I know of a school in Cork where the principal did not want to put a computer into the teachers lounge because she did not want them to use computers. Most of the so called ‘computer’ teachers only used the computers in the computer room to teach ‘touch typing’. There were NO classes using the computers to teach other subjects. No one used the computers for any internet activity. Even the Library computer was not permited on the internet. There was only one teacher who maintained the computers, and managed to get them on the internet, almost in opposition to the principal and board of management.

As for the technology, gee, anyone could make that happen. it only takes money. But you have to train the teachers first. Then replace most of the computers in the schools. Then you can start to think about the education of students.

As for the linux comment, how does that work with two thirds of the computers being under 300Mhz, and 64MB memory, 1/3 being 75Mhz and 32MB. Windows 95 was an upgrade, 98 and 2000 are highpoints there. With no machines having 128M, or more than 5GB disks.

I won’t go over old ground, but in deference to teachers that I know in Primary school – they are hugely committed to the best education they can deliver (which in many cases is through and about ICT). However, the continuing lack of vision, policy and investment is resulting in even these leading edge teachers becoming cynical and disillusioned. Teachers who a couple of years ago would spend saturday morning fixing up computers for colleagues, or working after-hours to get a colleague’s printer working, or bring a laptop to get fixed etc.. – many have now totally given up – and abandoned using technology in the classroom.

I’m just in the middle of designing a course to be delivered by 50ish tutors all around the country to groups of 15 to 25 teachers. The time allotted for design of this course has decreased, the number on the design team has decreased – and most of the course is based around Open Source and freeware!! This is because as schools have received no money for software, hardware, tech support etc. for 4 years, it would be disingenuous to learn about commercial software.

I would call on the government for two items in the coming months:

1. A policy document on education for the knowledge society
2. A budget of €300million for ICT in the Primary sector to cover 2002-2007

Ireland’s slide in the international broadband and technology tables is almost inconsequential in comparison to our lack of preparation for tomorrow’s learning needs.

Is this ‘point of rescue’ for our economy of 2015? I certainly believe so.

Damien – I’m more qualified in ICT than in education so obviously my answers are going to weighted but I’ll try and respond:

I’ve worked in situations where 2400bps (0.00004% of 512mbps) was sufficient to do a job – it depends of course on the tasking. If you have managed messaging and firewalling so you block portscanning, torrents, spam and large email attachments at ISP level and do some traffic shaping for the rest, you really don’t need all that much bandwidth – the killer in that situation is likely to be the satellite latency if anything. I’m glad that HEAnet is involved as you say, but without further information I can’t accept your arbitrary figure of 512mb minimum without explanation of what that’s based on and knowing that your personal goal is bigger pipes everywhere – not a bad thing but bandwidth optimisation is a good thing to be involved in all round.

As for “how do you teach teachers about Linux” – well what kind of teachers? If IT Teacher training is OS specific, it’s the wrong kind of training. Kids need to be taught in as platform neutral a way as possible – if they want to manage an AD environment, that’s what MCSE is there for, not the Leaving Cert.

The day to day management can be carried out remotely over very low bandwidth connections (dialup will do for RDP/VNC/SSH) – all of the IT staff in my firm work in Toronto but we manage four other offices up to 400km away, visiting in person maybe twice a year. RDP/VNC for the Windows boxes and SSH for the Linux file & print servers and web interfaces on the Xeroxes allow us to configure and administer virtually every device we have. The staff just need to push power buttons or plug something in or out when we ask them to via our VOIP network.

For the rest of the teachers, plenty of government installations in Europe have installed KDE, Firefox and OpenOffice and people have hardly batted an eyelid. The fact is that by depending solely on Windows you essentially guarantee bandwidth depletion due to all the crap that comes with it like security patches unless you have a local Patchlink or WSUS server to cache them. It also encourages usage of technologies that aren’t portable like ActiveX. We spend huge amounts of time not merely administering Windows boxes but applying patches in ways that users won’t notice or be forced to reboot. Linux on the other hand has a very good uptime record but has different limitations for desktop use in respect of drivers and other issues. You use the tools which are appropriate but which also allow re-use of time expired equipment.

Now – your education points. Here’s the problem: to do what you want to do, you need to reshape the curriculum and teacher training. Arguably you’d need to hire a completely new cohort of teachers and completely mould them in new teaching methodologies and gradually replace the old guard by attrition rather than attempt to impose retraining – this would increase the number of teachers at a time when enrolment is falling due to falling birth rate per capita.

In either case, the fight with the union will be enormous. The teacher unions rarely prioritise major curriculum and structural change because they are a conservative bunch who don’t see what’s in it for them – you can see it too in their dog-in-a-manger attitude to their temporary colleagues who drift from permanent interview to interview knowing the job is sown up already.

I completely agree that research is something that should be taught, if only so kids can appreciate the value of peer-reviewed information rather than the subjective opinion which colours so much of blogs and of sites like Slashdot and Wikipedia (both of which I contribute to).

As for the colleges – this is where you’re really dreaming. There is no zealot as hardy as a college activist but they form a miniscule proportion. Liberal parties in every country in the West have prayed for students to vote for decades – they just don’t because they don’t give a rats ass. Old people vote (political parties run cars from nursing homes – when was the last time you saw that on campus) – persuade them and you can have anything you want.

Nice post btw – forgot to say that off the top.

By the way, all the traffic goes through Heanet with these systems as part of the broadband for schools plan. 512k cannot power a whole class nevermind a whole school. How can teachers not trained in computers get their heads around linux when they can barely understand Windows? As I also stated there is no tech support so who is going to remotely admin these machines when nobody will pay for it?

As to the old PCs – that’s what Linux distros are for. Firefox, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Nvu all run on Linux after all. They are also perfectly good file/print servers if you have enough to make an image (our print servers in the office are 1996 vintage Dell Dimension P75/P100s!)

However – this is where the big picture thing comes in. We should be continuously examining the education system as a whole, what we should be prioritising etc. Simply putting computers into schools isn’t enough – you have get a definite win from having them there.

For instance, one law prof in the states has banned laptops from class because she feels her students are losing note-taking abilities. I suspect many of them are probably IMing too.

It could be that ICT could be a method for delivering school courses into small schools that don’t have enough teachers to give a broad curriculum using conferencing tech.

Ultimately I’d like to see an existing educational network provider (HEAnet) have a leading role in deploying networks to schools rather than farm it out to the private sector piecemeal as appears to be happening.

Funnly enough I was also banned at those times from the computer room by the principal for making all the computers cruse when ever someone clicked a button.

To me educations surplantes everything. By far the most inportant thing