Technology Management

The lesson addresses these topics:

• From the Trenches – a Hawaii Middle School Implements F/OSS
• Vendor Lock-in
• Total Cost of Ownership
• Paths to  F/OSS Implementation

Advanced Organizer

During the lesson, look for answers to the following questions:

1. What motivates a technology manager to implement F/OSS solutions?
2. What are some of the pay-offs, pain points, outcomes, and unforeseen issues involved?
3. What did the British Educational Communications Technology Agency (BECTA) find regarding total cost of ownership of school computers?
4. Per BECTA, which cost elements represented the majority of TCO in both primary & secondary schools?
5. What did BECTA conclude regarding teachers’ view of their own technology skills and confidence in schools that integrated open-source ?
6. Why is lock-in beneficial for technology vendors?  What are the consequences for schools and users?
7. Why is avoidance of vendor lock-in the primary motivator for enterprise adoptions of F/OSS?
8. What are the technical options for providing F/OSS in schools?
9. What are the non-technical issues that a F/OSS implementation must contend with?

Synchronous Meeting

Google Hangout (Required)

• Monday, 9/30/13
• 6:00PM HST
• Link to The Event

Please join the Hangout 10 minutes early (5:50PM) to re-test your microphone and headset. During class; we will be discussing some of the material from the past week, and have a chance to interact with a guest presenter (Ken Agcaoili). Be prepared to ask questions and to participate in answering those posed.

I have created a Google+ event associated with a Hangout on Air (HOA) for this guest presentation. The presentation is public, streamed via Youtube, where a recording will be stored. Class members will get an invitation to the Google+ Event, in which the Youtube stream will be viewable. Note that Youtube viewers have a separate chat window from those in the actual Hangout, and Youtube viewers will experience an audio/video lag from our live session (up to two minutes, from my testing). The HOA allows us to invite others from outside the class to view (and to ask questions in the Youtube chat window).hav

The “on Air” aspect of this meeting is different than our first class meeting. I will be inviting a selected group to participate in the live Hangout, note that if you’re one of these participants you will be recorded. There is a maximum of 10 (8 students, instructor, and guest presenter). Because a “Hangout on Air” cannot be scheduled prior to the time of the event, live participants will get an invitation shortly before presentation time (ie, when the HOA is launched). Please join the Hangout asap, or 10 minutes early to re-test your microphone and headset.

Guest Presenter:

• Ken Agcaoili
• Vice Principal, Kaimuki High School, and
• Technology Coordinator at Hawaii School for the Deaf and Blind (current)
• Curriculum & Technology Coordinator, R.L. Stephenson Middle School (former)

For much of his career, Agcaoili has fought to transform classrooms by changing pedagogical practices, which encourage knowledge creation communities.  Key factors in creating a knowledge creation community are collaboration tools made possible through easy access of networked computers.  Despite a limited budget, Agcaoili has successfully established a more than one-to-one computer ratio at RLS by using netbooks running the Linux distribution, Ubuntu, as the operating system.

The shift to Linux began when 150 laptops running Windows XP on RLS campus could not run the Hawaii State Assessment, because of programs running in the background.  Instead of troubleshooting each laptop, Clonezilla was used to re-image each laptop with Ubuntu.  The small footprint of the Ubuntu image allowed for a seven minute re-image for each laptop.  This is compared to the 30 minute re-image for Windows XP.  RLS now has more than 700 student computers smoothly running Ubuntu.

Walk-through

1. Read Open Source Software in Schools: A study of the spectrum of use and related ICT infrastructure costs, Executive Summary (PDF) pp. 4-5

BECTA was an agency funded by the United Kingdom Department for Education from 1998 to 2011. BECTA’s purpose was the Promotion and integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) in education. BECTA published several reports that addressed the TCO for school computing, including this analysis of open-source use in schools. There are several extremely interesting findings in this study. Of significant note is that support costs, both formal and user self-support, made up the lion’s share of TCO. Paired with the finding that support costs in open-source schools were “generally around 50-60% of the equivalent non-OSS support costs”, this appears to be the most significant source of financial savings for open-source implementation. Software costs, while significant, represent considerably less expenditure.

2. Read Vendor Lock-in (Wikipedia), specifically Lock-in for electronics and computers, and Avoiding vendor lock-in for computer software

Vendor lock-in occurs when  a customer is dependent on a single vendor for products or services and switching vendors is too expensive, difficult, or impossible to consider. In the computer industry, difficulty in switching systems can be caused by an application, a file format, the operating system, or hardware. IBM, Sony, Apple, and Microsoft all have unique histories promoting lock-in to their products.  It’s easy to see that vendors profit when customers can’t switch to competitors. Conversely customers without alternatives must pay whatever fees are required to retain use of locked-in technology. Open standards (which we’ll explore in an upcoming lesson) and F/OSS have been hailed as solutions to avoid lock-in.

3. Read Future of OSS Survey, 2012 (HTML)

This survey summary notes some fascinating current statistics about open-source in enterprises. Among them, the survey indicates that enterprises are participating at a high rate, with 30% of the 740 respondents indicating that open-source will make up 50-75% of deployed code.  That’s huge.  The results I want to call your attention to, however, are the motivators.  The top “driver of open source software in the enterprise” was “freedom from vendor lock-in” at 60% – which is even higher than lowered acquisition and maintenance costs (51% responses). This is an important finding, and consistent with my experiences managing technology in academia.

Adopting F/OSS at the organizational level clearly creates recognized benefits to the enterprise.  Freedom from lock-in goes hand-in-hand with paid, expert support services.  When license fees are not the source of vendor revenue, there are other profit-making options that provide more value to the enterprise – namely support and service agreements. The enterprise benefits from getting expertise and assistance, rather than just the right to run software. Vendors clearly see support and service as viable revenue generation strategies.  Respondents ranked annual support and service agreements as the top strategy (52%) and ad-hoc services and support second (41%).

4. Read 8 Paths of OSS for Schools (PDF) pp 1-5

Imagine that your school has decided to try one or more F/OSS applications. How do you plan and execute a pilot program? There are several issues to consider, technical and otherwise. You’ll need to implement the software while minimizing inconvenience to users. There are trade-offs between maximizing the savings and efficiency of F/OSS use and minimizing inconvenience to users. The biggest payoff is generated by a complete F/OSS implementation, which also generates the most change and inconvenience for users.

8 Paths of OSS for Schools addresses the technical options for providing F/OSS to users. The options described list advantages, disadvantages, and technical difficulty of each choice. Of central importance is deciding whether and how to provide a fully F/OSS operating system, Linux, as an alternative to Windows or OSX. This is a concern because there is a much wider selection of F/OSS available for Linux systems. The document introduces Linux, which we will cover in-depth in a coming lesson.  For now, know that Linux distributions are complete F/OSS operating systems – akin to Windows or OSX.  Just as there are many versions of Windows (XP, 7, 8, RT, etc), there are many versions of “Linux”. The better known Linux systems include Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Red-Hat, openSUSE, and Debian.

The most convenient path from the user perspective is to do nothing – let users continue business as usual.  Hence, any F/OSS implementation is bound to generate some degree of push-back, as it will be less convenient to users. It is therefore important to consider communication strategy (how do we announce the plan?); timing (when is least disruptive?), training (how do we prepare those affected?), and support (how do users get help after the implementation?) as well as the technical details.

Activity

I intended for you to try Edubuntu, a Linux distribution pre-loaded with educational software, as an online demo. However, the “weblive” demo is currently offline.  The Edubuntu team is putting their energy into preparing it for the Edubuntu 14.04 release (April 2014), so we’re going to miss out for now.Edubuntu has a world-wide community and installation base.  The Edubuntu App Guide provides a list of software that comes in each of four bundles (preschool, primary, secondary, tertiary).  You can also browse the Edubuntu screenshots tour to get an idea of what software is included by default.   Instead of the weblive demo….

Try Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions, and the one on which Edubuntu is based.  In fact, you can easily install the preschool, primary, secondary, and/or tertiary software sets from the Ubuntu Software Center. Explore the software and user interface.  Use one of the following methods to try Ubuntu. You can do option 1 from any computer – it is the least impressive options, but easiest for those who can not get to Wist Hall and don’t want to set up a boot-able USB flashdrive or DVD.

1. Take the Ubuntu online tour. This is a simulation, not a real Ubuntu instance; but you can explore the user interface and see some of the default software. By contrast to a real Ubuntu instance, though, it’s pretty lame. Also review the Edubuntu App Guide for ideas on educational software that can be added to Ubuntu. Find and visit project websites for interesting titles.
2. For those on Oahu, stop in to Wist 134 (the COE Collaboration Center) during open hours (8 and 5PM, M-F). Half of the computers in the drop-in lab run Ubuntu. Edubuntu 13.04 (latest) has been installed on “Meerkat 4”, the PC closest to the COE Tech Office – you can try all the Edubuntu software on this computer.  Also review the Edubuntu App Guide for ideas on educational software you may find useful. Visit project websites for interesting titles.
3. Windows users, Boot from USB:
   1. You will need a USB flashdrive with 4 (four!) GB of space. Do NOT use a flash-drive with data on it, your flash-drive will get erased in this process.
   2. Download edubuntu-12.04.2-dvd-i386.iso (a disk image, or .iso file, for the DVD). This is single a large file, holding the entire contents of a DVD.
   3. Create a bootable USB stick per these instructions. Choose “Edubuntu 12.04” in step 1, and substitute the edubuntu-12.04.2-dvd-i386.iso file in step 2.
   4. Boot from the USB drive.  Note that you will likely need to press F12, or Escape (or another key named in your startup message) to prioritize USB as first boot device.
   5. You will have the option to Try Edubuntu or Install Edubuntu – click “Try Edubuntu” and you’ll be running Edubuntu right from the flash drive. (Do NOT click “Install Ubuntu”. This would walk you through installing on your hard drive. Don’t panic if you do, you can still cancel during the upcoming steps.)
4. OSX users, Boot from DVD:
   1. Booting from optical disks (CD’s or DVD’s) works, but it is very slow.  Don’t blame Ubuntu, blame your Mac for not supporting USB flash-drive booting. While there are instructions for creating a bootable USB flash-drive for OSX, from experience I distrust that it will work.
   2. You will need a writable DVD and a DVD read/write drive.
   3. Download edubuntu-12.04.2-dvd-i386.iso (a disk image, or .iso file, for the DVD). This is single a large file, holding the entire contents of a DVD.
   4. Create a bootable DVD per these instructions.  Choose the edubuntu-12.04.2-dvd-i386.iso file in step 4.
   5. Reboot your computer and hold the “C” key down. You should boot from the DVD
   6. You will have the option to Try Edubuntu or Install Edubuntu – click “Try Edubuntu” and you’ll be running Edubuntu right from the DVD. (Do NOT click “Install Ubuntu”. This would walk you through installing on your hard drive. Don’t panic if you do, you can still cancel during the upcoming steps.)

   Consider This:

   • What are your reactions to using this user interface?
   • How difficult do you think a typical teacher would find it to navigate?
   • Are there software titles you find interesting?
   • Which of the applications that you find interesting is available for Windows? For OSX?

   Assignment

   Blog Post 5 – Edubuntu and/or Ubuntu
   

   1. Respond to the questions in the Ubuntu activity

   Test: Module 2

   1. You will find the test in Laulima, under the Tests tool.  Tests are timed, and allow only one submission. Cooperating on test responses is prohibited, and evidence of cheating will be addressed through the UHM Student Code of Conduct. Study well, and good luck!
   • Per announcement, I will delay release of the test until after our synchronous session on Monday, 10/7/13

   Additional Reading

   1. Edubuntu (Wikipedia)
   2. Ubuntu Online trial
   3. Open Source, an Educated Decision (PDF) – a “white paper” by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux
   4. TCO Graphs reproduced from: BECTA (2006). Managing ICT costs in schools