The future is green, Open Source and Nintendo!

My principle interest has always been the use of Open Source thin-client solutions in an educational context. Its worth stating, again, what is really the blindingly obvious - thin-client work stations use one twentieth of the power of a typical PC (10-20 watts versus 200-400 watts), require no maintenance or technical per-machine support and Open Source software is free of licence costs.

Thin-client networks should be 'no-brainers' for schools trying to meet carbon targets, giving value for money and eking out scant human resources.

Needless to say thin-client deployments in schools are as rare as hen's teeth!

But thin-client solutions just will not go away, and for good reason, it's just that it is very hard to dislodge the incumbent fat boy PC and their fatter still vendors.

Cries of the death of the PC are frequent and always come to nothing. The only major vendor who has doggedly beaten the thin-client drum is Sun Microsystems with their SunRay workstations.

Microsoft's RDP thin-client servers are admittedly ubiquitous but invariably they are used as remote (expensively licenced) add-ons to a conventional PC network.

The big software vendors fear loss of revenue from diskless low power work stations. Sun's premium 'blue chip' pricing hardly encourages new customers and MS fear the loss of revenue from their per PC licencing.

In other words the market for thin-clients is repeatedly announced and then killed by the interests of corporate business models.

How thin-clients will change education (really)

You can't keep a good concept down however and there was a inevitability that the Open Source community would be at the cutting edge of innovations in this area.

However let's deal with recent hardware developments first as these impact on the whole scene:

Thin-client Laptops

Even 18 months ago it was a difficult search to find thin-client laptops and notebooks. Today this market is overflowing with offers. Wyse, Lenovo, Comet and even Dell (supplied if not branded) offer disk-less wireless notebooks for businesses and schools. The compelling sales pitch is that these devices contain no persistent data that can be left in the taxi or lost in the T5 baggage handling void.

In other words serial data loss incompetence and the fear of future losses from public services, school databases and others has driven a huge change from the PC Laptop. This alone may ensure the rise of the thin-client solution.

Of course the data and applications for these notebooks has to be stored and supplied by a thin-client server. We will deal with this later.

Cost

It is a while now since highly specified thin-client terminals with decent graphics broke the £99 barrier and became available with power consumptions below 10watts. This trend shows no sign of abating as Intel Atom chip is released and commodity hardware costs fall. £50 and 4 watts should be all an office needs for its everyday work station. As we said above this should be a no-brainer set against a £400 PC with 400 power packs and per seat licences.

Gaming Consoles

Gaming consoles are very much overlooked technologies for those of a certain age. Computer games are played on high spec PC's, MS XBox, Sony's PS3 and Nintendo's Wii. PC's Xboxes and PS3's all use much the same power; 200 watts or so when gaming, 1-2 watts on standby. The tiny Wii however uses 10 watts when gaming and 1-2 watts on standby.

The Wii, which is currently the best selling console, is very much a graphics-competent web-facing thin-client. Opera indeed produced and support a version of its browser just for the Wii. This means that, in effect, regarding Web2 applications the Wii is a modern thin-client for everyone.

Forget 17" monitors and think HD TV instead. From an educationalist's point-of-view there are some very interesting downstream consequences of this development, more of that at the end of this post.

Server Software

Thin client hardware is, of course, nothing without server-side software. In the world of Microsoft we are well used to the ageing RDP server and in the Open Source world we have the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP).

Other new server-side solutions are very exciting indeed:

1. An Open-Source Hybrid Thin-Client Project from SafeDesk
   Safedesk is a new Open Source project that uses Debian Live Net to create a Terminal Services Environment. It claims full local device support such as USB, and a full virtualisation of operating systems such Win XP.
2. openThinClient
   A free Java 6 product provides the server and client software which can be installed on any existing hardware.
3. Xandros Server 2
   The Linux distributor Xandros has collaborated with NX NoMachine to produce a thin-client server with powerful virtualisation features and a variety of boot options.
4. Nydio and Userful
   Two separate offerings based on Open Source software which effectively are PC replicators. One PC is used to run 2, 4 or 10 users using separate keyboards and monitors.

The products above are very intriguing in themselves. On one hand they represent a renewal in interest in the terminal server, with the added twist of the energy saving virtualised server suite, but they also show an innovative approaches to sharing out the excessive CPU power of the single PC.

Whatever the approaches it seems economic and environmental imperatives now mean that mindset has changed and the emphasis is on making best use of computing power rather than building gas guzzlers with huge operating system overheads such as demanded by Vista.

Web 2.0 and Thin-Clients

The Net-pc came and went 10 years ago. Web applications and revenue models had not advanced to the point of usefulness but all that has changed emphatically now. Perhaps the most powerful illustration of how things have changed can be illustrated by the following (actual) scenario:

The home-educated student has logged onto the web and is using the Open Source program Second Life. She is using her Wii as a thin-client web terminal and her HD TV to attend 'school' where, in addition to accessing her teachers' avatars, she can access educational content through the Open Source VLE Moodle and Google's Apps.

Maybe the classroom of the future will come to you via be Open Source software and Nintendo's hardware!

Summary

The death of the PC is predicted once again. Of course I will be wrong like all the others before me. Personal Computing is so seductive that it will morph into ultra-cheap low-powered devices that hybridise the web thin-client with the personal device. Even Dell are aiming to release a sub $100 Linux (Ubuntu?) notebook. What I can say, however, is that the day of the big beige/black box is stone dead maybe it will take a major operating system vendor with it.

Big business appears to be closing ranks in order to force UK schools to use non-interoperable Microsoft-based databases despite determined efforts from the UK Government to introduce the UK Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF). The dominant vendors, Capita and Serco have withdrawn from Becta's SIF trials and are lobbying the Government to support their opposition to SIF.

In order to understand why this should have happened it is necessary to appreciate the upcoming developments in school management and database systems.

Databases in Schools

Currently UK schools’ databases are largely confined to Management Information Systems (MIS). This sector is dominated by Capita through their long lived product Sims.net. A distant second place is taken by Serco's own MIS database and together these two companies account for over 90% of this market.

Typically monopoly markets are enjoyed and protected by the vendors that own them. Sadly the inevitable consequence of a monopoly is market abuse as the following recent memo to Surrey LA schools illustrates:

...Windows Server 2000 will not be supported by CAPITA after July 2008 and Windows 2000 workstations will not be supported after February 2008. It will therefore be necessary for all schools with these operating systems to consider upgrading them at the earliest opportunity. Four S will continue to support them for as long as possible, but it is vital that you start planning your budgets for 2008/09 with this in mind.

Microsoft’s withdrawal of support for SQL 2000 (which is the ‘engine’ making SIMS.net work) also means that a newer version of Microsoft SQL will need to be installed later this year. The August 2007 main release of Sims.net will work on both SQL 2000 and SQL Express 2005, the newer version. However, subsequent releases of Sims will only work on the latter. Four S will issue further details on the above and instructions of what schools will need to do in order to install the new version of SQL, once they have received more information from CAPITA'...

Of course extracts like the above are not news to anyone who has experienced the pain of vendor lock-in. In reality SIF will not affect the major player's market share of MIS, schools already have invested too much training and data to contemplate changing. This begs the question as why should they then be so opposed to SIF?

Following the introduction in September 2007 of the huge database that is the Unique Pupil Learner Number (ULN), schools are about to experience a rapid increase in the range of databases that they and others will use. Information from social services and police databases will be integrated with school records stored on the school's MIS and on their Learning Platforms which are also obligatory from 2008.

What is clear is that the monopoly school database vendors see a new lucrative market which they naturally would like to exploit ideally to the exclusion of others. But how will they try to do this and why do they regard SIF as a bad thing?

Learning Platforms (LPs)

Learning platforms (LPs) otherwise know as Course Management Systems (CMSs) and Virtual Learning Environments VLEs), are web-delivered database-driven solutions for independent and remote learning facilities based in schools but designed to extend to a wider 'learning community'. They are key to understanding opposition to SIF.

LPs are 'all the rage' in UK schools; they have to be, because in the near future they will be 'pupil entitlements’. That is to say schools or LAs must have one. Right now Europe's leading Learning Platform is Moodle, an Open Source fully inter-operable and free package. Moodle dominates the UK's further and higher education sector and in a sane world Open Standards and Open Source would make it the platform of choice for Secondary schools too. However it is always a mistake to underestimate the proprietary vendors' ability to close off a new market. How it's done in this case is described below.

How 'Must Have' distorts Schools' thinking Learning platforms are the latest 'must have'. 'Must have-itis' is endemic in education. They are replacing the previous educational ‘must have’, the Interactive Whiteboard(IWB). It is instructive to briefly divert into the IWB story because it will inform the database story to come.

Truly, the most spendthrift and undiscriminating market must be the schools ICT sector. Hitherto loaded with public cash and addicted to shiny new stuff, UK schools have now bought a staggering 250,000 IWBs (by the way using a kilowatt of electricity each)from a standing start ten years ago, a feat comparable with the PC revolution itself.

Ten years on, predictably,we now see a proliferation of IWB products, all of course non-interoperable, and all using incompatible proprietary software. This is a major source of frustration to schools which often have several different makes of IWB on site. It is little wonder, given this mini Tower of Babel, that Becta funded the UK's first major educational Open Source- Open Standards project to produce a universal IWB software package.

Such virgin markets are of course wonderful opportunities for ICT vendors, especially when armed with a little (often flimsy) evidence of 'proven education value to children'. Now with LPs the scene is set identically for the same thing to happen again.

Without SIF, without open standards, we can be sure of the following:

1. lots of proprietary database software will be sold to schools by major vendors
2. most of it will be incompatible with its rivals' products but will work well as suite of one vendor's applications.

It follows that opposition to SIF is an effective strategy to extend the monopoly vendors' hold on the emerging school database market. However as the expression goes ' it gets better' ...

The great LP stitch-up

Learning Platforms are databases with a web front end as described above, they are however empty shells devoid of content. LPs such as the huge Moodle VLE used by the Open University are enormous resources of content created and uploaded by their academic staff who act as course creators.

In a school context however course and content creation is something now quite alien to teachers who as well as being very busy are used to delivering off-the-shelf content provided by publishing houses in coordination with the exam boards.

Consequently there is great advantage to be had if monopolist vendors can 'partner' educational content providers such as Pearson and, rumour has it, that this is exactly what has happened.

Great advantage can be had only if non-inter operability remains the status-quo. Non-SIF compliance excludes competition and locks in clients. As a bonus, if the market share is big enough, the monopolist by ensuring non-interoperability can make its product the standard!

To remind us all of how this kind of thing works, it is useful to consider a 'de-facto' standard, MS Office. Despite initial rejection worldwide of OOXML as the standard format in place of ODF Microsoft are fighting back hard. Even the BSI it is rumoured are preparing to back OOXML as an ISO standard, despite .docx being un-openable by any rival product.

Becta's SIF trials, if you were wondering, were taking place in Birmingham. Capita's withdrawal has caused the whole project to be deferred indefinitely.

Coincidentally guess who is Birmingham City Council's outsource partner for IT? Capita.

Conclusion

Schools once again are looking like becoming victims of non-interoperability and 'de-facto' standardisation. They are being put in a position where they are yet again unable to take full advantage of the products offered by others including the open source sector. Value for money will not be an option and no doubt many more memos such as the one at the beginning of this article will be issued.

Becta, hopefully will have the courage and support of the Government simply to insist on SIF implementation, open standards will benefit schools, increase innovation and provide opportunities for UK companies.

Closed standards will mean a return to the bad old days of monopolist providers and poor value for the taxpayer.

Watch this space.

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.