Laptops in the Australian Classroom
Over and over, we keep hearing about drives to bring a personal mobile computer to every student. There was the famed - but ultimately ill-fated - XO Laptop, which was to be cheaply produced and sold directly to governments around the world for their citizen's use. There's now about 12 versions of their story out there, from the $100 promise to the buy-one get-one program and then Microsoft getting a stake in the deal, followed by lots of internal bickering. But other projects of this scale have met with somewhat more success.
The latest attempt in this vein is by New South Wales Secondary Principals' Council president, Jim McAlpine. In this story at Australian IT News, he outlines a plan to equip secondary school students with an as-yet-unspecified brand of laptops, equipped with the opes-source Linux operating system Edubuntu.
What is Edubuntu? It is a version of Canonical's Ubuntu distribution, modified to bristle with educational software and be geared for school use. This is a very natural choice; Ubuntu has become the most popular distro by leaving behind the high-power tools and menagerie of choices typical of Linux systems to focus on a simplified, slimmed-down vision of Linux. Ubuntu has become the canonical distro to refer new Linux users to.
As one parent's review shows, like all Linux distributions you'll need to be at least a little bit of a geek to get it installed and running, but once you do, Edubuntu has many surprises and delights. The install issue would naturally be taken care of if the government provides the machines to schools, of course. But we cannot express this strongly enough: Most of the resistance to Linux on the desktop comes from people not having experience installing an operating system. If you attempt to do this on your own machine, accept as a fact of life that you're in for a lot of learning and trouble-shooting.
Anyway, quite a few manufacturers of laptop and notebook computers are beginning to offer Linux pre-installed on their products. So most likely NSW won't have much difficulty coming up with a vendor.
But don't count on it being an Edubuntu distro! As the article at AU-IT mentions, Red Hat global chief executive Jim Whitehurst has - well, we can't resist saying it - "thrown his hat into the ring" on the matter. Red Hat has been the leading commercial vendor of Linux systems for almost a decade now, so the upstart Canonical, who makes Ubuntu, can expect some competition here.
As many of the commenters on Slashdot have observed, offering schools a discount to put a computer system in front of students is perhaps the smartest marketing plan ever. Children are naturally flexible in learning new systems, and later in life as adults will be more favorable to the systems they've gotten to know. Both Microsoft and Apple knew this for years; Apple led the desktop wave in the schools with their MacIntosh line back in the 1980s, and Microsoft today uses the Bill and Melinda gates foundation to donate Windows desktop machines to school districts.
Do students like Linux? Undoubtedly, Linux has seen huge uptake with the 21st century children compared to the previous generation. Since most of your time on a PC is spent in a web browser, the Firefox web browser and its cousins are partly to thank for this ease of adoption. Open Firefox on a Windows box and on a Linux box side by side: you can't even tell the difference!
Filed Under: Education in Technology • Mobile Computing
