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 uses an astonishingly meagre 1 watt of power and rivals Intel’s new 2 watt Atom chip.

Both chips are technical wonders (low enough in power to make photovoltaic devices a reality) and both signal a clear break away from Microsoft’s dominating influence in Desktop-PC-CPU specification.

New devices based on these chips will use Open Source applications and sport Linux operating systems. No one, surely, expects otherwise? Windows XP continuing to 2010 is hardly a solution to Microsoft’s empty OS larder for this new market sector.

So called NetBooks are being designed and launched by all major manufacturers. The new chips make last year’s 6 watt Asus EeePc seem rather greedy.

The coming of the NetBook will make the PC obsolete in schools except where specialist applications such as CAD are needed.

Education is the target market

The impact will be felt in education first. RM has lead the way in the UK with the amazingly successful Linux based EeePC. Other suppliers will follow.

As for the OLPC (One Laptop per Child Project) these new low cost, low power computers will be aimed at children and education where resistance to adoption is low and interest in innovation is high.

What is the ideal NetBook for schools?

• Think the Asus’ EeePC to get a feel for the size; make the screen fill one side of the clam shell and think along the lines of Amazon’s Kindle e-book for readability.
• Make the keyboard-side the same thickness as the screen side. Now fit a wireless interface, embed an OS and a few useful applications including a browser and a decent terminal server client. If you turn it on its side hinge vertical) it’s a e-book. When horizontal it’s a notebook PC.
• Let the screen flip (a la Apple), and give it 7 hours battery life.
• The NetBook is not only a PC-notebook but a thin-client and a universal text book.
• The Netbook will access content wirelessly from the School’s File Server, Intranet and Publishers electronic textbooks.

Maybe this machine will turn up this year, maybe next year, but turn up it will and soon: the new chips have made this a certainty.

ICT procurement

That ICT in schools will change radically is obvious but less obvious is the effect it will have on the procurement of ICT in schools.

Very recently schools have undergone a sea change in their attitude to ICT. E-learning credits have gone, ring-fenced ICT budgets have gone. They are now in stasis, unsure of which way to go, discouraged from entering the latest upgrade cycle by official Government advice and facing cuts in their budgets.

The love affair with network rooms full of expensive power hungry PCs running the latest bloated software is over. Shrinking budgets and steeply rising energy costs have seen to that.

Furthermore the pedagogical claims of proprietary ‘interactive learning software’ are dying away and anything that is remotely useful is on the Web.

With the emergence of Free Open Source Software and genuine low cost personal computing devices, schools can quite simply do the following:

1. Stop paying for software and software licences.
2. Stop buying any computer equipment that draws more than 30 watts when operational and extend the life cycle of existing computers.
3. Stop the printers and the photocopiers.

It is not really necessary to elaborate on the above. Previous posts have done so at length.

Possibly, paper addicts may wince at point 3 but in terms of cost these devices are the biggest single equipment/electricity/consumables technology in a school.

It doesn't take a fortune teller to predict that the above developments may mean many traditional ICT vendors will simply not exist in five years’ time.

Emerging business-models

In a previous post I described ‘the great VLE scam’. VLE or learning Platforms have been slow to get a grip of teachers’ enthusiasm. In most cases they are forced upon schools. The sticking point has always been content. The problem is solved by deals such as those made by the content publishing house Pearson.

Quite simply the VLE will be delivery device for a publisher’s e-text book market. Expect many other VLE-publisher exclusives in the near future.

Schools have to pay for text books even e-textbooks. A new gravy train is departing on the back of an ever diverse curriculum.

Schools and LA’s will have specific requirements for applications in education. The Open University provides a good example. The OU decided to use the VLE Moodle for part of its distance learning provision. Moodle, like all VLEs, did not do exactly what the OU needed. However because it's Open Source software the OU simply paid for it to be changed to meet their needs - an impossible notion for a major proprietary product.

It follows that the future vendors will be knowledge-based companies able to develop and customise products as required by the users. This means Open Source software. No user adapts proprietary software to their needs, you adapt to what it can do.

Summary

In five year’s time it is likely that:

1. There will be no proprietary software or hardware market in education capable of sustaining even a medium sized company.
2. Schools will have slashed their ICT expenditure.
3. Publishing houses will reclaim their pre-eminence in content provision through quickly updatable e-textbooks delivered through VLEs.
4. Specialist suppliers will adapt and develop Open Source software for a new emerging market.

How things change so quickly.

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 job reverse engineering MS's .doc, .xls and .ppt formats so that OO has an unparalleled ability to handle a range of file formats with fidelity, including VB macros. This achievement ranks with the other great interoperability open source project, SAMBA. The SAMBA team's duplication (improvement?) of MS's SMB networking protocol liberated Mac, Linux and Windows machines from their isolation.

Are Microsoft worried? I think they must be...

If you are a student and go to your favourite online today you will find something pretty similar to this; Vista Ultimate rrp £249.00.. student price £64.95; or amazingly, Office 2007 Pro rrp £395.95... a snip at £79.94.

These are some discounts, especially if we take into account that virtually the entire cohort of 16-19 year olds and 50% of the under 21s in the UK qualify. Education discounting has increased steadily over the years so lets run with this trend and see where it leads.

The trend is to zero; free, no-purchase cost, nothing; can this be a possibility?

If you're a very rich company and money is no object, heavy discounting is quite possible, maybe not sustainable on a global scale and maybe not a great way to promote your brand value either but it's the old story, market share versus profit. Can you grab/keep enough before you go bust?

Obviously, market share of the next generation of 'Office' users is everything: de Facto standards depend on near monopoly.

Imagine then Vista and Office 2007 is offered to students free (a bit like Linux and Open Office but with proprietary licencing).

Imagine also a soupcon of brand-loyalty gewgaws (aka lock-ins) such as a quirky interface (eg Mac Office 2008 ), quirkier file formats (.docx). Finally even better, one may predict that if you signed up to MS's MESH you can also expect a free laptop from an obliging ISP to run all that free software.

Is there any evidence other than the price crashes mentioned above to fuel this scenario?

In fact there are a few indicators.

For example this April, as reported in a previous post, UK Gov in partnership with Microsoft launched a Microsoft-funded £6,000,000 computer literacy drive to bring office skills to those on the other side of the digital divide. For another, Vista comes with a trial Office 2007 suite which can only save in .docx format. As an aside .docx, (possibly one of weirdest, least interchangeable, impossible to reverse engineer format currently around) very quickly puts school ICT teachers in a spin when their students bring in their work and it won't open. Yet another indicator: one ISP already offers a free Dell Laptop with a broadband account.

Finally, the famous OLPC sub $100 (£50) notebook project has just 'joined forces' with Microsoft and now sports a Microsoft Windows XP hack. Just how much of the £50 is the cost of the OS. One suspects not very much.

All circumstantial evidence, not enough to convict anyone, but it will do to be going on with. Here is a plausible scenario:

We are witnessing a live race - Open Office versus Free MS Office. The latest generation of phenomenally successful education-targeted sub-notebooks and diskless workstations are all running Open Office on Linux (excepting now of course the OLPC).

Within a very short time a great many young users will have been exposed to Open Office. QCA approved companies like INGOTs in the UK will supply training (if needed) and the dominance of MS Office is threatened in a critical sector; future users.

So who will win this race? Open Office and MS Office are now both free for 'bona fide' students. Which would you choose?

Well, three and more years ago this question would have been a no-brainer, you would have chosen MS Office. What about now? Is this still true?

Open Office looks set to follow in the footsteps of Firefox and achieve significant market penetration.

If, in this case, say 20% are OO users, 5% MS Mac Office 2004, 70% MS Office 2003 and a handful were MS Office 2007/2008, then how does your student's decision look?

Both OO and MS Office 2007/8 (in our imaginary scenario are free of purchase cost to the student), the 'something expensive for nothing principle' is very strong, so free MS Office (which costs industry and the public sector hundreds of pounds per go) still is pretty compelling, especially with that free laptop!

And, after all, the young don't think too hard about the future of vendor lock in and they also always save in the application's default format (.docx). To cap it all Becta has just signed up for another three years of the now infamous MS MOU.

It looks like a win to 'free' MS Office.

Two things may be pivotal, the need for MS to protect loss of revenue and a potential backlash from a cash strapped Public Sector and bottom-line conscious business sector.

MS Office related revenue is a serious bedrock of funds for Microsoft. It can't just be given away to everyone. In the standard proprietary software business model free, or nearly free software has to be subsidised by those paying full rate. Microsoft subsidises education hardware vendors in the UK very generously already, even so their profit on turnover ratios are wafer thin. Any loss of perceived value for bundled MS products could well further erode profits, some firms will fail. Why, for example, would a school buy a desktop computer with Vista and Office 2007 from say RM plc when a 'student' could get the whole lot pretty much for nothing and bring it in on a laptop?

Meanwhile as stated before the Public Sector and Industry are paying full price.

To the mix above add a failure of OOXML to become a Standard Format and the inability of MS Office to use already standard Open Document Formats. In which case, as in much of mainland Europe, we may see a sudden and massive, corporate and public sector switch to Open Office as firms address their bottom line and worry about backward compatibility of their legacy files. Many still use Office 2000, not the ideal software to add a .docx compatibility patch to. Open Office however has first class legacy file support.

Circumstantially it looks very much like MS's strategists are relying on 'just one more generation' of Office users before revenue streams from the on-line Web 2.0 world crank up. The strategy may not work for another reason though, one that MS is acutely aware judging by the resources it is committing.

Uptake even of free software has its own problems. The Free Open Source software world has always struggled with the lack of cost of its products! Marketing 'free-stuff' as enterprise quality equivalents to 'very expensive-stuff' is not always easy as those of us in this industry know very well. It's counter intuitive and a lot of breath gets wasted explaining how FOSS even got to exist at all let alone how it became so good.

Open Office itself gets better each version, but soon I guess it too will be as glossy and as over featured as MS Office. Then how do you chose between two products other than by familiarity and personal preference? Why also would you stay with one product, unless you were locked-in by some odd format?

A strong feature of high quality Open Source Software has been adherence to open standards and the endorsement of really major companies supporting such standards. Factors like open standards have enormously helped the deployment of OSS solutions into industry. It follows that software with idiosyncratic non-standard file formats can't even be given away...

... now I understand. That's what all the fuss is about: ODF versus OOXML! No standard means no product differentiator which means dwindling market share even when you give it away. Exciting stuff.

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 to top it all our projected industry demand for IT professionals is estimated at a massive 150,000. If all our computing GCE students went to university to do computing they would amount to under 2% of demand.

How on earth do we find ourselves in this position? To set the scene before we look at what actually happens in schools I will remind you that some months ago I predicted Linux will dominate school desktops in 5 years through low cost personal computers. Since then HP and Dell have lined up their own Open Source offerings in this sector so it may be a lot quicker than I first thought. There will be an accompanying growth in demand for Open Source engineering services. If we are to meet this demand for new engineers able to work with Linux then the statistics are even more worrying.

The Rise and Rise of ICT

A survey of school IT qualifications provides the clue. There are today a plethora of examinations relating to using computers in schools. The majority, the overwhelming majority, are ICT qualifications: this is to say qualifications in Information and Communication Technology, a title that needs a little exemplification...

ICT qualifications are offered by various QCA approved awarding bodies: AQA, EdExcel, OCR, E-Skills, ECDL, BCS and INGOTS to name most but not all. The qualifications themselves subdivide into categories: Key Skills, GCSE, GCE (AS A2), GNVQ, CLAIT (cert and diploma), BTec, HND and of course the new Diplomas which are due to replace a lot of them. We are not quite finished with categories; all of the above are divided and united into 'Levels'. Thus CLAIT operates at Level 1 through to Level 3, Key Skills are Level 3, INGOTS Levels 1-2, GNVQs Levels 1-4 and so on. AS and A2 GCE's are levels 3,4.  Many have proxy transferable Levels between categories. Confused? I hope so, most teachers are. In any case whatever qualification you get, ICT means 'Office' skills, lots of coursework (mostly institutionalized cheating) with a bit of other social stuff added in.

There are scores of intersecting ICT courses barely differentiable from each other, the vast majority date from 2000 (floppy drives anyone?), all talk about social impact of ICT, none know about social networking; all instruct about copyright, none mention patent issues or intellectual freedom; none except INGOTS know about open standards. It's not all doom and gloom though. Buried deep in the OCR course list is a nugget or two. Did you know that the OCR GNVQ course iPro is a gem or that one of the new ICT Diplomas has a great Sys Admin Level 3 course? I thought not. It's all too complicated. ICT qualifications are manifold because IT literacy is seen as an imperative and awarding bodies make lots of money from qualifications.

What does ICT really mean?

ICT courses mean proficiency in presentation, word processing, e-mail and spreadsheets. Ho Ho, I should have said, MS Power Point, MS Word, MS Outlook, MS Publisher and MS Excel. Actually, unlike a few years ago, no publicly examined course today dare explicitly require a single proprietary package for its qualification (except CLAIT which has no such qualms),  but when reality on the ground is taken into account, an ICT qualification in UK schools really means proficiency in MS Office. Nice work Bill, how did this happen and what are the consequences?

The infamous MOU

The great change happened in 1997 when the newly elected Labour Government signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Microsoft for ICT in schools. The MOU still exists but Becta is less than happy with it nowadays as I have referred to in previous posts. I can still see a happy smiling Prime Minister and the CEO of Microsoft beaming the good news through my television screen (I no longer own a television just in case). Almost overnight on a wave of funds and 'advantageous' educational licencing, ICT replaced IT in schools. No ICT course has a programming or a systems module, instead students are taught to be mere consumers of technology, and operators of applications. Complex fragile networks in schools also mean that students are locked out of the system and potentially invasive coding activities are deprecated. Thus in barely one school generation ICT wiped out computing.

If you think I am over egging the pudding, here is a timely reminder courtesy of Labour's David Lammy MP at a launch of a new 'literacy in IT'  Government initiative this week. The answer to bridging the  divide for the estimated 17 million digitally excluded from ICT is ...Microsoft's Digital Literacy Curriculum !  Yes thanks to  a $ 12 million donation from Bill those non-Microsoft users missed out by UK Gov-MS plc will at last get their chance to join the fold.

Ways Forward

Most computer engineers I know are self-taught. You will commonly hear mention of Atari, Commodore, BBC Micro, even Win 95 as platforms on which they cut their teeth. I have yet to hear of XP/Vista script kiddies. Coding and engineering requires open systems (you knew this was coming), the legendary taking the clock apart as an indication of nascent techno behaviour would not have happened if we started with quartz mechanisms; you simply can't get under the bonnet (hood). The same applies to modern appliance like computers you are not encouraged to find out what makes them tick. Open Source software gives us the tools to play with the clock again. Here is my recipe for the success of computing in our schools.

1. Move ICT courses out of the Level system of the curriculum. The accrediting and examining QA processes just freeze content. ICT is not like chemistry, it changes uniquely and continually and has no core knowledge. ICT courses should live or die according to their usefulness and should not be promoted by the state.
2. Increase the availability of computing courses at all Levels within the system. Engineering principles have a much longer shelf life and make very good qualifications as it happens.
3. Becta should do as did Newham Council last week and drop  MS's MOU

In summary for as long as school computing amounts to little more than how to use MS Office, our technological base will continue to erode. We cannot hope to compete in the modern world by relying on a few, intelligent self-motivated and self-taught individuals to escape the education system. As a first step in liberating the next generation why don't we give them a tweaked copy of Ubuntu's excellent live Linux distro. On it with all the other usual goodies will be the developer environments for Python, Ruby, Java, Gambas. Go kids, reboot those closed boxes from your live CD and learn about freedom. At least then we may have someone homegrown to recruit in the future.