MESSAGE
| DATE | 2003-05-20 |
| FROM | Sunny Dubey
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [hangout] Alt schools demo
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On Sunday 18 May 2003 11:07 am, Marco Scoffier wrote:
> The reliance on external companies, or web-service portals shocked me
> because the teachers are imputting their entire lesson plans through
> a web form and relying on the continued well being of a distant company
> offering a "free as in beer" service over the net, which seems to me to
> be an incredibly precarious way of running classes.
The reality that having it done externally might be cheaper than doing it in
house on a per school basis ... if this was done at each individual school,
there would always be a demand for someone with that specific know-how ...
and even for the better schools of NYC that is much easier said then done ...
(read my next quote where I reverse this statement)
> Why can't the Board
> of Ed offer these types of systems in house, to ensure the safety of the
> teacher's data.
Good question, you should visit the Dept of Ed's website, they talk about a
city wide Outlook server as the next best thing. You'll get a few good
laughs out of the tech pages.
The DoE *Could* do something ... it would be great for the schools and
cheaper/safer/better too ... well actually they could do a lot of other
things too .. heh ... good luck getting them to do anything
Whats more amusing is that there are these paid "technical computer
consultants". Who make more than 120k per year, and sit in lovely little
offices in the Brooklyn Marriot (which also costs a pretty penny). I still
have yet to figure out what exactly do they do, or better yet, what have they
done so far. (Some Union had an entire article about this a while back.)
> There are so many ways free-software could improve the technological
> situation in the public schools, they could not possibly fit in an
> email.
You are dealing with a bunch of people who tend to know only of Microsoft, and
also the DoE has city wide contracts with Microsoft as well, so the software
is essentially "free" for a school to use. (Use some common sense and don't
debate me on the usage of the word free in this context.) These people
often won't care about ideals, the only time they will care about OSS is when
they notice the gimp is free, and photoshop is not.
Sunny Dubey
PS: someone needs to fix hangout so replies are automagically sent to
hangout instead of the original author.
LEGAL JARGON: My opinions above are not in any way the opinions of The Bronx
High School of Science, The Alumni Association of the Bronx High School of
Science, nor the New York City Department of Education.
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