If you guys are interested in hearing the IT directors Ted talk from 2014 here it is https://youtu.be/f8Co37GO2Fc
Anyone else find themselves singing this headline to the tune of The House of the Rising Sun?
There once was a school that ran Linux
“Not so!” cried so many cynics
Robert Maynard put Linux in
it made the cynics heads spin
so fast they ended up at the clinics
If you actually look up the school it is really cool. They literally give students full root access to there local machines and encourage learning. That is a bright contrast to the world of locked down Chromebooks and high surveillance
This just reminded me of a thing from my high school (many years ago). They had windows machines that were somewhat locked down, but I discovered a trivial way to bypass the restrictions on changing the desktop wallpaper. So naturally I set the background image to a screenshot of the desktop, and then hid all the actual icons.
On another timeline, the staff would have approached this with “Huh that’s clever. You fooled us and we thought the computer was broken. Please don’t do that, but also let’s channel your creativity somewhere useful.”
Instead I got a monologue about breaking things and was banned from the computer lab for a week. Soured me on school and such for a while.
You just got to be a bit more stealthy. When I was in middle school I figured out that I could completely bypass group policy if I unplugged the network cable at the right time.
When one of the school IT person questioned me I just said, I do not know why it looks like that. I also never shared my secret
That’s a nice find.
You just got to be a bit more stealthy.
Yep, but that’s not the lesson the school should be teaching, at least for it’s best interest. Fostering white hat attitudes would probably work out better. Instead I learned the authorities were idiots that can’t be reasoned with.
That is a very important lesson to learn early, because the same applies when you’re grown up.
“There’s a school in Wisconsin that is so underfunded that they only have very old computers and the person running it barely knows hat’s a computer and thus won’t ever create a budget or approve new systems. Furthermore this school is so irrelevant they aren’t even able to qualify for free software from Microsoft. A bored teacher saved the day and made the old computers somewhat useful by installing Linux on his spare time. Of course all of this doesn’t come for free, the current generation of students never used a computer at home, just mobile devices, and are being robbed of learning a valuable and required skill for any future job - basic Windows and Office usage.”
There, article fixed for you.
uninteresting disingenuous troll
Sure basic windows and office usage is sure a required skill.
You don’t even use windows that much in any future job. You use the software solutions you are given as a wage slave. And most of them run in a browser.
Also cool that this school is unimportant for Microsoft. But for the students, teachers and parents its certainly ain’t.
You don’t even use windows that much in any future job. You use the software solutions you are given as a wage slave
So you’re assuming there aren’t “wage slaves” doing data entry on MS Office and also that 0% of those students won’t ever be managers or hold any other more high level job that does require those tools. So you must be against teaching financial literacy at school as well because “they won’t ever invest anything”. Great job, let’s keep the peasants illiterate in everything they actually need to climb the ladder.
Because they can’t learn to put words and numbers in excel. How skillful do you think they’re gonna get from one semester in excel?
One semester in Excel you have time to learn how to use it for almost everything.
Good luck teaching middle schoolers how to use a pivot table when there’s barely enough time to teach the basics of Excel’s convoluted user interface.
Maybe they don’t give up that easily.
You can learn Windows pretty quickly. Also this is much better than giving students locked down Chromebooks
Also this is much better than giving students locked down Chromebooks
Oh yes, but still can pose a problem. Imagine one of those students tried to apply for a backoffice job at a bank, they’ll most likely test the person’s Office skills and the student may not be able to compete the assessment and have an inferior grade to another one who always had MS Office at his school.
Why put this much effort in trying to getting banned? Is making up a story based on the headline a creative writing exercise for you?
Ahahaha, I like to think about all possible sides of a situation.
What about this situation where kids don’t have enough knowledge to give informed consent to being spied on and profiled for the rest of their adult lives?
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That was only in the 90s. Now they have a vibrant ecosystem where they let students have full root access to there machines.
If things go wrong they just reimage.
Hehe if you’re REALLY broke you get “benevolent” corporate grants for things like cheap Chromebooks, so Google can write off a huge donation while vendor-locking school infrastructure and student mindshare into their “cloud services.”
