Free Software Linux

Can you tell us a little bit about your background and your role at the North West Learning Grid? I’m Chief Executive of the North West Learning Grid , previously I worked for 8 years with Knowsley Local Authority. Knowsley is widely recognized as having a very progressive ICT strategy and is one of the first Authorities to implement a Building Schools for the Future Program. How d [...]

I am writing this late at night not too far in the future; Google is refusing to send my e-mails until I answer some dumb maths questions and my Sat Nav is so critical of my driving that I dare not venture out in my car. Thus confined to my laptop how about a simple blog on why Becta, the UK's ICT quango will embrace Open Source software? Now that would be unbeliveable. Actually, why shouldn't our Government' [...]

or how the future is being 'Windows Proofed' The one thing that you really need when teaching something to a group of children, students, adults, whoever, is to ensure that they are 'singing from the same hymn sheet'. Put less metaphorically, they all need to be accessing the same text book or work sheet during the lesson. If not chaos is sure to follow. Any teacher who has blith [...]

It's true, free open source software can and will save schools a small fortune. But why schools in particular? The first thing to get clear in your mind is that I am not talking about simply replacing expensive proprietary software with free open source equivalents. Sure this measure alone saves money and when you are talking about server software it can be a lot of money. However what distinguishes [...]

This post comes hard on the heels of an important piece of news... at least two Open Source companies have become part of the Becta's official list of suppliers to the education sector. The new procurement frame work under the aegis of the OGC relaunches the supply of ICT to education. The emphasis is clear: deliver value for money to UK schools. It was not long ago that most commentators believed [...]

... or "Linux feels the need for speed" A recent post has introduced me to a term with which I was previously unfamiliar. 'Click-bait' was the epithet used by a US reader to describe the title of my blog and it both intrigued and disturbed me. It means self evidently that the title is more attractive in a sensationalist sense than the article merits. The post below is hardly sensational, it's al [...]

It hurts to say this, but in the early 2000s you knew where you were when it came to school PCs. We all used Windows 2000 Pro. It worked OK and countless children and their teachers based their understanding of ICT on it. It was also at this time that Exam boards and accredited agencies created numerous schemes of work and certificates to prove how ICT as taught in schools was in tune with the real world.

Recently I attended a presentation given to all the major UK suppliers of ICT goods and services to schools. It was hosted by the Becta, the government quango responsible for the use of ICT in schools, and was all very worthy with a lot of talk about value for money and exhortations to encourage diversity, simplify supply lines and so on, but just one slide of the presentation did jerk me into life. On it wa [...]

The future of IT in UK schools is a subject which pre-occupies me, as any reader of this blog will know already. The reason is quite simple; on one hand we see fundamental changes in the way in which new technology is being used, 'on the streets' as it were and on the other we see an institutionalized attempt to fossilise students' IT into a particular way of doing things (circa 2001) and to peddle this, ad infinitum, to the next generation. The result has been a near co [...]

Last summer the list of ‘thriving’ UK PC manufacturers contained a very familiar list of players. These were RM plc, Akhter plc, Evesham Computers Ltd and Viglen Ltd. The industry collectively had concentrated on the public sector market, especially the education sector, since it was becoming clear that retail selling in an ultra cut-throat market was untenable. The dangers of retail se [...]

Last summer the list of ‘thriving’ UK PC manufacturers contained a very familiar list of players. These were RM plc, Akhter plc, Evesham Computers Ltd and Viglen Ltd. The industry collectively had concentrated on the public sector market, especially the education sector, since it was becoming clear that retail selling in an ultra cut-throat market was untenable. The dangers of retail se [...]

The simple answer is 'yes' we could do it now and we will save the taxpayer millions of pounds. In previous posts I have documented the exponential rise in school ICT costs over the past 20 years. The articles focussed on costing ICT fully. This meant summing the costs of software purchase, software licensing, hardware replacement cycle, support costs and&nbs [...]

ICT spending in UK schools is unsustainable but it could be cut by 90% with the help of Open Source software and the latest innovations in personal computing dubbed NetBooks. ARM wars? The latest salvo in the new chip war gives some indication of what is to come and just how soon it will happen. NVidia’s release this week of their ARM-based Tegra CPU [...]

If you are a student looking for an Office suite for college, let me inform you that Open Office 2.4 rocks; it's smart, easy to use, supports open standards, is free, can be distributed freely to your friends works on virtually any computer and now you can even get free training through the QCA approved INGOTs. Best of all, Open Office.org's engineers have done a fantastic [...]

This post is prompted by some outstandingly depressing UK statistics: The summer 2008 will see  fewer candidates taking GCE Computing than even the previous year's low, approximately 5000 out of the total of 800,000 GCE's, of which barely 600 are female; secondly the drop out rate for Computer Science at University is  now the highest of all subjects at over 10% and [...]