__/ [ John Bailo ] on Friday 07 July 2006 00:18 \__
> http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=39987&cid=3
>
> "Ed Montgomery, a computer science teacher at Monarch Park Collegiate,
> said in an e-mail to ITBusiness.ca that he was given a note in May,
> telling him that the Linux lab would be dismantled and replaced with a
> Microsoft-based Classroom Migration Technology Initiative (CTMI) lab.
>
> On June 21, according to Montgomery, Terry Wister, the head of school
> wide services for Monarch Park, removed all of the Linux computers from
> the lab room under the direction of the school?s principal, Rob
> MacKinnon, while Montgomery was out at lunch. When Montgomery came back
> from lunch, he said all of the machines in the lab were running Windows.
> Montgomery had received a note from Terry Wister a month earlier."
For what it's worth, I noticed the following letter a few weeks ago. It's
directed at the Ontario Minister of Education.
,----[ Quotes ]
| I was just told a good-news story about a Toronto area high school
| computer science teacher who has been using the Linux operating
| system exclusively in his classroom for the past 5 years.
|
| [...]
|
| The bad-news part of the story is that the school recently dismantled
| the already running Linux lab and told the teacher that he must only
| teach Microsoft software. Microsoft jealously guards the source code to
| their software, disallowing teachers and students from studying and
| improving the software. This is like disallowing English students from
| reading or building upon existing literature. While Microsoft software
| might be of limited use for teaching word processing, it is quite
| inappropriate for teaching computer science. Microsoft software is
| also funded by royalty-based business models which extract considerable
| amounts of money from provincial budgets, while FLOSS allows the
| educational sector to collaborate with all sectors to create software
| that is then distributed at a marginal cost of zero.
`----
http://p2pnet.net/story/9207
I think this sheds some more light on the issues. I too studies computer
science on Linux. Windows is just not the right environment. But you can
expect Microsoft and its friends to continue to sabotage any exposure to
"that other O/S".
|
|
