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.

Schools like their computers to be predictable. Many teachers, administrators and students who obtained their ICT 'competence' certificates between 2001 and 2006 felt secure in their 'learn-once, use-forever' skills acquired on what appeared to be a 'final' version of the PC.

Sysadmins for their part loved Win 2000 and proudly bearing their MSCE certs were slowly rolling out the XP upgrade (after all XP is not too different to Win 2000).

But in 2007 XP was ruthlessly deprecated by Bill and Steve in favour of Windows Vista. Or so it seemed.

The trouble was no one in charge of schools actually wanted Vista or could use it on their hardware. At much the same time super cheap Linux sub-notebooks aimed squarely at the education sector exploded onto the scene. These devices are already springing up in the very middle of the mainstream and can be found not only in PC World but also at Toys 'R Us. You can even get one from Tesco's through their link with RM plc!

The Tower of Babel

I do love Linux, it's so..., well..., so not-boring. The laptop I am writing on is using Fedora 9 and KDE 4 , my big laptop is using Ubuntu's Hardy Heron with all the 3D twirly bits on a Gnome desktop, my Asus EeePC sometimes uses Xandros' Easy interface and sometimes good old Puppy Linux (soooo fast) and I'm not sure what my Elonex One is running. I nearly forgot, my Mac-book, it's running an OS named after a large cat.

To cap it all, this month's Linux mag shows yet another small laptop, this one from Gdium is booting Mandriva Linux from a USB-stick and so doesn't even have an OS installed, embedded or otherwise: I need one of these sticks.

You will soon get where this is headed. I love this rapid spurt in PC evolution, but to a school or any big institution such diversification looks like the Tower of Babel; they'll not be happy.

Creationist vs. Evolutionists

I would posit, with some 30 years experience as a school teacher, that schools are by and large 'ICT Creationists' by disposition. 'ICT Evolutionism' with its fits and starts and sheer pointlessness is unlikely to have any real appeal.

A Creationist-deity approach to ICT: on the day (late in the week) God-Bill created Windows 2000/XP he saw that it was good and would no doubt have rested there with his finished work. Unfortunately, because of not really being God and therefore not omniscient, he forgot that he had already created the upgrade cycle on the very first day. So after a day of rest he reluctantly, and against his better judgment, agreed to start over again. I think this twist on the creation story would have had interesting consequences if applied to humanity but we should digress no further.

Evolutionary-Atheist ICT: Note how the changes in ICT happen - sometimes rapid, sometimes slow; sometimes you think you can see a purpose and a direction then it veers away or even goes extinct; suddenly new species pop out of unpromising beginnings; sometimes even mighty, unchallengeable dinosaurs die quite suddenly. No doubt Darwin would recognise this pattern well.

If you were an ICT user in a school for the stable period mentioned at the start of this article you could not tell (during the dominance of Win 2000/XP) whether the stable status quo existed in a regime of creation or evolution, to all intent they would appear the same.

Well now we all know which it is. The 'Creator' has retired and the dinosaur is dying. All sorts of odd creatures are evolving pretty fast. Real world computing in education is becoming highly diverse after a period of relative stability, not least as my own eclectic collection of OSes illustrates.

Such a situation though will not do in education. The emphasis in this sector is on delivering standard products measured against fixed criteria. It comes as no surprise then that the usual response from pedagogia when faced with the messy diversity of the real world is to develop a parallel but more controlled world.

For example 'school science' is a separate entity to any other science, ditto 'school foreign languages', 'school history' and so on. Following the logic above, obviously what is required now is the creation of 'School ICT'.

'School ICT' will be like real world ICT but will change in a controlled way and as such always slightly out of date and unsettlingly irrelevant. This may seem a touch insulting to the teaching profession, it's not meant to be because education and training have always had a tense relationship, but my response has to be 'you should get out more' if you don't recognise this situation.

What then will characterise 'school ICT'? Some of the must-have features include:

1. Being quick on all computers (including those 50 laptops you bought in 2004 that no-one wants to use now)
2. Easy to customise creating standard applications and interfaces for particular teaching groups
3. Securely access school web based resources
4. Very very cheap, ideally free and could be given away to students
5. Work on nearly all computers old and new
6. It must not be installed on school computers, thereby eliminating maintenance (this is key, read on)

What is being described above though is a lightweight operating system and applications, running from a LIVE DISTRO.

Live distros evolved/were created to allow users to try a new Linux OS running from a CDROM without installing it on the hard drive. Recent developments have shown that they can be so much more.

Puppy Linux, for example, uses very light applications (e.g. AbiWord and Gnumeric in place of Open Office) and runs incredibly fast just like computers used to do. Puppy can also be run from USB-Memory stick or a cheap Flash card. Mandriva, that ever so slightly quirky French Linux distributor, is so fired up by the possibilities of non-installed OS's that they distribute Mandriva Linux on a bootable USB drive and have partnered with hardware gurus GDium in developing another so called 'netbook'.

Conclusion

Non-installed lightweight Linux operating systems will allow educational institutions to side-step the evolutionary mayhem and create stability and consistency with their own 'School-ICT' OS and applications. They will be able to use their legacy laptops and new sub notebooks side by side in class.

There will also, I predict, be a race to create this putative product. Which major vendor will define school computing? Will we see a Capita-RedHat OS? or say RM-Suse OS operating on a range of hardware from Dell to HP? Maybe it'll be Mandriva-GDium....whatever, thanks to the electrifying pace of Open Source development we had better just hang on to our hats and enjoy the ride.

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.

In the past few weeks I have written several articles for this blog deprecating at length the wasteful power consumption of ICT facilities in schools and suggesting alternative strategies to tackle the problem. I do not intend to do go over the ground again because you can only hector folk for so long on one topic. In any case I don't need to, since wonderfully, the Cardinal Wiseman CTC in Birmingham has recently deployed the UK's first zero carbon ICT facility.

The facility went live in January 2008 according to this month's Education Executive ICT supplement. The details of the project reported in the magazine shows how innovation and open source make natural bedfellows. The school, sponsored by North Birmingham City Learning Centre, has combined a novel thin-client installation designed by yours truly here at Sirius with a 6kw Wind Turbine and 1 KW solar panel supplied by SRE technologies.

The fanless thin-clients use an embedded Linux and draw approximately 4 watts when combined with 7” LCD panels and optional laser keyboards. They are grouped in clusters of five inside a central cylinder and cooled by a natural thermal updraft. The 12v power is supplied to all five from a single DC source thus avoiding the huge power losses contingent on individual transformers. A cluster of five computers uses 25 watts of power, not bad when compared to a single standard 400watt desktop PC.

Up to 20 clients are supported by one 400 watt LTSP server clients bringing the deployment to under I kilo watt. Many congratulations to Cardinal Wiseman Technology College for their bold moves into sustainable computing and hopefully other CTCs will be inspired to do the same.

In addition to thin-client computing low powered devices (6W) such as the new generation of sub-notebooks such as Asus's EeePC and Elonex's One are ideal partners for electricity generated by wind turbines and their like. Maybe now that the island of Eigg has its own wind generated electricity they will soon get computers too.