Free software

Insurgent methodology clearly fascinates master tactician Peter Mandelson who recently urged the UK Government to behave more like insurgents in order to beat the Conservative Party in the forthcoming election. Superficially, it is a mildly bizarre statement but maybe not.

General McChrsytal no less believes that the US is in real danger of never being able to beat the Talebs... unless they find the 'right strategy'. Pretty shocking statement that.

Anyone remember Computer Assisted Learning or CAL? No? Well it's back.

Ever since the first computer to draw a graph or do that parsing thing to allow kids to fill in missing words, ICT has been the 'Great Beige Hope' that would revolutionise teaching and learning.

It's all tosh by the way. Ignore the fake stats and the deluded evangelists. CAL (or interactive computer lead learning) is simply a gimmick perpetuated by the faux trendsetters with good hair that stalk education.

Transparency is a nice word, you feel as if by being able to see through something you are less at risk and more in control. Little wonder then that it crops up a lot nowadays, usually in the wake of 'revelations', whether they be about the dastardly banking practices that brought the world to its knees or MP's expenses which threaten to do the same for Parliament.

The No-Brainer

If state schools and other public sector bodies adopted more Free, Open Source Software and low energy thin-client computing they would:

a) suffer no reduction in their quality of provision and

b) save up to 90% of their total ICT costs.

They could do this without upfront costs if they used the money immediately saved from non-renewal of proprietary licences to fund investment in low energy technology.

This assertion has been made before and details of its components have been explained in previous posts. The money thereby saved UK-wide is in the order of many millions of pounds.

Few dispute this nowadays, even the FUD has all but gone, but who cares anymore?

Fanciful? No not at all and here is why in three short headings:

Credit Crunchy Stuff:

1) I think we can take it as read that there is a shortage of money as credit withdrawal directly impacts on the major school refurbishment programs and the BSF programs. All of the Goverment's schemes in this sector are joint Public and Private ventures and the private sector is squeezed dry by the lack of Bank lending.

There is of course precious little point bringing forward public spending schemes unless you are prepared to lend directly to your partner industries, which at the time of writing is not the case. Ergo, no lending to construction companies and the like, then no BSF.