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Story: Microsoft rubbishes school open source report

Posted by: Keith Milner (Wednesday 18 May 2005, 1:30 PM)

I worked selling computers into educational establishments and supporting them several years ago.

Any claims that we should be using Microsoft (or any other) software in schools "because they will be using them in real life) are totally bogus.

One of the worst things that has happened to school computing is the demise of the more specialist computing platforms in favour of an office tool.

What we have lost is the specialist educational environment with tools designed for and by educators, not by any old failed games programmer trying to make a swift buck.

Computing in schools used to be inspirational. These days it is bland.

Whilst the use of office tools and modern operating systems is important in education, the reality is these skills transfer easily between platforms. In any case, the version of MS Office used in schools today will be significantly different from the one they use when they start their working life.

IT related jobs require skills that extend far beyond the use of Office tools and the percentage of jobs that require these skills is significant. By restricting our kids exposure to a limited, sanitised, view of technology we are doing them a huge disservice.

Open Source provides a huge opportunity to address this. Through Open source kids can get access to real-world techologies such as SQL, LDAP, file sharing, XML, C++ and Java development, Web/PHP development, etc.

Whilst much of this is available through Windows, it is usually out of reach of most schools and/or is in a santised and highly proprietary form that is not suitable for education (e.g. Frontpage).