Linux helps kids, brings hope, in Hawaii (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

NewsForge covers Scott Belford and other members of the Hawaii Open Source Education Foundation. ""One by one, I began converting them to Xandros," Belford says. "It is seamless. Kids come in having no idea what Linux is. They sit down and click on the icon for Internet, or word processing to do schoolwork, and suddenly the 'broken computers' are working." HOSEF also supplied staff members who previously didn't have computers with which to do their work with Linux computers. Belford admits he was experimenting on them. "If you don't tell somebody they can't do it, they don't know. One is running SUSE, one is Mandrake, and two are on Xandros. I haven't offered any training -- they each do their work with spreadsheets, word processing, and Internet.""

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Ignorance really can be bliss

Posted Nov 23, 2004 2:51 UTC (Tue) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link]

If you don't tell them it's hard to learn, they often don't realise — and, lo! it is indeed easy to learn new things, because what they are learning is not new things.

The Internet doesn't grow horns and a tail just because you're viewing it through Konqueror instead of MSIE (very much the opposite, in fact, it's great watching people's confidence blossom again as they no longer have to be dreadfully careful about every click lest their browser be hijacked); they're visiting the same sites, doing the same things there, and something that doesn't work because the website used ActiveX is a glitch, not the end of the world.

Linux helps kids, brings hope, in Hawaii (NewsForge)

Posted Nov 23, 2004 18:44 UTC (Tue) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]

I had the privilege of meeting Scott at the last LinuxWorld in San Francisco, in a "Birds of a Feather" meeting on non-profits and open source. His story made attending the meeting (and maybe even the conference) worth it. After being saddened by the great preponderance of "suits" and huge corporate booths at the conference, it was so refreshing to see someone create and successfully manage a project so fundamentally generous and oriented toward the future that didn't have "TCO" or "Enterprise" or other corporate buzzwords as justifications. His work and the work of the HOSEF project are truly inspiring.

Making Linux become a staple of education is important. I believe that if I ever have kids, Linux will be there when they grow up and start working. Microsoft, Sun, HP, Apple - who knows if they'll be around in 20-30 years? Their profits could dry up for an variety of reasons, and buh-bye Mac OS X, Windows, HP-UX, Solaris, etc. But Open Source (and hopefully Free Software) will still be there. And they shouldn't have to go to private schools (or wait for college) to learn about it in a classroom format.