Promoting Open Source in Schools

[Robert Brockway]

On Sat, 17 Dec 2005, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:

> Another problem: a thin client system may prevent individual student
> creativity with computers.  Creativity may not be distinguishable from
> Bad Behaviour.  Do you remember what it was like being a high school
> student?  Control by the system may actually work against education.

I believe the same thin client model we propose for businesses will 
actually work in the classroom and provide the creative release needed.

Specifically, you don't want people being "creative" on the production 
server no matter how much it helps their education - it simply impacts 
other users too much.  But this in no way prevents you from providing 
"crash and burn" systems that can be built, destroyed and rebuilt by the 
students (at least in a software sense).  The key is the lock these 
systems into a firewalled box: whatever goes on in the room stays in the 
room.  The production system (accesseed via thin client) is always 
available and the crash and burn systems are always available to crash and 
burn.  The costs are not great either - it is cheaper to rollout a thin 
client system, both in terms of hardware and administration and the crash 
and burn systems can be recycled boxes.

In businesses we advocate a strict seperation of the production server 
(accessed via thin client in most cases) and the development boxes which 
are locked off behind a firewall.  Too many development houses expect 
programmers to develop on their desktop boxes - this is not a good fit as 
far as I'm concerned and once you start putting multiple boxes on each 
desktop it's time to stand back and say "there has to be a better way" - 
well there is.

> | At least some portion of the savings made on the "cheap terminals"
> | will have to be consumed in beefing up the server and the network.

In practice a moderately powerful modern system will run many many thin 
clients.  The key is to add gobs of ram.  The cost of a thin client server 
is not much greater than the cost of many modern desktop systems so 
overall the savings on hardware are signifcant over the entire 
organisation, and that's before we look at the savings on administration. 
(Yeah I know I'm relpying to the previous speaker).

For the record I'm typing this on a thin client.

Rob

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