 So, it's great to have here today somebody who can give us some real life experience of, I guess it's not too hard to introduce kids to something like Linux, but people like teachers I find are some of the people who are least receptive to new ideas. So it's great to have Patrick Brennan here to give us his story from in New Zealand. All right. Well, my name is Patrick and I have chocolate. I know that it's the end of the day. I know that everybody is tired. I have a lot of chocolate. I wasn't sure exactly what the turnout would be. I've come to tell you a little bit about Albany Senior High School and open source in education in general in Auckland. Now, this is a follow on from a talk I did last year at LCA in Wellington. Last year it was a very technical talk. This year it would be a bit more philosophical. Again, I know it's really late, so try and follow closely. I've got chocolate to try and assist with that. There'll be questions. And if you're cheeky, you might get chocolate. If you heckle, you might get chocolate. Now, I know somewhere in this room the spelling heckler is here. I don't know which one of you it is yet, but I've made three deliberate spelling mistakes for you to find. All right, so a bit of a power biography. Really, there's a bunch of information there, but the main thing is that I was the lead engineer on the Albany Senior High Implementation and that I am as well a father, although my kids are a little bit too young to be in a senior high at the stage. So I'll give you a bit of a background on the school. It's been operating for two years. It was a Greenfield school, completely new school, completely new. What? Where? Who was that? Oh, two of you. That works. I'm not renowned for my throwing. Anyone that was. Oh! Hey, I've gone better. So, very, yeah, for the person that can duck, there we go. So, a Greenfield school, completely new, completely new philosophy. They're a Ministry of Education flagship school, OK? So, if you were to walk into Albany, you would see some significant differences immediately. The first thing that you would notice is there aren't really any classrooms. Now, there are some specialist topic rooms. So, the music rooms, obviously, are sound insulated rooms, because you don't want Megadeth disrupting the English class. And the science labs are science labs with fume hubs and that sort of thing, because you don't want whoever in this room made chlorine inadvertently in their science class poisoning the whole school. All right? The whole right-hand side, so that's down the left-hand side. It's basically a big, long school in a line. The whole right-hand side is Open Plan, two floors of Open Plan spaces. And the idea with that is, is that an English teacher who is maybe teaching Anne Frank's diary in the class of studying Anne Frank, can liaise with a class and the geography teacher that is teaching the geography of Europe, can liaise and interact with a history teacher that is teaching the history of World War II or an art teacher that's doing Holocaust art. There's also no computer labs. So, there's no concept of, you know, well, now it's computer lab time. We're going to go and do IT now. What you'll find is that there are computers through all of the learning commons. So, as it's appropriate during any educational session for a student to use a computer, computer is there. Rather than having this, you know, we've got English, we've got math, we've got computer time, okay? So, IT is quite integrated. Now, the other interesting difference in the school is that they only teach four days a week. And the fifth day, and I believe last year this was a Wednesday for what it's worth, students do what are called impact projects. Those are self-driven projects. And I'll give you a couple of examples, one non-IT, one IT. So, one example that commonly comes up is students that maybe want to do some fundraising. So, the student would be in a group, they'd be expected to perhaps choose a charity, contact the charity, liaise with the charity, and say, here's what we're planning to do. We're planning to raise you some money. We're going to have a sausage sizzle or a disco, something along those lines. And they would then be expected to write a business plan and present that to the school and the school would say, okay, why are you going to need $380 worth of sausages and $250 of bread and some tomato sauce? You have a sound business plan, here's your money for that. Students will then run that event, take the money that they received from that, pay the school back for the portion that, you know, for supplies essentially, and then deliver the sum revenue to their charity. So, all of the impact projects are led by a supervising teacher. Those have been at sort of post-grad level. It's sort of like a research supervisor. Another very, very good example because one of the people involved is sitting in the room at the moment, stand up Shane. Shane Gettys. Now, you can sit down again now. Another very good example is a student, a group of students in fact that went, oh, actually what we need is a video repository. We need a way for students to upload videos and to go into a moderation queue for teachers to upload videos, for that to be sort of private, self-contained local, not, you know, YouTube, but basically a local YouTube, let's call it our tube. And so the students got together, they wrote their plan and they went ahead and they implemented that. And that is now a core part of the infrastructure of Albany Senior High. Now, our tube is one example, there's actually I think three others that these guys have been merrily pushing along through. So, open learning lends itself really, really well to open source technologies and we'll come along to that. Now, just to give you an idea of the size of the school this year, there's expected to be 740 students based on enrollment. So, it's not a huge school, we're not talking 2,000, but it's not a small school either. It has a certain critical mass. Now, those would be what, 16, 17, 18 year olds around that, around that sort of bracket. There's a little picture of the campus, you can see one of the two level main blocks and there's three of those blocks I believe, two, three blocks extending backwards. Now, again, not a technical presentation today, but I just did want to overview a little bit of what there is technically. So, all of the desktops and all of the teacher laptops are running Ubuntu. And surprisingly the teachers have coped with that. In fact, jumping off my slides from over and jumping back to last year, I told a story where basically Mark Osborne, who was the deputy principal and he holds the IT portfolio for the school, went and bought before his staff arrived 30 HP laptops and he delivered them to us and he said, please put Ubuntu on these, yes, two, very good. So, he basically delivered them to us before his staff arrived and when his staff arrived, he said, here's your laptop, here's your laptop, he didn't say, here's your laptop and it's got something different on it and you're gonna have to figure out how to use it and it's not what you'd expect and it's not Windows and he just said, here's your laptop. And I was actually really staggered because when we went in, there were staff using laptops connected to projectors, there were staff and, I mean, I don't know about you, but the amount of people that were shouting, Linux consultants and engineers that were shouting at their laptops last year, trying to get them to talk to projectors and here were these teachers that were just doing it. So, there was no complaint, there was no, they just did it, you know, and I think that that was a good approach. Now, coming back again, and Dreaver on the servers, there were some technical constraints that pushed us that way. Terminal services, now stick this in the back of your mind because we'll come back to this, this is important. There were some edge cases. Predominantly the student management system, which is really only runs under Windows but is really constrained in its scope. It's for teachers, it's not for the broader community. So, there are 30 terminal services cows involved in that. We'll come back to that, okay. Cloud apps, most of the business applications if you like that the school users were provisioned in the cloud. So, Google apps, Google mail, okay, that's all free for schools. The library management system, COHA, off hosted in the ether. So, not necessarily open source, not necessarily free, but certainly open standards of interchange and often the cloud, e-portfolios in the cloud. Now, currently there are 11 applications that the school uses that are out in the cloud, I believe with more planned. So, I'm not gonna list them all, I'm not gonna go through them all, we'll provide a link at the end where you can go and go through the Albany documentation, which is open and look at what those services are and how the school is using them in education. They're all single sign-on or single credential. So, if you are external to the school, you log in with your Albany username and your Albany password, that's all from the Albany out-up server or from a central point. So, there's no, I've got my password for this and my username for that and I can't remember this. Change your password in one place, change that everywhere. If, Yes, that's specifically for the cloud services that I'm ruling. So, those 11 services are all tied back to that central repository. Taking that a step further, if you are inside the campus and you log into a desktop, you're logging into GDM and GDM is authenticating against PAM and then through some PAM magic and some firewall magic, which we definitely don't have time to talk about, you are authenticated to all of those services. So, you do not need to enter your username and password again. Now, I think there are some exceptions to that where there's technological constraints or more work required. But essentially, if you're in the campus, it is true single sign-on. You log into the desktop, that's it, you're logged in everywhere. There is one windows machine, one token windows machine used by the building manager because the CCTV software and the programming software for the swipe card access does not run under Wine or Linux or anything other than, well, I think it was written for Windows 95, to be honest, but it seems to run under XP. Now, to give you a bit of a landscape, if you like, who's from where in here? Who's from Australia? Okay, who's from New Zealand? Who's from elsewhere? Lichtenstein? No, America, I know who you are. Yeah, so in New Zealand at least, and I would think in Australia, and possibly you can comment on elsewhere. Yeah. Europe. So in those spaces, the education environment is very, very Microsoft focused. Would that be true? Would anybody disagree with that? For their country? Yeah, very, very Microsoft focused. In New Zealand at least, it's heavily, heavily subsidized by the Ministry of Education and therefore the government and also by Microsoft. So it's not just Windows. So again? Which makes a lot better, Ryan. Right. Catch. There you go. See what happens when you open your mouth? It's terrible. I've got quite a lot. Okay, all the established design norms and design patterns are around Windows. So if a school goes out for RFP and says, you know, we're a new school, we need an IT system, I would guarantee that 99% of those responses would be, we deploy Windows, we deploy Active Directory stack, we deploy, you know. And I would go even further and say that the school would typically contract someone to write the RFP for them because they're teachers, they're not engineers, right? I would go further and say, I would almost guarantee that that RFP specified Microsoft technologies. I would almost guarantee that the RFP, instead of saying credentialing source would say Active Directory and would say group policy instead of saying what the actual outcome is. And we've seen a few of those RFPs and we've responded to a few of them and typically that's the way that they are. Okay, there's also a perception that students should train with real world tools and I'll touch on that and get a little bit excited about that later on. Okay, so free. What does free mean? Unfortunately, English is a terrible language and we have lots of meanings for the word free, but in free software, who can tell me what those meanings are? Looking for two of them? Free as in beer. Free as in beer. I knew that one would come up first. Some of you might call that beer. Some of you possibly would not. I'm not going to start a riot, but who was? Okay, you're sure? That'll do. Okay, free as in beer, free as in zero cost. Okay, and the other one, free as in freedom. All right, is there anyone here that can do a passable impression of Mal Gibson doing a bad William Wallace? Is there anyone that daring? No, all right. Free as in freedom. Okay, so let's talk about free as in beer first. License costs. We touched already on the New Zealand government subsidizing license fees. Now, in my view, and this is just my opinion, that's a little bit underhanded the way it works in New Zealand. I'll tell you why. Coming back to the 30 Terminal Services client access licenses that we had to buy, you get a form from the Ministry of Education that you have to fill out, so Microsoft form. And one of the fields on that form is quantity. Now this is where it gets tricky because that field is not, excuse me, the quantity of licenses that you would like to buy. That field is quantity of qualifying machines. And when you look at the definition of qualifying machines, it pretty well just excludes OSX machines, and that's it because theoretically they can't run windows. Now we looked at that form and we thought, well, okay, so what happens? We put 200 on that form, and Microsoft gets 200 licenses worth of money from the Ministry of Education. Now that doesn't seem right to me because that's money that I'm paying to the government that I expect them to educate my children with. Have you considered? No. It's an interesting idea. Yeah, well, I'll tell you what we did, and I don't know whether it's something, yeah, I don't know whether it's something that I should be admitting in a room full of people, but however, what we did was went, well, qualifying machines, an OSX machine can run windows and it's disqualified because it has a different OS. So therefore our Rubuntu machines that happen to be after on windows, surely they're disqualified because they're running a different OS. So we put 30 in that box. But it's a little bit, you can see the scenescape and you can see how ingrained and carefully considered it is. And again, I'm not trying to necessarily be anti-Microsoft. I think Microsoft are doing really well when you measure them against what you should measure them against. Now, Microsoft is a company and a company is supposed to make money for its shareholders as much as it can in any way it can. And they're really good at that. You gotta admit they are really, really good at that. They've built themselves a fantastic monopoly. What that's not good for is my kid's education. Now, web filtering as well, we'll touch on that in a minute, but what I wanted to come back to was, Mark Osborne, again, DP, uses a term called learning tax. Now, that's quite a neat term. That's quite a neat sound bite to troll up around to people. If a student wants to use tools at home or wants to run windows at home, they have to buy stuff, right? Now, I just dragged these figures off the internet. They're not top, they're not bottom. They're just kind of what I could find quickly somewhere in the middle, okay? So, a copy of Windows 7, I'm using 108 Australian dollars. So, maybe we want Office as well. There's another 160 Australian dollars. Somebody add this up along the way would be good. Okay, maybe we wanna do some photo editing. Elements, nine, it's 130 Australian dollars. Then it starts to get really expensive. What if we want to do some video editing too? There's 477 Australian dollars that you need to spend to do that. Now, maybe my kid is interested in video editing, but it's also a musician. So, he wants to do some digital audio work. He wants to do some multi-tracking. That's 832 Australian dollars, but it gets worse because, hang on, keep going, Pro Tools. You want more chocolate, you've already had some. Pro Tools only runs on a Mac and it won't run on a low-end Mac. It needs a high-end Mac. So, you all of a sudden have to add in 2,300 Australian dollars. It gets very, very expensive, very, very quickly. What is it? You've got the capitalization on my Mac now. That's fucking good. Oh! There's always one. It's so good a shot. That was good. I am so much better than last year. It was terrible. Right, what does it lead to? It leads to piracy. Okay, now, I'm not gonna stand up here and say, I'm perfect and the piracy is wrong and that I've never used pirated software and there'll be plenty of other people in the room that have and that I don't ever download TV shows. But, we're not talking about what would I do. We're talking about what an educational institute is representing to my children. And really, what they're teaching my children is, well, if you want to learn, if you want to use this tool, if you want to be equal to your classmates, you'll have to steal it. We have a lawyer in the room. Let's come back to web filtering. This is interesting because it saved the school a lot of money, so it's worth mentioning. Schools typically, certainly in New Zealand, at least out-farm their web filtering. The reason that they do that is not so much because it's technically complicated, but for liability transfer. If we're paying somebody else for this and a student access is something, then there's a degree of liability transfer that's happened with that payment under contractual law. Hasn't been tested in court in the school environment, but it's certainly tested in other environments. Yeah, I think it's not as I can get. It's good. Yeah. Let's go to the school, let me see. Yeah, all of the company, yeah. Exactly. We've asked them to do a better job. Exactly, that's exactly right. And I doubt that something like that would ever really go to court in that scenario. But, so the Ministry of Education funds the schools in New Zealand and it funds it to 10 megabits. So they send you a Cisco 1800 router, you put it in line with your internet connection, you get 10 meg out of it. That's fine unless you have 11 of your core productivity apps in the cloud and you want to deliver a rich experience to your students. And then all of a sudden 10 megabits supports, well, you know, three students, which isn't very many. So if you want more than that, and now when he has one gig fiber coming in, which they're currently buying 100 megacross, am I correct? 100 megacross for the internet connection at the moment. If you want more than that, you need to supply your own Cisco router. It has to be a watchdog certified Cisco router, a particular device. That is $5,000 for a device that will support 100 megabits. So it gets very expensive very quickly. If you want to go beyond that, then all bets are kind of somewhat off. It gets very, very expensive. Now, obviously the school already has an IP table's firewall because there are Linux across the board. So why don't we use that IP table's firewall to take on that functionality? And what we were able to do was build that functionality into the firewall so that we can basically filter at interface speed. And Watchdog as a company is very happy for that. They're very, very Linux friendly. Now taking that a step further and saying, well, okay, that's great, that's open source. Let's make it open philosophy. That is now available. We made the configuration and the steps available to Watchdog so that other schools can benefit from that knowledge. So it's not just Albany that can do that now. No, actually everything is going through Watchdog. Technically, it's asymmetric routing. It's an IP IP tunnel and only outbound packets go through Watchdog. The return packets come back not through Watchdog. But if you want more technical detail, come grab me afterwards. But yeah, now the argument that you'll hear against that from people is well, but Albany had to pay to have that developed. Well, yes they did. Unfortunately, Albany is the first school and they're groundbreaking and they did have to pay to have it developed. But they didn't have to pay $5,000 to have it developed. It was considerably less than that. I mean, $5,000, what's a book cost? $20. What's 5,000 divided by 20? Who? What? 25. 25, is he right? I've already thrown him chocolate. 250. 250. 250. It's wrong by an order of magnitudes. No, you must keep it. So. Are you a vegetarian, sir? No, absolutely not. Oh yeah. So, that's 250 books. I'm sure a librarian would absolutely love to have a school. That's the whole rack, you know? So why spend this money? And now other schools can benefit from that and for another school to implement that, you're talking 30 minutes or an hour. Not the time that it took, yes. Then can you go buy 250 books? Or is that, if you didn't spend the $5,000 from Mexico, then that's $5,000 you didn't get from the government. So you don't really get to buy books with that. I hear what you're saying. Just for the benefit of the webcast, the question was, if we don't spend that $5,000 on IT, can we therefore take that $5,000 and spend it on something else? At a very low granular level, I don't know because I'm not a teacher. I don't know how that works inside the school. Taking a bigger picture level, if the government's not spending that $5,000 from that poll and therefore, there's more money in the poll, then surely more money would be allocated elsewhere. Yeah, it's possible. It's certainly possible, yeah. You've got politics in the mix, so. I'm not sure if you're actually officially taking questions, but. Sort of. Is there any mechanism available to the school to allow you to propagate some of these developments that you have done, so for example, some sort of a code repository online or a forge or something that you can point people to when they say, well. Okay. Sort of. Albany did it. Sort of, we will touch on that a little bit later. It's more about tools more so than perhaps particular technologies. In terms of this specifically, Watchdog is the company that the ministry pays for for all schools in New Zealand, so they're the fact to go to and they now have that knowledge because we provided it to them. So specifically for this, yes, for other things, sort of. It depends what it is, how technical it is. Now, I also wanted to talk about a brand. Now, I wasn't bold enough to come up and stand up here and, whoops. Dear, what brand was that? To actually endorse a brand because I just thought that would be inappropriate. So that's for the sake of argument, call them Dill, which really works quite well if you're from Sydney. Now, the reason that I raised this is because Albany ended up with quite powerful hardware on their desktops, but this particular company, Dill, was able to provide that with no OS. So if you're looking around, if you're doing this for other schools, it's worth looking at Dill hardware because they will, if you talk to them, even if it's not on their website, and I know it's a little bit different in the US, but in New Zealand, Dill won't sell you a... They do? Right. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so moving on from free, as in beer, to free, as in freedom, and labor, and powerment, okay? Now, the deputy principal is normally the school disciplinarian. He's normally the person that says, Patrick, no, you can't use that different reaction to remove the purple stain from the sink that you left when you concocted the first reaction that you shouldn't have, and there's some of you smiling who know what reaction that might be, I suspect, okay? So it's normally the deputy's role to bang people on the head and say, you've been bad, you've been bad, okay? Now, Mark Osborne last year took students to LCA, and I thought, wow, and I stood up and said it, that is so empowering to be taken. This year, those students came back and spoke at LCA. Now, Shane is one of those students. Now, I remember, I remember when I was in school, and I remember speeches, who remembers speeches? And you had to stand up, and you had to talk, you haven't had chocolate, and you were daring enough to put your hand up, you had to stand up, and you had to talk for three minutes about something that nobody else in the room could care less about, and then sit down, and then everybody teased you, or at least everybody teased me afterwards. So, how is it to be able to come down to LinuxConf and speak to an audience that is, A, interested in the same stuff as you, but, B, have specifically come to hear what you have to say about education in your school? That is so, so empowering, and that picture there is N518, which is about the same size as this room. With, okay, it's exactly the same size as that. Who was that? Maybe I shouldn't do that. So, I mean, that's a decent audience to address, of people that have come to hear you, as a 17, 18-year-old high school student. All right, so I think education traditionally was like education with benefits. You had English, and then you'd do some typing in the computer lab, and you had mathematics, and then you'd do some spreadsheeting in the computer lab. I think it's much more empowering for students to have that integrated, to have the computer spread through the learning commons, to be able to integrate that into all the topics, so IT certainly isn't a separate thing. It's the same thing. It's part of the same. It's a different tool that you're using, okay? Now, previously, to be escorted to LinuxConf, I think you would have been labeled teacher's pet, right? Who was labeled teacher's pet here? Yeah, a few of you. I feel you guys, bro, I feel you, brother. Yeah, you're gonna have more than one, because I bought 60. Actually, to take that a question, just take that a step, but who was the person in the room that used to pick on the teacher's pet? Nobody, oh, the bully's scared now. Okay, but I think access and equality become the norm. Okay, access and equality become the norm. Now, Shane was able to build an R-tube server. Grammar glitch, by the way. What? The grammar glitch. Really? This is an equality become the norm. You're seeing that this wrong in the slide. Yeah, that's one of the things. Oh, for goodness' sake. Have you had chocolate yet? I have, I'm... Okay, okay, okay, we're not. We are not going to get into a grammar debate, because that will consume the rest of the session. And we have different people from different countries with potentially different grammatical rules. However, access and equality, you know, Shane could do something that Mark Osborne could not. Mark Osborne could not have built an R-tube server, because he doesn't know how. He knows he doesn't know how. But Shane probably couldn't have got that project off the ground without Mark supporting him, without Mark saying, okay, this is how you get this through the bureaucracy. This is how we get this off the ground. And Mark saying, okay, well, Shane, you need a little bit of help with open-out-up S, because it's quite complicated and you can't... Okay, well, we'll get an OSS engineer to come in and sit with you for an hour and help you with that. Access, equality, it's different, it's different. Yeah, yeah, mutual respect. So you haven't had chocolate yet, yeah. Your laptop's already been off the table once, so maybe I'll walk that up to you. Now I spent a little bit of time with the Graphics and Design teacher before I flew over here. And I just wanted to show some of the student work, because these guys are working with Inkscape, Blender, Scriber, Skimp, these are free tools, right? These are free tools. So these are photographs of standing boards, so the quality of them you have to excuse me is not amazing. But this is the 2010 NZQA externally assessed portfolios. So this basically is exam work for these students. And I don't know about you, but I look at that and think, my goodness, that looks professional. I have no idea how you would do that with those tools. I can resize a photo in GIMP. Yeah, well, how many senior high would be where I would start? So I look at that and go, well, it's a magazine layout. It really is. It looks like a professional magazine layout. Now, the same Graphics teacher is also musical, and he's never worked with open source before, except last year when he started Albany. So he started to say, I want to try and do some music stuff on my laptop, and I want to then teach other students how to do that on my laptop. And he's not a music teacher. This is not his job. This is something that he's gone, oh, cool, you know? Openness, open philosophy, access, equality, okay? What he said to me was that the first year it was very hard. I'm not sure very was quite the word he used, but difficult, because there was no resource. He wanted to do a contact sheet. So those in photography, basically contact sheet, lots of little pictures of all of your pictures, so you can choose which one you want from the negative days, really. And he couldn't figure out how to do it. You know, Photoshop, it's click, click, click, done, right? Well documented. Couldn't figure out how to do it in GIMP. Had to go off and research that, and then it turns out that it's some GIMP scripting, all right? So what he's doing now is saying, well, I've built this resource now, so he has figured out how to make screencasts from his machine. And he is madly making videos of how to do this stuff, A, to benefit his students, but B, to put on Wiki Educator, which is like Wikipedia for educators, rather than Wikipedia for everything else, and release those into the community. So that other schools can use them, other teachers can benefit from them, and maybe people who aren't even teachers or students, or, you know, open philosophy. Now, this is the results. Unfortunately, I don't have other schools in there from those NZQA assessments. And basically, if you look at the other big schools who are comparable in size and socioeconomic status, Albany's better in some areas, and worse in others. If that's a spelling mistake, I'm gonna... Okay, so NZQA is the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. It's some complex thing that the New Zealand government dreamed up to manage qualifications in New Zealand. Enough said, yeah. Okay, so earlier on one of my slides, I mentioned that free as in beer and free as in freedom, I don't believe are that different in education. I think they're quite close to each other, because not having a learning tax gives you freedom. It gives you freedom not just to use software free beer. It gives you freedom to maybe make choices that you otherwise wouldn't make where you would be constrained. It might enable you to choose to do video editing and digital audio work. It might, you know, it might change your topic choices. It might change your interests. Okay, so access to resource yields freedom as well. Do I want my kids to be able to spend 15 or 30 minutes a week using Pro Tools on one of the five Macs that we have in the music department because that's all the school can afford? Or do I want my kids to be able to sit down at any machine in the school at any time and use a digital audio workstation, use ADO or use LMMS? Or at home. Or at home. Yes, so taking that a step further. What about the other 18 hours in the day? The students are at school for six hours. Now, people argue with that and people say, oh, no, they must use the tools that they will use in the real world. And I absolutely refute that because we should be teaching our kids concepts. We shouldn't be teaching them how to use Pro Tools. We should be teaching them how to do digital audio work. When we teach them to write, we don't teach them how to write with a pencil and then how to write with a pen and then teach them to write with a crayon and then teach them to write with a paintbrush. We teach them to write. And then when they pick up a different tool, oh son, actually you need to dip that one in paint first. Oh, thanks dad, I see that's different to a pencil now. We teach a concept. We don't. So unfortunately, IT in schools traditionally, we've taught technologies. So we need to take the philosophies from the rest of education, these conceptual things and bring them across into IT as well. Now, the school funded some changes that they wanted in Koho, the library management software. This is, it's not source available. It's not open source. It's written in Pearl, but you can't get it. It's just up in the cloud. So the school subscribes to that, but they wanted reviews to work differently. They wanted some additional functionality. So they, pardon? Is it? Really? It's done correctly. I don't think it was actually open source, but that's fine. It applies to other cloud services more broadly, conceptually anyway, but they've paid for those changes to be made. Koho made them and now those changes are available for other schools. Now, some schools, and this is an argument that you hear, some schools will say, well, we paid for those changes. Why should they be available to this school here? We paid it. It's not your money. It's my money. It's my tax money. That's the money stuff. Yeah, well, this is true. This is true, but it is not the school's money. It's my money that I give to the school via a very circuitous path to teach my kids. Now, this is quite from our new website. We wanted to create a school and the community where everyone has access to a wide range of powerful tools. So that comes back to useful sound bite earlier from Gimp. These are not toys. These are not toys. Of powerful tools, hang on, on every computer at all times. Yes. Because that's not what you're using up there. My school offers 12 years ago, it was completely different. Yes. It didn't start using the phone differently. Yes. Anyway. Even when we were using proprietary software. That is a very, very fair and valid point. Okay, so there are some other schools around that have done this. There's a similar sort of thing in New Zealand at least. Okay, so there's Warrington High School, Warrington School, sorry, they're not a high school, they're a primary school. In Deep Dark of Togo, the bottom of the South Island, they run a sort of 30 PC lab of some form of Linux. I can't tell you what it is. And there's a couple of other big ones in Auckland, Mission Heights Junior and Ormiston Senior. Ormiston is basically Mission Heights Senior. And they've gone open desktop, but delivered over Sunray. Which, from my mind, technologically, possibly wasn't the best decision if you want a really rich experience. But, you know, we responded to the RFP and... Yes? Service, yeah, absolutely. I'm thinking more broadly in terms of, you know, students being able to take the stuff home and work with and use it all as more than... That's actually a question that you should put to that man there, who is, hang on, one second. This is Bridgesh, who is the IT manager. So, my question was just, you know, it's great that you could, in theory, take a U-Bund to install at home, but you've probably, you know, gained the particular apps and things, the way they set up at schools. Have you made a custom disk or something, just so that it's all ready, or is it close enough to a standard install? It just doesn't matter. Installation? They just do standard installation. They just install U-Bund to live CD or install OS and install a game, Pingscape, while that. Yeah. So, the students typically are fairly technological savvy, as students are. I mean, my son's 6.75. And he, you know, I bought him an iPad, just as an MP3 player, and he's figured out all sorts of stuff to do with that. It's not on the internet, obviously, but, you know, he's stuff that I didn't know that it did. He's been merely figuring out, and he's six. So, you know, students, kids, figure out stuff. I'm allowed to call them kids, because they're really young adults, but they're pretty quick to pick stuff up. The Ministry of Education also is working on, in a sec, Open Data Exchange, and what they're calling SMSLE, which is a work to replace some of these student management systems that are Windows-only and Webify them. So, they're working on that as a broader project. I don't know how that's coming along, yes. Have you got a sense how the students view their experience at Albany High School relative to their peers at other schools? Like, for example, do they actually sell what they're doing to the other schools where they don't have the benefit of similar policies? Can I actually bounce that question down to you, Shane? Because we have a student here. I think that's the right way to answer that. So, what was the question? No, I'll answer it. It's just whether you, as students, talk to your peers at other schools, not at Albany, who maybe don't have the benefit of the same kind of facilities available to them, and do you sell them on the fact that you're actually using open source in your school, or is it something that the students don't really think about? I'm probably not the best person. I don't have too many peers at other schools, but I know from other schools at the junior high, they are interested, this is a little bit different from your question, though, they're interested in using our digital signage solution, open source, to put out notices for students. I don't really know from a different student, different school perspective, though. We have a guy who's working with us now in Christchurch, and he was previously a teacher at the Hagley Community College. And several years ago, he developed, sort of as a rogue teacher, an entire design and computing curriculum based on open source. And he continued doing that for several years until he was shut down by the IT staff in the school who found him very threatening. But in the time that he was there for several years, he was able to put, he had several classes of students that came all the way through the curriculum that he developed single-handedly. And he found within weeks of being introduced to open source software, they used Ubuntu on the desktop as well, they would not even consider using Windows again. Yeah. Well, I mean, for a start, any of them that study computer science at university are going to deal with open source software anyway. I just want to plow through this slide, and then we've probably got time for a couple more questions as there's only really one slide left. So I think what we need is more people to understand this philosophy, because what people don't understand as you alluded to, they feel threatened by. And then they'll try and shut it down. We need more media. Do we have any media here today? No? One sort of? Yeah. We need more media to write about this philosophy. It needs to be more broadly known. And I know last time at Head ZDNet, which generated quite a lot of interest and quite a lot of people talking to Mark and saying, hey, what have you done? All right. We need more social noise, more teaching resource and more teachers to expel us the philosophy and technical reference models, because ultimately you're fighting against a well-entrenched, well-established technical reference model. Now, groundbreaking can be expensive. Gonna skip that running out of time. But basically, on the question and answer slide, I've given you Mark Osborne's email address. He's happy to take emails, but just be respectful that he does have a teaching workload. So, you know, be terse, be respectful of that. I'm happy to take emails, technical questions. Glenn Ogilvy in the red shirt over here was one of the other design engineers. It's also happy to answer technical questions if people want more information about how it was built. And then there's two links at the bottom there, Albany Senior High School's homepage, which has information on it. And the Wiki Educator page, available to everyone, for e-learning at Albany. And that will give you the tools that are used, the applications, how they use, very valuable, well worth visiting. You guys found my spelling mistakes. I will confess that I didn't think there are any I was trying to heckle the spelling heckler back. But never mind, you found three nonetheless. So, I think we've probably got maybe one question. Yeah, there's one minute left. You're very strongly encouraged to attend the closing ceremony where there are going to be lightning talks and announcements about next year's LCA and various other entertainment and prizes. So, that starts in 15 minutes. So, I'm going to allow probably two or three questions. But after that, please make your way up to the main building F. So, I think there's a question here for you. Hi, just a very quick one. You're storing your data in the cloud. Does this, so I understand, does this give any sort of compliance issues with your government and stuff like that? Yeah, okay. So, the only compliance issue really is email storage for the school and what they have done is purchased a bolt-on for Google Mail that archives that. So, that's still in the cloud. It's just a subscription that they pay for. I don't know what it is, I'm sorry. Moodle for learning management. Yes, the school is using Moodle. And that is one of those 11 applications. I actually don't have a question. I have a comment and a challenge for you. Yeah. I think your talk is absolutely brilliant. It's about an issue that I care very deeply about. You deserve a much bigger audience than this one. I would like you to team up with your deputy principal, get a qualified and talented graphics artist team to beef up your slides and you might wanna be talking to some of your students there because they're doing excellent work. Get on a prestigious education conference and I want to see this talk downloadable from TED within a year. Thank you. It's an interesting challenge actually. What I would say to that, just to clarify, I worked for a company called Open System Specialists and we're a consultancy, an engineering consultancy. So I'm not directly associated with the school but we have quite close ties with them obviously going forward but I accept your challenge. That's all I'll take. Yeah, I was just thinking that as I said it. Okay, well I think we're gonna draw to a close here. So it's obviously been a great talk. Could I ask you all to join me in thanking Patrick.