Linux in Italian schools - five months later

The FUSS organizers helpfully connected us with several teachers in the affected schools. These people, in turn, graciously took time out of their busy schedules to answer a long list of questions - and they didn't even complain about your editor's difficult Italian. The answers paint a picture of a not-entirely-smooth transition, but, in the end, the system appears to be coming together. More importantly, the new system, based on free software, would appear to have the strong support of the people who must make use of it to get their jobs done.

School teachers everywhere tend to be busy people who are dedicated to their work. So your editor did not expect to hear them praise the way free software may have saved money for their central IT department or to talk about the ethical aspects of free software. It seemed more likely that these teachers would grumble about extra work, having to learn an unfamiliar system, and the glitches which are inevitable with a transition of this size. This expectation turned out to be only half correct.

There were indeed some complaints. Printing was at the top of everybody's list; "cups" is indeed a four-letter word in Bolzano at the moment. One teacher described its administration tools as "delirious." Other peripheral devices - scanners, for example - were also problematic. It's not just that there were problems, but that these problems often required the intervention of the central FUSS staff (who received credit for much hard work) to resolve. Many of the teachers do not see a Linux-based network as something they can administer themselves. As one middle school teacher expressed it:

(All quotes translated from Italian by your editor).

By most accounts, the key software - OpenOffice in particular - is working well for both students and teachers. The big exception is documents with macros; those macros must be rewritten to work on the new system.

When asked what they would most like to see improved, most teachers talked about printers and related issues. There were also requests for better ease of use in general, and an interface closer to Windows in particular. A couple of teachers noted the relative scarcity of documentation in Italian, and one complained that Linux was bloated and slow.

In the end, though, the transition appears to have been successful, and most of the teachers seem happy enough. Not one said that the schools should go back to the previous, proprietary systems. And these teachers - some of them at least - are beginning to see the advantages of free software. Here's a few quotes from various teachers:

Of course, not everybody is quite so pleased. As one instructor put it:

How do the students feel about it? As we know, children tend to be more flexible, and, as a rule, they have smaller investments in old Word macros. So they seem to have taken the change in stride. Some amusement can be found in this article (in Italian); one school opened up a forum where 9-year-olds could post their impressions of the new systems. Here's a few:

The theme should be clear by now. As can be seen from these comments, the students are not yet, in general, ready to think about where free software comes from and why it exists. Don't expect any patches from the students in Bolzano in the near future.

One of the goals of the Linux transition was to give each student a CD with the software; that way, they could use the same tools at home and at the school. At this point, however, it seems that, while some students are using free software at home, most of them have not made that change. Part of the problem here is that the promised live CD distribution has not yet been made available. This CD is evidently ready to go, it's just waiting for the obligatory launch press conference with the education minister. Once this CD goes out (which could happen within a week), there may be more students using Linux at home.

Another obvious question which comes up is: will other school systems follow the FUSS project's example? Bolzano has two parallel school systems: the Italian-speaking schools (which moved to Linux) and the German-speaking schools (which did not). If any group of schools were likely to be inspired by FUSS, one might expect it to be the German-language schools of Bolzano. Views on whether that might happen soon were varied, but a number of teachers noted that there is some free software use in those schools now, and that the German-language schools were certainly watching to see how things go. Most teachers seem to expect that change to happen sooner or later.

Finally, your editor asked the teachers if there were anything they would like to communicate to the free software development community as a whole. The answers ranged from the short and simple ("Documentation, people, documentation!") to the lengthy, but most shared the same theme. Thanks for the work that you do, please continue and make it even better and easier to use. Oh, and, if you could, make the printers work please?