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Comment by jnbiche | Hacker News Reader

>I have an excellent technician at my school who manages to be as flexible as possible, while keeping within the bounds of school policies.

You're very fortunate. I'm guessing you're probably in a high-performing, relatively well-to-do school district (please correct me if I'm wrong).

>and are in position to give every student in the school their own Linux VPS next year.

The IT depts at the schools I'm familiar with (through friends, I'm not a teacher myself) wouldn't even know what OpenStack is. They're 100% Microsoft shops. And the idea of giving a student root access to his/her own virtual instance would simultaneously blow the IT staffs' mind, terrify, and enrage them.

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> They're 100% Microsoft shops

I think this is a bigger problem than most people realize. Expensive proprietary software has no place in education. It is antithetical to the students' interests in learning, and it inherently prevents them from tinkering. Techies with children entering the public education system really need to push for a wholesale transition to open source. If it's good enough for the office, it's good enough for schools.

I absolutely agree. At the very least, students should have access to Linux computer shell accounts via Putty or the like. That at least would eliminate the struggles of HS computer science teachers to get the necessary dev environments set up on their classroom Windows machines.

I serve on a tech advisory committee for a local school district. I am unforgiving on a single point: students need access to a development environment -- or at least the ability to install software -- or else these computers are just consumables.

I've suggested numerous setups to get around all of the excuses tech people at the district give. Would you mind sharing personal contact info for either yourself or your IT staff so that I can go to administration with a "this works in practice, here, go see" argument?

My domain is coding2learn and my first name is marc, so feel free to email me and I can put you in touch with my net admin. Alternatively I'm @coding2learn on Twitter, so we can DM if you like.

We're starting the whole OpenStack/Linux experiment in September, so I can't give you concrete evidence that it works yet, although I can't see any issues at present.

>You're very fortunate. I'm guessing you're probably in a high-performing, relatively well-to-do school district (please correct me if I'm wrong).

You're 100% correct. I work in a UK grammar school, so we have a predominantly middle-class catchment area, and students are selected on academic ability.

TBH I didn't know what OpenStack was a few months ago. I went to my tech, after issues with running Python on the network, and explained that I wanted the kids to have root access to 'something'. I wanted them to play around with a CLI and be able to explore different tools.

We explored RaspberryPis with KVMs, dual booting and paying for VPSs from a third party. My Tech did his research and came up with the OpenStack solution.

My point was that these things are possible, but I agree that to many IT admins the concept is terrifying. The sad thing is that offering students such an experience is well within the budgets and technical capabilities of all schools in the UK.

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