the developing world (India, China) are vast numbers of programmers who are happy to give time, to develop software that we can all own and use. This is enlightened self-interest. Sun may spend many millions on supporting OpenOffice.org and StarOffice - but it already saves far more than this by NOT buying stuff from Mr. Gates.

There is a real interest in this stuff, but it is heavily qualified by the inertia of those who wish not to learn to use alternatives. (Though oddly, most school network managers have already done that, in moving from Novell to Microsoft networking software.)

We need to be very forthright in simply confronting the uncritical endorsement of branded products - where teachers talk, not of presentation graphics, word processing and spreadsheets but of Powerpoint, Word and Excel.

Those who claim that Microsoft is the de facto standard forget that it's only that so long as people accept that status quo. The challenge for institutions is to use www.OpenOffice.org, and spread the wealth to students and parents. A bit of high profile marketing might help here - the general public still does not really know about it.

Incidentally, its rather more obvious if you look at the relative cost of software to developing countries. According to the World Bank World Development Indicators Database, 2001,
MS Office and Windows XP cost the equivalent of $5431 in Malaysia based on
the country's GDP and earnings. Mind, if you go to Sierra Leone its
$135,000. So if you want your kids to understand the differences in wealth
across the World and why it is very difficult for developing countries to
legally join the hi-tec elite, take a look at

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_12/ghosh/index.html

If the government wanted to not only save itself a lot of money, but also contribute to overseas development, simply backing the OpenOffice.org project with a modest amount of money would do both. Better still, invest the £100m a year spent on E-Learning Credits on FLOSS development projects using UK programmers for the benefit of the World. This would create jobs in this country and reduce costs so its a win-win. And before anyone thinks I'm an old socialist, I run a private sector company and I believe in free enterprise and competition. There are however some things that don't work on traditional free enterprise models and software development is one. Monoploies are bad for free enterprise whether state or private sector controlled but a state monopoly at least has some democratic accountability.

If you want to come and learn more about the Worldwide revolution taking place in Free Libre Open Source Software in Education come to the FLOSSIE conference in February at the London Institute of Education. More details at http://www.schoolforge.org.uk/flossie/conference200402.html

Essential INSET for anyone who wants to be up to date about future trends in ICT

I have only just started 'playing' with Open Office but am moving to a Middle school where the budget allows one only to stand still - as mentioned by other correspondents. We still have a quarter of the machines running Windows 95 and Office 95. The rest are on Windows 98. We have even had to downgrade 3 Tesco machines to 98 and they came with XP and so did not fit in with the scheme of things.

I hope to switch over gradually to Open Office by running both systems at the same time but allowing Microsoft Office to wither on the vine - as it were.

Most of the WP work is done by default on Publisher 95 or 97, which may be a problem to wean pupils off it. What is the experience of others?

Richard

It has just been reported that Becta has just negotiated a new deal with Microsoft. According to the press release schools will be paying between 20% and 37% less for licences, saving them around £47m in total. I know little about software prices but is this really a good deal?

I do not know the prices in the uk, but I thinjk it is a good deal. However the monopoly of microsoft still disturbs me

One of my pupils (oddly without any prompting from me!) described Microsoft as a bloodsucking global corporation.
Why am I suspicious of their generosity? They are interested in making a profit. They can still make a profit with schools paying 20 to 37% less for licences. That is an indication of how much money this global corporation has siphoned out of the education budget already.

The vampire analogy seems an appropriate one. The education system's finances look positively anaemic. A sort of public-private partnership between Dracula and a Blood bank.

In any case we are always being told that "one size fits all" is not government policy. Microsoft just does not suit everybody

Take a look at
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/co...1101447,00.html

This article puts the cost savings into perspective. MS are beginning to get really threatened by both Linux and OpenOffice.org. Its no coincidence that they are dropping prices and offering inducements to try and shut out the competition. What this really proves is that their prices, even those with large discounts to education, are and have been very inflated due to the effect of their monopoly. When competing head to head they struggle to make any profit at all eg Xbox, MSN, IE, but when they have tie in they make 80% margins and that is probably without having to be particularly efficient. Any government with any sense is going to give the impression that it will not only use but back Free software because even if they have no great intentions in this line it will certainly force prices down - possibly to less than 20% of their original values. That alone would save UK PLC around a billion a year. And the bottom line is that whatever a license costs, its more than zero and there is the hassle in auditing the stuff etc. So as software matures and people realise that functionally one piece of software is very much like another there won't be much reason not to use things like OpenOffice.org in place of MS Office, even if MS Office sells for £10 a license.

The last thing BECTA should be doing is giving MS the impression that they are doing us a favour. They should be screwing them to the floor for every penny given that we have been paying inflated prices for far too long.

MS threatened? I am not convinced that Linux has made the inroads that its supporters claim that it has. I just looked at the visitors' stats for an educational website that I maintain. The stats include info about the browsers and OS used by visitors. The most recent stats, based on around 14000 visitors, break down as follows:

OS
Win98 45% - I use Win98 2E. It's stable and I see no reason to upgrade it.
Win2000 22%
WinXP 12%
WinNT 6%
Win95 6%
Mac 2%
Others - no significant data
Linux: just 100 visitors out of 14000

Browser
IE5 47%
IE6 38%
Netscape4 4%
Opera 2%
IE4 1%
Netscape5 1%
Others - no significant data

Don't get me wrong. I'm not in love with MS, but Bill Gates seems to be hanging in there.

People use whatever most other people use. Betamax was a better system than VHS but most people chose VHS - probably due to the wider choice of recorded materials produced for that system. Macs are better computers than PCs, but they hardly show up in the educational market now. I have concrete evidence from the steadily falling sales of Mac software by my business to schools over the last 10 years - down to around 2% right now. Macs hang on in niche markets, e.g. graphic design and printing because every self-respecting designer and printer uses a Mac. My daughter's graphic design business uses exclusively Macs - and she wishes that school art departments would train kids to use them too as it would save a lot of re-training time.

Macs are better computers, that I agree to. But the availability of software was very low. Therefore I think they missed their chance. Just like Betamax or VCC.

Sad but true. I used one of the alternative vcr's untill apprx 7 years ago and that vcr is still working as backup vcr. No materials that is why I changed systems.

The Mac has always been acknowledged as a superior computer but the reason it didn't take off like the PC was nothing to do with VHS/Betamax. It was largely because the Mac was seen as a closed system wholly owned by Apple whereas the PC was open architecture and anyone could build one. People failed to realise that this was not true of the software so we now have a software monopoly instead of a hardware one. This is changing with FLOSS. While there are still few GNU/Linux desktops compared to Windows ones, the rate of growth is much higher than with the Mac and the number of GNU/Linux desktops worldwide is probably similar to the Mac numbers, just not as visible yet. I wouldn't expect to see hundreds of hits from Linux web browsers on an education site because there are probably only a few thousand desktops running Linux in schools at present. But if you go back 3 years it was probably a handful and then only a few technician enthusiast. Given that China has announced it aims to have 200m FLOSS desktops in the longer term with 0.5-1m new installations in the coming year, it seems to me that by the time primary aged pupils (half the school population) leave full time education FLOSS is going to be very much more visible driven by World events irrespective of what UK schools and the DfES do.

When there were only a few FLOSS servers around, suggesting they would take 25% of the market would have been unthinkable. Anything new by definition is going to be small in number, its rate of development that matters and the FLOSS snowball just keeps trundling on.

True! VHS/Betamax was a different situation, but it illustrates the point that the best doesn't always win.



So, it's a question of wait and see... As a cautious businessmen, I take little notice of predictions. My business only changes tack when there is significant concrete data to confirm a prediction. We could have been caught out badly if we had believed the advice of educationists about Acorn computers in the 1980s and early 1990s. Teachers and advisers who supported the use of Acorn computers in schools kept telling us that PCs would soon be eclipsed by the Archimedes, but our sales figures kept telling us that the Arc was in decline - and seriously from around mid-1992. By the mid-90s the PC dominated the scene, and sales figures of PC software to schools have continued to rise ever since. Macs hung on in Scotland and Northern Ireland, but DENI in Northern Ireland has recently negotiated a deal with a local commercial agent whereby all schools in the province are being provided with networked PCs and PC laptops, pre-installed with generic software and a range of subject-specific software.

Regarding the worldwide situation, see:
Kirkman G., Sachs J., Schwab K. & Cornelius P. (eds.) (2002) Global information technology report 2001-2002: readiness for the networked world, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Substantial sections of the report are available in PDF format at: http://www.cid.harvard.edu/cr/gitrr_030202.html

My subject area is MFL. I have recently been involved in the production of two reports including contributions from a number of international experts:
(1) A report conducted during 2002 for the Directorate General Education and Culture at the European Commission: The Impact of Information and Communications Technologies on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and on the Role of Teachers of Foreign Languages (edited by Tony Fitzpatrick and Graham Davies, published 2003). The report is the outcome of a Europe-wide study coordinated by the International Certificate Conference (ICC), Frankfurt. The full report can be downloaded in PDF or Word format from the ICC website:
http://www.icc-europe.com - click on Report on "ICT in FLL".
(2) A report commissioned by UNESCO: Analytical Survey on Information and Communications Technologies in the Teaching and Learning of Foreign Languages: State of the Art, Needs and Perspectives (forthcoming). One thing that we have noticed worldwide that the Internet is moving away from its original model of cooperative communication based on exchange, and tending towards the logic of a mass broadcasting medium, resulting in concentration of producers and the progressive disappearance of interactivity. This is somewhat worrying to the language teaching profession, and we propose various ways of fostering cooperative, collaborative approaches. There is a contribution from China in the report.

Finally, I currently head an international team that is in the process of setting up WorldCALL as an official organisation - a decision that was taken at the second (very successful) WorldCALL conference in Banff, Canada, May 2003: http://www.worldcall.org. There is a major focus on the transfer of expertise in the draft constitution.

My school Veurs College 3 in the Netherlands (www.veurs.nl) is running partly on a linux server. So far no complaints! With the technical ins and outs I cannot help you

And yes the Betamax vhs story was different but I was only trying to illustrate the point Graham so rightly made namely that the best does not always wins.

I think that the Betamax thing is misleading. What do you mean by best? What do you mean by win?

In the case of FLOSS, its there, its being developed and its expanding globally. Its unlikely to suddenly be discontinued and whether its best or even in a majority is not really an issue, its more is it good enough for some adoption that forms a big enough client group for the size of business you operate. IBM seem to think so. From a purely business point of view, the only risk in not developing a business strategy that incorporates FLOSS is the loss of competitive advantage to those who do in a growing market with relatively little competition. In the mature Windows market there is over supply with only the monopolist making very high margins. I doubt that is sustainable and the significant players like IBM, Sun and several Governments seem to think not either. So as a cautious entrepreneur, I saw the business case to put some effort into new FLOSS systems about 3 years ago and now our Linux business is growing faster than our Windows business and its more sustainably profitable. But don't tell anyone, its nice not too much competition ;-)

No, I don't think it's misleading. It illustrates the way in which market forces tend to determine the way in which products thrive or fail. Most electronics experts agreed that the Betamax system was technically superior (i.e. "best" in this sense), and I remember buying a couple of Betamax systems for the university language centre of which I was director in the 1980s and 1990s. They were more compact and less prone to break down than the VHS systems that were around at the time. The problem was that more and more pre-recorded material (especially for language learners) began to be produced for VHS systems and less and less for Betamax systems, and my teachers therefore demanded that the Betamax systems should be phased out and replaced by VHS systems - which is what happened in the end. This is what I mean by "winning". It's rumoured that the large-scale production of "Bollywood" films for Indian diaspora and porn films in VHS format played a significant part in the demise of Betamax - but I don't have any concrete evidence to support this.

As for Macs, yes, it was mainly due to the policy of Apple not to licence its systems to other manufacturers that caused PCs to come to the fore, but at the same time - certainly in the educational sector in the UK - less and less subject-specific software was being produced for Macs, i.e. a similar situation to the Betamax/VHS situation described above. As a language centre director, I was at odds with the technicians who loved Macs and the teachers who could not get enough CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) software for them. In the end we centred on PCs. In the USA, however, Macs were the dominant machine in many (probably most) university language centres in the 1980s and 1990s and it was easy to obtain CALL software relating to the US schools curricula - I have seen a lot of excellent Mac CALL material demonstrated at conferences in the USA. Macs still hang on in US university language centres, but PCs are gradually edging them out.

What i meant with best system is that I used a non vhs vcr longer and had better quality of the viewing material than I have now with my vhs. Maybe it is the quality of the tapes???

Its misleading for the reasons you cite.

There is no consensus that GNU/Linux is technically superior to Windows in the same way as there was with beta and VHS. Most of the consensus is that MS Office is technically superior to OpenOffice 1.1 at present though again there are arguments both ways. So the issue of technical superiority is the first red herring.

The reason there was less subject specific stuff for Macs in the UK was that Acorn had a much more dominant installation base in the early 80s and then it became obvious that the shift would be to PCs and that shift only really took off when the hardware price plummeted due to competition and economy of scale. Macs have only ever been a niche player in the education market in England. Acorn was the English equavalent of the Mac.

So the situation is not at all like the one with betamax and VHS and there is no real reason why open software systems for computer operating systems will not displace closed proprietary stuff in the future in the same way as the micro computer has become dominant at the expense of mainframe and mini-computers. Where I agree with you is that market forces will be influential and cost is a big factor in that equation. If VHS discs had cost 10 times as much as beta discs the story would have been completely different.
So while GNU/Linux at the desktop will not take over this year or next or perhaps ever, we can be sure it will take a slice of the market, particularly in price sensitive areas and the effect of that will be to force down MS prices. Whether to a level that negates the growth of GNU/Linux remains to be seen but overall a healthy alternative is good for all users of technolgy.

Ok ok forget that the comparisonwas ever made!

OK, Ian, we agree to differ, but we seem to agree that market forces play a role in many choices that we have to make. I could keep my German up to scratch (I am a former teacher of German) at virtually no expense by going online and conversing with German native speaker colleagues in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in a Virtual Learning Environment. But, foolishly and heedless of the cost and market forces, I am shelling out hard-earned money to leave this country for two weeks on Sat 10 Jan to practise my German in the Austrian Tyrol. This is solely to improve my German and has nothing to do with enjoying the local food, wine and beer and cruising gently on skis down the beautifully groomed pistes, stopping off for the occasional glass of Glühwein in a chalet set in gorgeous mountain scenery. This is therefore my last message for a while...

I'm off to play 5 a side. So if I'm not back you know it was terminal

Good for you! However I bet that Veurs is one of the few schools in The Netherlands to use Linux in the server area. Desktop systems is quite another thing.
Our systemmanager refuses to look into Linux. He claims it's too much fuzz, changing all the systems. On the other hand in 1995 he abandoned the Novell network for MS NT3 and just recently he's just gone through an upgrading experience from MS NT4 to Windows 2000. With 180 computers that is a lot of fuzz too! Upgrading to Win 2000 meant that part of the software had to be thrown away since it wouldn't run on that platform: what a waste!
And now we're in the ratrace of upgrading from Office 2000 to Office XP without any real need: but it is MS that collects the cash!
Linux Desktop distributions like Red Hat, Suse or Mandrake using the KDE or Gnome interface are as userfriendly (or even better) than Windows. Open Office is a stable software to work with. And above all: Linux systems hardly ever suffer virusattacks, due to the nature of the system.
Last year MS increased the licence fees for their software. It caused turmoil in Dutch schools, but obviously MS gave in a little.
IMO it's only a matter of time and there will be another unashamed increase of licence fees and unfortunately I believe my director and systemmanager will be caught by surprise and totally unprepared.

We just had a meeting in which we decided to do the same upgrade. According to our systemmanagers it would make live more easier. well, not for them. upgrading the pc's at more than 5 locations is a really big job.

Is there a need? Not from a user viewpoint i guess, however , i also think we should give students the most up to date software we can afford. This to prepare them for society, one of the aims in education

Can we wean schools from Microsoft addiction?

Replace Office with an alternative like Open Office.
See if there are any problems.
Count up the money you have saved
Replace IE with Mozilla
See if there are any problems.
Then consider Linux because we can still use these programs with Linux and Microsoft "suddenly" becomes useless!

Graham states the size of the problem correctly...but my school can save a lot of money....perhaps the school down the road might be interested...and another and another...

and at the same time we are helping Thai schools to make the same transition by sending the odd CD to a school in Thailand out of the small amounts made from selling CDs to pupils so they can try Open Office (Mozilla is so widely available it is not worthwhile probably)

Yes, but what do you feel about preparing students for a 'microsoft'society?

The concept of a Microsoft Society is anti-democratic. In so far as Windows is currently a monopoly that restricts competition, raises prices and curtails freedom, its undesirable enough, but the implication of a MS Society where MS has even more political power over a broader range of technologies is highly undesirable. I think maybe we should be preparing pupils to understand the economic and political implications of putting too much technological power into the hands of non-elected orgaisations. So let's talk about broad education that enables individuals to question the marketing propaganda of not just MS but all larege corporations.

I suspect you were thinking more along the lines of - they will use MS word when they leave school so we must teach them using MS Word at school. In fact, young people take virtually no time to adjust from a shift from OpenOffice.org Writer to Word and back, its usually adults who have the problems. If we genuinely want to education children for change, we should be actively encouraging them to use different tools to gain confidence in the underlying principles not channeling them into a narrow set of button pressing where if something unexpected happens they are shouting for technical support. Of course many of the current generation of adults are technophobes and many of these are in positions of influence. We have to be careful that they don't transfer their prejudices to the next generation.

It costs nothing but a bit of time to put OpenOffice.org on a school network alongside MS Office so why not give them some choice? The truth is we don't know what society the pupils will move into in 5 or 10 years time, so prepare them for technological change.

Yes but running two kinds of different software on your schoolnetwork can prove to be very complicated (for lack of a better word). I agree that we do not know what society will be like 5 to 10 years from now but i think it is reasonable to state that MS will be very present. Of course we need to prepare students for change and we need them to become flexible. But from a schools point of view why would i use two systems when one suffices?

When personal computing was an expensive minority interest, Bill Gates did much to make it affordable and usable for the ordinary person.

That was then. Now Microsoft is a malign influence, since it seeks to own what should really belong to us all.

But no-one forces us to use this stuff - it's only our assumption that today's dominant technology has to be tomorrow's.

Microsoft offends in many ways:

It more or less dictates the rules of ownership.

It decides that we cannot buy products outright, but must subscribe annually.

It publishes "upgrades" that require extra system resources - thereby making perfectly usable PCs seem useless (so we discard them, and add to pollution).

European governments spend vast amounts of money on this stuff, yet still the technology is not affordable everywhere.

By contrast, Open Source software is more robust (less prone to virus attack), and runs on equipment that we would throw away and replace, if we stuck with MS stuff.

So long as we insist on using MS or other expensive products, we guarantee that many pupils and parents cannot share the software (we cannot buy it for them all). If we use OpenOffice.org (for example) then we can ensure that everyone has the same freeware that our pupils use.

Businesses do not, perhaps, understand this, or have the time to reflect. But educators can lead the way and do the right thing. If every child in Europe leaves school, having learned to use Open Source applications, then business will quickly follow our lead - which is maybe the way the world ought to be.

If the software designers were really clever, they would be finding ways to make the stuff more productive, while using less of the system resources (which, of course, many do).

After all, Open Source software runs the Internet and the World Wide Web.

The economic arguments here meet the ecological and moral arguments. We can choose to breathe air that comes to us freely - that we all share and own collectively. And then, we can drop our concern with the more arcane features of, say, text formatting, and use the stuff to make documents, spreadsheets, databases and so on, with their own integrity. Or we can keep paying the tax.

If we choose not to be liberated now, we may have to do so in a few years, anyway, when Indian and Chinese computer users, who will not pay the MS tax, have made Open Source products the standard software for the world.

If every child in Europe leaves school having learned to use open Source applications yes a change can be made. However how do we make Open Source software more popular for use in schools? I think we need to think about that one as well.

I've heard the Betamax - VHS argument for years too. The reason I think it's irrelevant is that video tapes basically do two things (play and record), whilst computers do lots of things.

I've often had the experience of working in educational organisations where the vast majority of teachers use PCs, but where nearly all the innovative work is being done by the people who don't use PCs.

My explanation for this situation is that the idea that educational development is a matter of writing a killer educational app is an illusion. Innovation seems to come from the ground up, and from teachers who have first the confidence and much later the time to innovate.

My observation, as a non-PC Windows user, is that large numbers of Windows users seem to have learned *not* to be confident with computers - even when they work, you never know when the next crash, or computer virus, or sudden incomprehensible message from the IT support department is going to come along.

I agree with the previous contributors: this is potentially an enormous problem for Microsoft and its loyal supporters. IT is expensive enough already - and the returns, in terms of improvements to the job in hand, are still fairly scanty.