Blog Entries tagged 'Advocacy'

The Future of ICT in Schools

jspencer — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 01:00:00 +0100

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 [...]

Has Becta presided over the collapse of the UK PC industry?

tcallway — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:00:00 +0100

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 [...]

Can we give every school child in the UK a Linux notebook and still save money?

jspencer — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:00:00 +0100

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 [...]

NetBooks

jspencer — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:00:00 +0100

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 [...]

When Windows and Office are given away

jspencer — Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 +0100

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 [...]

Who destroyed IT in UK schools?

jspencer — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

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 [...]

Interview: Steve McIntyre, Debian Project Lead

tcallway — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Steve McIntyre is a software engineer and a long-time Debian developer. His best known contributions have been in the field of creating Debian CD/DVD images; he is the debian-cd team leader and is responsible for generating the official images. McIntyre ran for the post of Debian Project Leader in 2006 but was defeated by Anthony Towns by only six effective votes. In 2 [...]

Thin-Clients Revisited

jspencer — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

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 [...]

Microsoft Tax on Linux in Schools must end says Becta

jspencer — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

John Spencer talks to Dr Stephen Lucey, who having joined Becta in 2000 is now their Executive Director (Strategic Technologies). Becta is the Governmental organisation which has oversight of all things ICT in UK schools. Specifically, apart from being a general advocate for ICT in schools, it is charged with providing strategic leadership, technical direction and advice on obtaining best value.
[...]

Is Becta loosening Microsoft's grip on UK schools?

jspencer — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Becta's massive school database interoperability project (SIF) will create huge opportunities for Open Source software companies.

Hitherto, competition in the school's database market has been minimal due to schools being locked-in to proprietary, non-interoperable software normally based on Microsoft MS-SQL.

Capita-SIMS, the powerful and dominant schools database provider, has been instruct [...]

Interview: Tim Pearson, CEO at RM plc on interoperability and software patents

jspencer — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

John Spencer talks to Tim Pearson Chief Executive of RM. RM is the largest
most successful supplier of ICT to the UK education market and, for good measure, is British too. Tim has been there from the start and so is really now Mr RM. This autumn he gave the school ICT world a jolt when RM announced its Asus miniBook. It retails to schools for only £169 and runs Open Source software throughout. The miniBook has preceded an ava [...]

Interview with OpenLDAP's Howard Chu

tcallway — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Who is Howard Chu?

Howard Chu is the Chief Architect of the OpenLDAP project and its main corporate sponsor Symas Corporation. OpenLDAP is a free, open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) which provides an enterprise with shared address books, single sign-on functionality, automount of home directories and file sharing for Linux, Unix, Mac and Windows clients.

Q: Can [...]

Open Source software is the only way to deliver sustainable savings in public sector IT

mtaylor — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Things could hardly be tougher in the Whitehall front line. Last year Gordon Brown made it clear in his budget speech just what he expects – 4% annual growth in spending on front line services financed out of just 2% overall budget growth.

Enacting this latter day miracle of loaves and fishes is not going to be easy. But it will not happen at all unless Whitehall ends its chronic failure to use mar [...]

Open Source in schools could save the taxpayer billions

jspencer — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0100

In a previous 2005 report the Government quango Becta showed that schools could effect considerable savings by making use of Free Open Source software such as Open Office. In their study they simply looked at 'like for like' software replacement using existing networks and computers.

Since this study we have seen the emergence of the new breed of ultra-portable Linux-based computers aimed squarely at the education sector and the inexorable build of Web 2 services such as Google Apps [...]

Freewash, fake beards, and the enclosure of the software commons

mtaylor — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0100

The 20th February 2008 was one of those 'Microsoft moments', when suddenly, the world changed. Just like when they 'got' the network (and we got NT), or they 'got' the Internet (and we got 'Internet Explorer'). This time they 'got' Open Source and Open Standards and the company is about to make another of their legendary radical transformations... or so they would [...]

Becta Blocker

jspencer — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:00:00 +0100

This report analyses BECTA's procurement frameworks and concludes that they have placed school ICT in the hands of only a few of the biggest suppliers and that this is now acting to the detriment of school computing.

ICT has been part of schools for the past thirty years. During this time the number of computers per pupil has risen from vanishingly small to 1:3.9 and is set rise to 1:1 in the near future. [...]

Open Source in plain English

tcallway — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 00:00:00 +0100

Much of the debate about Open Source has been in Technical terms, or increasingly in Political Terms.

I'm not criticising either, I strongly suspect that both will continue for some time, but many are left cold by this approach.

What is it about at the fundamental level, in plain English, in simple terms that leave no doubt?

At heart, the argument is simple - it's about cost, and it's about the best way to run IT in an organisation which gives the organisation the free [...]

Why Open Source?

tcallway — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 00:00:00 +0100

What should we think about when we select software for a given purpose? The truth is that software procurement can be fraught with danger, potentially very expensive danger. It is unfortunate that we cannot have people walk in front of us waving red flags for our safety. There are no maps with "here be dragons!" So, IT procurers, while you are contemplating cost and fitness-for-purpose etc., here is one less thing to worry about: Open Source.

People often think about Open Source in al [...]