Suhit Anantula's Library tagged school →  View Popular

NSW secondary school students could be issued with $56 million worth of Linux-based laptops as part of Kevin Rudd's digital education revolution.

The state wants government secondary school students to tote around computers built specifically for the education market.

Jim McAlpine, NSW Secondary Principals' Council president, said sellers could look at offering non-proprietary software for the laptops, such as Edubuntu, the education version of popular Linux distribution Ubuntu.

"The laptops can run on an open source operating system with a suite of open source applications like those packaged under Edubuntu.

"This would include Open Office for productivity software, Gimp for picture editing and the Firefox internet browser.

Utzschneider continued:

“For me, the huge, eye-opening takeaway from this work isn’t that Windows and Linux cost about the same to put into school labs in poor countries, it’s that the 5 year cost of ownership for doing so is about $2,700.”

Utzschneider that the cost of electricity, training, repairs, infrastructure problems are all contributing to this unacceptable figure. The Vital Wave study offered a couple of solutions for helping control this chaos, he said, including increasing management/automation via the introduction of servers.

So far, Microsoft has been focusing primarily on getting Windows PCs and Windows Mobile phones into emerging markets. But just this week, Bill Laing, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Windows Server and Solutions mentioned to me that Microsoft was evaluating whether introducing some type of Windows Server configuration spcifically tailored for emerging market audiences would make sense.

Who knows… maybe OSPS (One Server Per School) will be the next Linux/Windows battleground in the emerging-market space….

SCHOOLS in South Australia have complained they are being short-changed under Kevin Rudd's education revolution, forcing them to buy cheaper laptops and spend up to 30per cent of their grants on Microsoft licensing and government fees.

South Australian public schools are paying $250 for licensing fees for each new computer and a $40 state government administration fee. They also pay $6 a student to cover existing licenses. Replacement computers do not attract the $250 fee.

It is understood the NSW, Victorian and West Australian governments will absorb the licensing fees, passing the entire $1000 grant to schools.

The states have been negotiating bulk purchasing agreements to enable them to buy computers for just $500.

LENOVO has won a Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development desktop contract worth in excess of $4 million.

The win puts the Chinese computer maker in the the box seat to also win the first Victorian contracts stemming from the $14 million grant from the federal Government's National Secondary School Computer Fund.

Lenovo edged out fellow panellists Acer, Dell, Apple and Hewlett-Packard to bag the deal for 7500 desktops.

"The equipment will be distributed across the state as part of schools' computerised administrative systems," a department spokeswoman said.

The Lenovo ThinkCentre A61e machines retail for around $1225 (excluding GST). The department paid more than 50 per cent less.

"It was around $560 (excluding GST) per device," the spokeswoman said.

Funding for the A61e computers is separate from the Rudd Government's $1.1 billion schools computer fund that provides grants of up to $1 million for schools to purchase or upgrade their ICT equipment in several stages.

In previous posts I have documented the exponential rise in school ICT costs over the past 20 years. The articles focussed on costing ICT fully. This meant summing the costs of software purchase, software licensing, hardware replacement cycle, support costs and for the first time, electricity costs. The latter now make up 20% of the total ICT spend of a secondary school's £100,000-£200,000 annual total.

Missing from the earlier work, for which I apologise, were peripherals such as printers and photocopiers.