Thin client compared to full size PC tower
This is another one of those comments that turned into it’s own blog post. The gist of the article on themacsucks.com is that macs are overpriced and education dollars could be better spent on other solutions. It got me thinking about an age-old debate: Which computer is best for education? Here is my response:
First of all, congratulations on a very clever way to set up your blog. Hitting the mac love/hate nerve should help your pagerank as thousands of mac fanboys go one the defensive and still others take the opposite side. I won’t take either side, but as a former High School Computer Science teacher I have to offer my 2 cents…
Focusing on ratios such as kids/computer and dollars/computer ignores the more central issue: What do you want to do with the computers? Simply creating more “computer time” does not improve learning. Throwing more computer hardware at teachers and kids doesn’t improve learning either. We found this out the hard way in California. It’s amazing to me how little thought goes into spending 100’s of millions of dollars on technology.
There is also setup and maintenance to consider. This is rarely ever included in the cost of new systems. Installing and maintaining software is often left to the classroom teacher, which is a major reason why so many school computers end up sitting idle, collecting dust. I am a former Computer Science teacher in Southern California, I designed my own computer lab, set up and managed my own software, etc, etc. I chose to buy Dells, but I also spent hundreds of hours of my own time setting up and imaging computer after computer. If I had to do it again, I would probably go with a solution better suited to a classroom environment. Something like Edubuntu running on a thin client system would be a great way to cut down on maintenance issues and dramatically lower costs. All you need is a single thin client server and a bunch of thin clients with screens, keyboards, and mice. And by the way, thin clients don’t need to be upgraded every few years like stand-alone computers. Their life-cycle is more like 10-15 years.
Let’s face it, for most of what we do these days, all you need is a browser, a PDF viewer, and OpenOffice. But I wouldn’t rule out buying macs for something like video editing, even if it means buying fewer machines. It really depends on what you are trying to help people learn. If Edubuntu can’t do it, then I have to go elsewhere until it can. I only wish we could take some of the money we plan to spend on school technology and put it towards projects like Edubuntu. Then we’d get a decent video editor and much, much more! And while I am wishing, I wish my school district had listened to Kevin Haugh. He advocated for thin clients back in 2001 and no one listened.