After the election and looking to the post-Becta future, Open Source Schools has been making new plans to ensure that the community is able to respond to the changing educational landscape where the benefits offered by open source are becoming ever more important.
A number of core community members were invited to a meeting on 29 June 2010 to develop an action plan for the future, and this group will continue to meet virtually or in real space on a regular, monthly basis. The group initially consists of:
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Tim Bateson, Network Manager, Houghton Kepier Sports College
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Alan Bell, CTO, Open Forum Europe
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Miles Berry, Senior Lecturer in ICT Education, Roehampton University
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Gary Clawson, CEO, NWGfL
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Leon Cych, CEO, Learn 4 Life
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Paul Haigh, Assistant Head, Notre Dame High School
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Brian Lockwood, Head of IT, Egglescliffe School
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Anne Matthews, Director, AlphaPlus Consultancy Ltd
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David Willmot, Head of D&T, St Thomas More Language College
This informal steering group agreed to work together on a voluntary basis and a number of tasks are already in hand. Over the summer work on the website will be undertaken to develop the navigation to provide tailored content for specific audiences, initially senior leadership and network managers.
The withdrawal of the Harnessing Technology Grant is requiring senior leadership teams to review their IT strategies. within the community there is wide experience of the challenges, successes and benefits of implementing open source solutions as well as information about cost savings. This information will be shared on the website, and will form the basis of a conference for senior leaders planned for early November following the Comprehensive Spending Review.
Wikis and turnkey solutions for network managers are also being developed.
For its part, AlphaPlus has offered to continue to host the website and to make some funds available to support the work of the community in these early stages.
The group will also consider the longer term governance of the community and its resources, and welcomes involvement from all members of the community, whose views and character it seeks to represent.
You know where to find me if Primary Technology can be of any assistance.
Happy to help if there is any way, possibly tying in with FITS to assist with any required change management, or sharing of documentation for turnkey solutions ... or by simply playing Devil's Advocate.
-- In general, my opinions, based on my experience and not a reflection on my employer or any other groups I am associated with *unless explicitly mentioned*.
Tony, that would be very helpful. Whilst being able to prove that Open Source solutions can save money there is a fear from technical staff, at school and Local Authority level, that the change just can't be done before budget cuts start squeezing their existence. The reality is that some things are easy to do and other things more difficult and time consuming and the trick is knowing what you can do now, and what will need some time and knowledge.
The suggested products and cost saving across individual schools and LA groups will be produced for September in the form of an "Open Services" White Paper and once this is out the knowledge and expertise of yourself and others who have 'been, seen and done it' will be invaluable in encouraging others to grasp the nettle.
The TDM Team would be happy to help in any way we can, Miles, et. al.
Please never, ever hesitate to ask.
Derrin Kent
Trainer / Manager / Linguist / Geek
derrin [at] tdm [dot] info
Gary,
You might like to point out to LA colleagues that the "do nothing" scenario is at least in part what caused the demise of BECTA. You have to start somewhere and simply expressing a commitment is one good start. We started on the FOSS route as a company about 8 years ago. It has taken several years to rid ourselves of dependencies but that is almost complete now and it is saving a lot of money. If they don't make a start they will be having the same conversations in 8 years time - if they last that long ;-). If BECTA had had some vision 5 or 6 years ago and provided the right leadership they might still be in business.
Ian,
8 months is probably the timescale for LA teams not 8 years!
Because of this the introduction of Open Services by LAs needs to be quickly considered, cost savings calculated and service offerings with new costs taken to schools who can then decide between finding more money out of school budget, using lower cost Open Source solutions or switching off ICT services. The choices are as stark as that and anybody who exercises the 'do nothing' option and believes that schools will magically pay for ICT services at the previous grant supported level is living in cloud cuckoo land. So its reduce costs by changing what is provided that remains the best option and Open Source solutions will provide the greatest opportunity to reduce costs.
"Open Source solutions will provide the greatest opportunity to reduce costs."
Alongside the time-honoured favourites of cutting back on support and maintenance, except where the costs of escaping from support contracts are too onerous. Expect to see more abandoned equipment as it fails and is not maintained or replaced.
From what i know the cutting back bit has already taken place simply to deal with the 50% cuts in Harnessing Technology Grant this year though I don't know if schools are fully aware yet. A lot of contracts will not be exitable until next April and some suppliers have reduced costs this year hoping to retain business. But all these things in themselves will simply not be enough.
Yes I think you are right, there will be abandoned equipment as it fails although in parallel I expect a relaxation of netowrk security to allow personal devices to be used more. That in itself suggests that Open Source may need to be used to ensure home and school desktop are similar.
If we are talking desktops, I wonder how many leaders will be prepared to give up Windows on their personal computers?Probably a more realistic strategy is to go for the main cross-platform productivity tools and web based applications and resources as a first priority, even if some are not FOSS. OpenOffice, Firefox, Google Docs, Inkscape, GIMP, Audacity, INGOT community site, Moodle, Wikipedia, Open Clipart. These applications/resources alone provide free facilities for most of what a school needs for the core National Curriculum, e-porfolios, VLEs etc without initially forcing a change in the desktop operating system. Sad indictment that with all the investment in IT over the last 10 years, that the fundamental levels of digital literacy needed to support technological change are conspicuous by their absence and changing that isn't going to happen in 8 months. Anyone produced a turnkey technological change management strategy for school SLTs?
Well, I have the barebones of a technological change management strategy as presented to the Ubuntu in Business event, if that's of interest?
Why not put it up on the site as public web pages? (Drupal supports public pages) Then it could be modified to individual needs. There are a lot of possible approaches - it would be useful to know any limitations of particular methods before embarking on a particular route so links from the strategy to commentaries on detail such as software, extent to which things work etc
Not sure what a public page is or where one does it, but a wiki seemed a reasonable approach. Unformatted, short on explanation, needs some work from people still on the educational ground (although archaeologists have some attributes in common with teachers when it comes to technology, so I'm not entirely out of touch), needs contributions generally. Might also need "accepting" by the powers that be of this site, not sure. Anyway, see:
http://opensourceschools.org.uk/node/15663
Given the recent maturity of virtual desktops, there's an opportunity here. One way of implementing Linux without sacrificing windows desktops would be via vmware or an equivalent.
By doing that, a user has the opportunity of running both windows and linux apps almost side-by-side. I'm not talking about remote booting to a linux desktop, I'm talking about running dual desktops, or even a linux app which looks like it resides on a windows desktop. We're almost back at X client and server!
I wouldn't want to sacrifice Adobe CS3, and for corporate reasons I need to use Outlook (not an open source equivalent - not the same!) and I have some web apps that only work in IE. But there are shedloads of Linux goodies I'd love to use, and that's the plan for those who want it, probably some time in the New Year.
Technically it's possible to run an Apple server under VMware - but illegal because Apple forbid it in terms of use. A great pity - it would be good to have atll three running side by side. A physical apple server is much inferior to a virtual equivalent because of network integration.
Derek
If you use Virtualbox http://www.virtualbox.org/ , you can have seamless integration http://vimeo.com/1170824, although I believe this only works if you have a Linux host and Windows guest.
Note:
The closed source version of virtualbox supports USB devices, this is the version I would recomend. It is still free as in beer and fast.
Hi all
Interesting lead article - thanks.
One thing that gets overlooked is that the UK is not joined up in its support for ICT in schools. For whatever political reason, here in Wales, funding for ICT in schools has always seemed to be a low priority. We did not benefit from the HT Grant funding (as far as I am aware) and as a result have often looked for OS alternatives.
As a school with a 5figure deficit this year, ICT has been hit hard - with whole school initiatives refocused down the OS route; Moodle, Terminal Servers running on Linux and web presence managed via WordPress / Tumblr. Very make do and mend.
Now is the time to make headway within schools for the OS movement, especially as tools such as GoogleDocs (non OS) are gaining significant footholds.
Luck
Glen Gilchrist
Head of Science - Newport High School
Blogging at: http://glengilchrist.tumblr.com
You may not receive the HT grant, but you probably do not have to pay for your Welsh Public Sector network connection, Internet services etc. because that is done through Assembly funding. There was and still is a great deal of joining up at massive bandwidth, it is through a communications network called Janet which connects the entire UK higher education, further education and schools networks to the rest of the universe, thats what your Welsh network provides. At the ICT policy and strategy level integration was brought about through an institution called Becta. It may have staff for a month or two more.
Hi
As a Welsh school, we get nothing for free. The annual cost to us as a Secondary school to JOIN the provided network connection, Internet services etc etc is over £40K (as a school governor, I see the bill). The connection to the JANET backbone is policed the Welsh Assembly, and access to that is included in the 40K per annum.
We have "gone it alone" - and now have a direct T2 connection, better services, faster access and generally more satisfaction for less than 1/2 the price.
We found that branding ourself as a .co.uk, and moving away from the restrictive ICT policies of education was a much more fruitful avenue to go down.
Glen Gilchrist
http://glengilchrist.tumblr.com
Blogging at: http://glengilchrist.tumblr.com