Educational Origami

This is a very interesting article published in the New Zealand Computerworld.

Essentially the article reads as follows The New South Wales Education departments has:

•  downgraded allvista operating systems to Windows XP
• use open office instead of Microsoft Office

The selection of Open Office instead of MS office is interesting as Sun, who make open office’s big brother Star Office which is FREE to educational institutions.

The  savings they are making while still having a functional productivity tool, are considerable and I would expect to see that money reinvested back into the education system. That could deliver a lot of broadband capacity to a lot of schools. What about replacing the OS with alternatives like Ubuntu?
“announced the department will install a free alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite, referred to in industry circles as OpenOffice, on 41,000 computers due to be distributed to schools across the state by the end of 2008.“

“One of the nation’s biggest users of personal computers, the NSW Department of Education is also resisting Microsoft’s attempts to upgrade users to the latest version of its Vista operating system.
Instead, Wilson’s team is downgrading every new computer it buys from Vista to Windows XP. This incurred an additional expense in the short term, he says, but was less expensive over the life of the computer.”

Source: Computerworld Article