[ubuntu-uk] ubunto in college, was Re: Women, LinuxWorld, Stuff

[Caroline Ford]

On Thu, 2006-09-21 at 13:11 +0100, stude.list+ubuntuuk at googlemail.com
wrote:
> Hi
> 
> On 16/09/06, ana <ana_m at onetel.com> wrote:
> > We had a college IT teacher in the
> > hacklab once, he explained that even if he wants to teach some free
> > software he can't, they are locked in a contract with microsoft by which
> > they can not install any other software on the machines.
> My University has both Windows and Linux. The CS labs run Red Hat, the
> majority of the other machines are all windows. I assume mainly
> because people won't understand how to use the Red Hat Machines (it
> didn't take me long to get used to it, and this was before I used
> Ubuntu).
> 
> I am happy to report that most of my university's machines have
> Mozilla FireFox, unfortunately the Windows machines don't have
> Thunderbird (the Uni prefers a proprietary app from a bankrupt
> company) or open office, grr.
> 
> 
> Do you have USB access? http://portableapps.com/ , seems to have got
> more applications than I remembered,
> Also read a BBC article about an anonymous browser using tor, if it
> can communicate to the tor network then the web filter is screwed, it
> gets to see some encrypted traffic as it crosses the border and has no
> idea what it is.
> BBC Article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5363230.stm?ls
> Tor Park (anonymous browser): http://torpark.nfshost.com/index.php
> 
> Mr Stallman has written an article about why only Free Software should
> be used in schools
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/schools.html
> 
> -- Andy
> 
I think this is a major different between higher education and further
education colleges. My college is a deprived area of south east London
and has all new, shiny equipment. I'm guessing they got grants etc for
it all and the suppliers have photos for marketing purposes.

Also the qualifications people do there require windows - even the CCNA
I'm doing requires access to windows and I get tested on MSDOS commands
etc. 

Computer science students in higher education are a different group with
a different set of abilities and needs - many of our full time students
are doing 2 year courses to prepare them to enter University. We don't
do any programming here afaik. 

Caroline