[Inschool] Granger Christian

[Adam Williams]

I'm willing to help,  although distance may be a limiting factor.

>Thanks for the response guys, I will make contact with school personnel
>tomorrow night and keep you posted.  The most important thing to
>remember is that we can help shift the MS mentality by training them on
>alternative OS and applications before they hit the workforce.  Some of
>them may not be hoping to work in IT, and I hope not.  I hope that they
>want to become CEOs that mandate their companies use the strengths of
>Linux and adhere to open standards.

By the time they graduate Linux may be a has-been.  But they will have
hopefully overcome platform bigotry,  which in itself is a huge boon.

>This also helps to reshape the way education works.  I teach for IvyTech
>and Davenport University (barely fits in schedule), but I try not to
>brand the classes.  For example, I am teaching an intermediate DB class
>using Oracle.  Actually, I am using (and strongly suggest to the
>students) that we use MySQL.  That way, they can actually apply their
>knowledge in the real world without having to buy Oracle.  Of course, a
>personal edition comes with the book- but you can't use it in production
>environments.  I am instead, trying to focus on normalization, joins,
>SQL statements in general.  

Great!

>Advanced Oracle concepts should be kept to
>advanced courses.  I used this same argument for that K-12 school.  One
>of their reasons for NOT wanting to use Linux is that parents will
>demand that their children learn microsoft applications.  

I have some experience with this.  First, most parents won't notice. 
Particularly parents of students who attend private/religious schools
can hardly spell M-i-c-r-o-s-o-f-t.  I've been there.  99% of the time
you say "Yep!", they nod and say "OK".  For those that exhibit some
symptoms of recognizing this as the 21st century, a nice smarmy response
like the one below till work wonders.  There is always the 1% hold
overs,  who have managed to become OS bigots themselves.  But in general
these are people who would find a reason to hate you either way.

>(here was my response..)
>My answer is that your children will experience much more powerful
>applications and be able to adapt to new technologies whether on
>workstation spreadsheets or enterprise database servers.  In fact, they
>will get to work on the same servers that are used to create movies like
>Titanic and Shrek.  MS can't touch that, only SGI and Linux.  We aren't
>meeting the bar, we are leaps and bounds beyond that point.  They will
>program in a stable, secure environment that runs such sites as Google
>(which is run by 15,000 linux servers).  No, you're right this is not a
>Microsoft shop.  And we don't want to be.

Not bad.

In general I think it is always best to avoid saying either "Linux" or
Microsoft", etc...  Keep it vague: "Here we have our computer lab where
students can work with the latest releases of powerful software packages
used all over the world by a wide range of industry leading
corporations" :)  They'll be so impressed.  

People walk up to my desk and see my VERY busy and wonderfully themed
GNOME display and say "Wow!  How cool.".  I don't think the concept that
it is anything other than Microsoft even crosses the mind of the
majority of them.  They just assume it is some tweaked, pimped out,
latest and greatest version of "something".  Most of the time it is best
just to let them keep thinking that.