Dick Sblog

There’s an interesting discussion going on in ZD Net’s forum pages about the use of Google Apps in schools. For those of you not familiar with this bit of the Googlempire, it’s an online suite of applications that can be accessed on an anytime/from anywhere basis via a browser: it was one of the first examples of consumer software services ‘out of the cloud‘. Apps offers fairly basic equivalents of office programmes plus collaboration tools, all stored online. Google offers the Apps suite free for schools and very small businesses.

The discussion is interesting. There’s a quiet minority who say things like, “I’ve tried it, it works, it offers enough functionality for my students” and a more vocal majority who don’t like the idea. Their reasons for not liking it are varied but many revolve around worries about losing service and data, about being locked in and not being able to move stuff out of apps to another system, about the software not offering sufficient functionality or that this is a ‘bad’ route and we should be setting up systems based on integrating open source software for use in schools.

I’d make a few comments on this (I suggested google apps as a route for delivering school software so long ago that I can’t now be bothered to wade through my archives!). Firstly, most schools (smaller ones anyway) don’t have the technical capacity to set up and maintain anything vaguely complicated.

Secondly, worries about service reliability are perfectly valid, as they are with all computing (I’ve had a blue-screen of death today on this machine) and there should always be backups of critical data held in another format (and yes, you can shift stuff out of apps fairly easily, it isn’t locked in).

Thirdly – how much functionality do you need? I’ve watched my kids working on computers for several years now. Two things consistently p*ss me off – the fact that we don’t teach kids to type and so they spend time looking at keys rather than thinking constructively while they work and also the fact that they waste time messing about with appearance rather than focusing on content. So,  reduced functionality could be a good thing for kids’ thinking skills!

Finally, this discussion provides a wake up call. Cloud services are coming… There are several reasons for this. One is that it solves the problem of pirated software – it provides a model for payment for the service as you use it, rather than paying for a CD/Download which can be hacked and redistributed. Also, it provides a significant route to reducing carbon emissions. IT is responsible for 2% of global carbon emissions; having data stored in massive, highly efficient data-centres which are sited alongside renewal energy generation sources is much more sensible than everyone having their own servers at the end of the hugely inefficient power distribution system that we call the National Grid. Accessing applications through the browser is going to become more and more common, get used to it.

Check out the UK’s Grid Computing Knowledge Transfer Network for more information about grids and cloud computing.