Re: [seul-edu] Linux in Universities

[Scott Brooks <scottbrooks@telusplanet.net>]

I agree 100% to Jan.

I go to a small college, in a town of about 38,000 people.  Out of the 5
CS prof's 2 or 3 have a bit of linux experience.  The IT department is
100% MS except for the 1 comp sci server.  Out of the entire population
of the school, I'm probably the only Linux user.  In the entire degree
program, one CS course you need to take is Operating Systems, which is
taught under linux, which is the only experience the students get.

One of the Prof's has expressed interest in doing more linux stuff, so
this year I am going to try and work with him as much as possible to see
where things go.

It can be tricky going through a CS program in a small institution where
one of the core courses is Win32 GUI programming, but gcc's cross
compile ability & wine still let me use Linux for everything.

Scott Brooks


On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 09:57, Jan Hlavacek wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 09:12:11AM +0100, Scott Wheeler wrote:
> > 
> > Quoting Dan Kegel <dank@kegel.com>: 
> >  
> > > Eventually I hope to make this a useful resource for anyone 
> > > trying to convince their local university that Linux should be  
> > > (a) supported by their IT staff,  
> >  
> > Few Universities do this, which honestly, I think is fine so long as they do 
> > not actively oppose Linux or require proprietary software to access certain 
> > resources.  Fortunately most universities have LUGs to help people along. 
> 
> Actually, there is a huge number od small 4 years colleges that
> completely sold their souls to Microsoft.  They usually don't even have
> CS departments, or if they do, they view CS as "business", their CS
> curriculum consists of PowerPoint and Visual Basic, and ASP if they are
> feeling creative. 
> 
> What should concern us is the fact that these colleges usually have a
> lot of education majors, and produce a lot of local teachers.  Those
> students graduate from college and go to teach thinking that Microsoft
> is all there is.  I think there is a huge potential here, if we can
> somehow educate the teachers even before they become teachers.  The
> problem is that there is a huge resistance.  One of the problems is that
> business or "CS" departments at these schools mostly consist of a bunch
> of MSCE's who are affraid of Linux, and since they often managed to
> convince the rest of the school that they are the true computer experts,
> everyone listens to them.  Often the only Linux users at such school are
> couple of math profs, and, if you are lucky, some of the IT stuff, who
> have Linux boxes at home.
> 
> > > (b) used for infrastructure, 
> >  
> > I've worked for two university IT departments -- both of which used Linux 
> > extensively.  I think you'll find that this is more of the standard than the 
> > exception. 
> 
> Again, a lot of the small colleges signed up for some sort of Microsoft
> Campus Agreement and use Windoze exclusively.  Their intranets and
> administrative software are only accerrible from windoze boxes (that's i
> have two computers on my desk). 
> 
> > > (c) used as part of the undergraduate cirriculum,  
> >  
> > Again, *nix has typically dominated computer science departments, well, 
> > forever.  Linux has become a much cheaper replacement to proprietary systems 
> > and as such is again, becoming the standard. 
> 
> Again, you are talking about large schools that actually have real CS
> departments and faculty that knows something about computing.
> 
> > At any rate I think the reason that you probably haven't found many studies on 
> > this is that Linux is more popular in the "university" subculture than 
> > anywhere else.  Typically advocacy stems *from* uni students rather than to 
> > them.  ;-) 
> 
> Again, at most small colleges and universities, you would probably have
> hard time finding a Linux user among the student population.  Maybe few
> geeks here or there, but that's it.
> 
> > I would even guess that universities that do not do at least half of the above 
> > are in the minority rather than majority. 
> 
> These days every stupid small community college calls itself university,
> and what's important, they do produce a lot of teachers.  In some parts
> of the country, small local schools like that produce majority of them.
> People who manage to get to a bigger better school often don't come
> back.
> 
> -- 
> Jan Hlavacek                                            (219) 434-7566
> Department of Mathematics                             Jhlavacek@sf.edu
> University of Saint Francis               http://www.sf.edu/jhlavacek/