[School] Indiana School

[Randall Perry]

I live [and consult mostly] in Indiana.  I also have experience teaching in K-12
public education and at a couple colleges/Universities in Indiana ( a couple to
3 years back).

Indiana schools have been staging this for awhile now.
Bryan Smith flew up here back in 2004 and helped me fulfill a contract with a
large Indiana based school system for Linux training (they were leaning towards
SuSe at the time).  On the server side, they had everything from Novell to
Windows to OSX servers.

Some schools up here made careful efforts, while others have thrown Linspire
boxes in a room and have no clue how to use them. (which gives mixed results
for their 'experiences with Linux' )

My biggest complaint with use of ANY technology in schools is playing the brand
game.  No bigger proof of our educational systems not having any abilities in
what they teach than in technology sector.  They have classes that teach 'Word,
Excel, Flash' or any other name-brand.  See, they do NOT teach students how to
use a wordprocessor, spreadsheet, C compiler, or Operating System.

That mentality is one of the ways public school systems proove their out-of-date
methods continue to dumb down American students.  Thank God for the
picture-laden buttons at McDonalds.

If this Brand training trickles back down the chain, we will have disadvantaged
children in Kindergarten who will only be taught how to tie their Reebok
sneakers. Those wearing Keds, Nike or jellies will be left behind for the
'better technology'.

But I digress.  On another note...
I know John (the guy in the article) at Wintergreen. Really, a great guy.
They were doing a lot of Linspire boxes (and I bought a couple of them).
But since these are budget boxes, any issues due to cheap hardware are going to
give a black eye to the 'linux experience'.  They should instead be setting up
X servers and then REALLY go light on the hardware side.  From administration
to performance would see marked improvement on the experience.

Another note: Wintergreen has been the 'whitebox' systems for tigerdirect for
awhile now.  Only in the past couple of years have you seen the 'Wintergreen'
brand in the TigerDirect ads.


Quoting Fred Moore <fred at fmeco.com>:
> A good article.. I found the part that the teachers don't mention open
> source,
> linux etc interesting..  fred
>
>
http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/breakingnews.jhtml?articleId=192201386
>


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      Randall Perry
      Domain Logic Technology Solutions
      http://www.domain-logic.com
      574-220-1545
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of
thinking we were at when we created them"
-Albert Einstein