[plug] [link] "Our" Chris Macdonald gets his name in the paper

[Leon Brooks]

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,5687204%255E15306,00.html

<quote>
[...]

UWA's senior lecturer in computer science and software engineering Chris 
McDonald said Unix was dropped from teaching around 1995, and was no longer 
specifically required for any research projects. 

UWA recently dropped Apple from its IT education programs in the school, for 
the same reason that Unix was abandoned -- expensive proprietary hardware. 

"It wasn't so much the [Unix] operating system costs, because it usually came 
with the machine or we could get pretty good prices as an educational 
institution," he said. 

Linux was easier to give to students for home use, Dr McDonald said. 

"If we were using Solaris or HP-UX or something like that, I'm sure there 
would be very different and costly licensing issues involved," he said. 

"We are trying to move to an environment where what we provide in the 
laboratories can be mirrored in the students' home."

[...]

Dr McDonald said in teaching open-source platforms to students it is important 
not to "just ram open-source issues down their throats. It's important to 
explain why there is a difference in philosophy, why it's reasonable to not 
to totally tread the path of one particular vendor, one particular monopoly." 

However, Dr McDonald said UWA's school of computer science and software 
engineering was part of Microsoft's academic alliance program, which allowed 
the free distribution of Microsoft operating systems to enrolled students. 

The school used Linux and Windows to teach operating systems. 

"It's good to show not just the similarities, but more importantly the 
differences." 

Linux allowed better teaching of the principles behind software development, 
he said. 

"We'd rather explain how things work. We do that by taking things apart and 
putting them back together again, rather than just showing people how to use 
particular GUIs that other people have designed. It's our belief that 
open-source software better explains those concepts," he said. 

"Personally, I think that just showing students how to use operating systems 
tools and networking tools, is more training than education. 

"From 2003 UWA's school of computer science and software engineering will be 
using Linux, in preference to Windows, for our first-year Foundations of IT 
unit."
</quote>

..another excellent snippet...

<quote>
At the University of Wollongong, which has about 1700 computer science 
students, machines in first-year labs that used to boot from either Windows 
or Linux have been changed to Linux only. 

"We get large number of inexperienced people in first-year and we are really 
trying to keep down our overheads and concentrate our professional support 
more in the later years," said Les Ohlbach, operations manager for the 
university's Department of Informatics." 

"The best way to control the first-years was to put them in a Linux-only 
environment where you can lock it down pretty well."
</quote>

Cheers; Leon