What is Digg?195 Comments
- missouribp, on 10/10/2007, -9/+84Why public schools should teach people how to spell.
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -2/+40As a network administrator, for a district of roughly 2500 students and 900 computers, i guarantee you that this will never happen, i have implimented 29 linux machines so i could get rid of all the 98' boxes, and they are not being taken very well. all I know is that even though it is 2007 most teachers don't know what the hell they are doing even on XP machines. Thats just my 2 cents
- BrandonPerry, on 10/10/2007, -2/+21Sorry, but I had to bury this (and I am a Linux fanboy). There are much deeper aspects to it than just switching and never looking back. I donated about ten computers to the school district my mom works for running Edubuntu, and now all the teachers in my moms school wants one. You need to just ease them onto it, not say this is how it is and will be.
- schestowitz, on 10/10/2007, -7/+21it's missing some key points. See http://www.gnu.org/education/education.html and http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/schools.html .
- nubious, on 10/10/2007, -3/+16I side with bjweeks.. If your server is unstable because you PLUGGED IN a linux computer, you've got bigger issues that OS selection - you need to hire rent-a-geek or someone who MAY have a clue what they're doing.. You sound like my grade 12 programming teacher.. He ended up having ME run the class.. And I'm not even a coder.. pfft
- unangst, on 10/10/2007, -1/+11I once heard a guy tell that he trained people to use OpenOffice very simply... he renamed all of the icons to MS Word, etc. and told the teacher he had upgraded to the newest version of Office.
- Tsiolkovsky, on 10/10/2007, -6/+14It's just I typo, I guess. It happens.
- chitoiup, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8As far as I heard, driver support is pretty damn good in Linux, unless you have some über specialized Smartboard...
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8I wouldn't brag about writing this. You should have just kept yourself hidden.
- EXreaction, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8"All I know is that even though it is 2007 most people don't know what the hell they are doing with anything."
Fixed it for ya. - rootstyle, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8Blog about common well-known Linux pluses while ignoring the obvious problems with respect to implementing in a public school environment => front page of digg? (and can't even take the time to spell check, I mean hell Firefox does this on the fly) Weak.
- theonlywizdum, on 10/10/2007, -3/+11You sir, should not be in charge of anything computer related.
- specialK16, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7Exactly what I was going to say.... jeez....
- sanford42, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7Let me get this out of the way first before I get dug down... I am now a full Linux convert, have been for about five years now. Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo and Slackware are my babies. OK, now to the point...
I think you're wrong in your assessment of Windows 2000... I ran it forever, even *well* after XP came out. It was quite possibly the most stable OS Microsoft ever released, until SP2 for XP came out. - EXreaction, on 10/10/2007, -3/+10Wouldn't happen if you'd take 2 seconds to read over what you want to submit again...
Or, better yet, used a spell checker... - ejhdigdug, on 10/10/2007, -3/+10This is a BS article, it makes its claims but doesn't have anything to back it up. Looks more like a trolling article to me.
- Spr0k3t, on 10/10/2007, -1/+8I think instead of focusing on key points, they should focus on content. Wow, that was short. I'm guessing that was a persuasion paper?
- Mipit, on 10/10/2007, -3/+10Yeah our school is using ancient Windows 98 computers.
- kamel, on 10/10/2007, -2/+8Settle down. I use Linux/Unix every day. My apparently poor attempt at humor was to point out the submitter misspelling the title when submitting a story concerning education. Put your pitchforks down.
- manicallday, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6I'm a real person in real life and I use Linux.
- ontain, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6Linux? we can't even go metric :P
- IllBeBack, on 11/02/2007, -0/+6Doodz, it was a JOKE for "shoud" in the title. Man, you guys have the comprehension skills of a manhole cover.
- waterdrop, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7The High School about a town or two over from me uses Novell Linux on nearly all of their PCs. It works well for them because they are are very poor town. My school still runs Windows 2000 Pro but is finally starting to get some newer machines with XP Pro.
- nubious, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6That's exactly what's wrong with windows machines.. PRICE..
- sanford42, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5Desktop environment? Check. Web Browser? Check. Word processing/office suite? Check. Programming tools? Check
Oh, and what really matters to a public school district? Low Cost.
You can teach someone perfectly well how to use a computer. The lines that denote differences in the GUI between Windows, Linux and Mac are getting blurrier and blurrier with every new release.
So get over your own "smug sense of self satisfaction" that you get by talking about things you really don't understand.
Oh, and FYI: I work in an environment that is 90% Linux. And we're no small company. - brharri1, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5And by the time most of them graduate they won't be using XP or Vista or Office 2007 either.
- HouseCentipede, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5you need firewire to restore? don't these machines have ethernet jacks?
- syroncoda, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5open-source is the only way to standardization. and standardization is the only way to true development. when everyone can look at an application and say "what if i did this..?" then we'll truly have something amazing.
- sanford42, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5Not every school district is exactly "rolling in the money". When I graduated High School in 1995, our senior programming class was in a room full of Apple IIe systems, and we were programming in BASIC -- during the height of the "internet boom".
In smaller communities like the one I grew up in (in southwest Louisiana), there's just not enough public funding to buy top-of-the-line computer systems when there's "more important" (in their eyes) things to fund, like the football program, who got new uniforms every two years.
I was in band, and my drum line was using the same equipment my brother used when he graduated in 1980.
Shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars on new systems and then paying licensing fees is just out of the question sometimes.
Buying a few hundred used systems and putting free software on them is actually not all that out of the realm of reality for many schools. - chingy1788, on 10/10/2007, -3/+8Linux will become popular when there's more driver support for hardware devices, as well as popular software being able to run on Linux, without VMWare or Wine (i.e. A Linux version comes out)
- krahzee, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5Linking to blogs and those blogs making the front page?
Oh the diggers of old would have a field day....... - EXreaction, on 10/10/2007, -2/+6It's not easy for an entire school system to "just switch to linux". Even though Linux is *free* it would cost thousands of $ for people to switch everything over, train people how to use it, etc, etc.
In the short run, if you already have a Windows setup, Linux will probably cost you a lot more Windows will. Unless, of course, you are by chance getting all new systems, then it would probably be cheaper to go all Linux. - pHr34kY, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Let's remember that your average student can gain competence in most Microsoft products without attaining the slightest clue as to now it all works. You learn a lot more about how an OS works when you learn Linux. It would be a good move to prevent people from graduating with only a basic grasp of MS word and Excel. I've found that microsoft 'skills' become outdated very quickly. I know that each MS product I learned in school 8 years ago is completely useless to me now.
All the Linux console skills I picked up in Uni are just as relevant today as when I learned them. - theOster, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4it always sucks when you have to 'splain :)
- DeathfireD, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5I agree. I did an internship as an assistant network admin for a high school in my town and we where given the task of setting up a second computer lab. We originally wanted to use Linux on the PC's since they where more then 8 years old and the school didn't want to spend any money. The school board had no idea what Linux was and that basically scared them away from the idea. They claimed that it would confuse the students and professors, so we where stuck installing windows 98 on everything in the new lab. Needless to say, three years later I found out the new network admin proposed that the school should buy all new Dell Windows XP computers and servers and the school board approved it. What a wast of money in my opinion.
- pixelpimp, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4It would be the smartest thing the US Education Dept. could do. But I think the problem is schools decide locally which OS/Hardware they go with. This is American (unfortunately sometime) and we just can't do mass change over like Russia. It would save billions! But I think the real problem are the TEACHER UNIONS! It is harder to fire a bad teacher than it is to switch all the computers over to linux. The real problem is the Union is there to protect bad teachers from losing their jobs! It takes 3 years before a teacher is even brought in for a review of a complaint! Besides most teacher's can't even explain what the Internet is, let alone jump to linux!
- JimXugle, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4I'm a Linux Fan and a Geek beyond all reason.
There are more important things that public schools need to worry about than which OS they use. More important things include mold-free buildings, reasonably clean bathrooms, non-toxic lunch food, newer books, etc. - IllBeBack, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5"Why Public Schools shoud* use Linux"
* SHOULD - tomis, on 10/10/2007, -2/+6Sort of like how we only teach our kids English instead of other "rarely used" languages, and only teach them American history and point of view instead of other "rarely used" perspectives on the world... Yea, good idea. It's clearly worked out so well for us.
- srg13, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4"2) Worse remote management support than Windows or Mac OS X"
I stopped taking you seriously right there - Tenoq, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4The problem is many diggers don't have a firm enough grasp of proper grammar to know what the hell you're talking about.
- doolittle, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4wow, at my job we are fully heterogeneous, a windows 2003 domain for desktop & user authentication and (mostly) RedHat on the backend servers. We even let the *nix applications authenticate to the domain via LDAP.
My advice, fire your windows administrator. - IllBeBack, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4You should stop writing. Forever. Security will escort you to the parking lot, and you can't keep that stapler.
- daverave999, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Hear hear. I love Win2k.
- unangst, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3I use Novell behind the scenes in my district. I never would have chosen it (former Windows server guy), but am grateful for what I've inherited here. Now, I have servers that stay up for over a year at a time, licensing I can afford, and more tools and options for running the show than Windows ever offered. Remote view/control, asset inventory, system updates, imaging, integrated email, software deployments... the list goes on and on. I'm never going back to Windows servers.
- dwhitbeck, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3It would be great if schools taught pupils to understand something rather than train them like a monkey.
- rgrcabbage, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3There are couple of great points, and while I'm all for incorporating open-source architecture into my building, there are a large number of complications to doing even a partial switch over to a new and/or different operating system.
1. Teachers are creatures of habit. Their primary job is to teach our children, to educate the next generation. Most of the time, they have very little time to learn new software, understand new or different technologies and find a way to incorporate it into the state mandated curriculum. Not only does the technology need to be available, but it needs to make sense and it needs to fit into tight little boxes that are easy to understand and apply appropriately.
2. Have you ever tried putting a Linux distro on an old Mac? The architecture isn't widely supported and while there are a couple of ports which will run, the hardware still needs upgrades before it can run even the most basic of GUIs that would mimic an environment anything close to what the educators have seen previously. Sure, I can use something like Edubuntu (Debian works too), download it for PowerPC, run the updates and compatibility, remotely control and service those computers, but it still requires a significant part of my time to properly lock down, maintain, and update those boxes.
3. Time. My day to day schedule consists of helping teachers apply technology to each individual lesson plan, troubleshooting problems from "my phone doesn't work" to "I can't print" and beyond. To do everything that is mandated in my job description and have time to research, install, and update an unsupported operating system (not to mention figure out the networking components and allow everything to talk to each other) requires as astronomical amount of time. I simply run out of hours in my week, even with overtime, to get everything done. Sometime it's simply easier to pay a couple thousand dollars for a well established program than to have to walk through the download, installation, troubleshooting, FAQ's, and everything else that goes into rolling out even one new program. If I can pay a fee to get an application, bring someone into my building to train my staff, and let them run with it then that's one more hour I save for doing something else that's a major fire and needs to be looked at.
4. Testing. My state, and many others, have state mandated testing. Until the state government releases tests and other mandated materials in another form other than something that's only supported by Windows machines, and if we're lucky, Mac's, then there's absolutely no way we can adopt another OS across the board. Without the compatibility, we can't conform to state standards and that in turn leads to all sorts of additional problems.
I guess what I'm saying is this, technology and open-source software definitely has it's place within our schools, within our classrooms, and within our current state of education. But for someone who is not a educator, or a school system administrator or technologist to look at the state of our technology from the outside and ask "why can't you..." there's a hundred different answers. The long and the short of it is simple, we want to be able to present technology in all it's glory for every student, teacher, or staff member in our building. We want items to be accessible. We want to adopt open-source applications and appreciate integration in every level. But we're just like everyone else, we have to accomplish goals with the equipment, the resources, and the time limitations we have and ultimately we have to look at what is best for our students and staff. It's a unique balancing game, and we're doing our best, so instead of sitting back on the outside, if you're one of the few who look at our education system, and have something to say, instead of just talking, take the leap and volunteer your time, and skills, so that we may have the opportunity to do more with what is available to us. - treelovinhippie, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Because the government gives more money to private schools than they do to public schools (at least here in Australia they do)!
- bovox, on 10/10/2007, -3/+6"... read over what you want to submit again... Or, better yet, USED a spell checker..."
ROFL. Oh the irony. -
Show 51 - 100 of 195 discussions
Browsing Digg on your phone just got easier with our enhancements to the 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is