Jonesieblog

It’s reassuring to read that someone else would like teachers and students to have more freedom on the PCs and laptops that they use in schools – Tom Hoffman expresses this better than I ever have in his post “Security Don’ts or User Requirements?”

I know Tom through our mutual interest in providing an open source alternative to the commercial MIS systems that our schools pay through the nose for. Tom is the project manager of SchoolTool, a project that has the backing of Mark Shuttleworth, the millionaire South African who went into space, and I’ve created FreeMIS.

If students and teachers can’t install software without a significant risk of data loss and support time, that’s a flaw in the system. It is a design goal of the OLPC system to allow users to safely install software.

Stumble it!