in such cases http://portableapps.com/ and http://www.portablepython.com/ could help or maybe even some LiveCD/LiveUSB On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 10:19 AM, Jan Ulrich Hasecke <juhasecke@googlemail.com> wrote:

Hi,

since three years I am guiding a Python voluntary workgroup in a school and we are suffering from a badly organized IT environment (a rigidly restricted Windows setting).

Most of all we miss a decent VCS as Mercurial or Bazaar. In the official IT classes they never used a VCS so it was never installed.

While thinking about this I discovered that some other things are missing. For eg. we cannot install a web framework due to the strange restrictions. They do not have Zotero installed. For students the FF-plugin Zotero would be a great tool to make bibliographies.

Does anyone yet compiled a list of things which may not be missing in a perfect IT environment in a school? Perhaps I can lobby some teachers to improve their environment.

juh

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On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 12:19 AM, Jan Ulrich Hasecke <juhasecke@googlemail.com> wrote:

Hi,

since three years I am guiding a Python voluntary workgroup in a school and we are suffering from a badly organized IT environment (a rigidly restricted Windows setting).

Most of all we miss a decent VCS as Mercurial or Bazaar. In the official IT classes they never used a VCS so it was never installed.

While thinking about this I discovered that some other things are missing. For eg. we cannot install a web framework due to the strange restrictions. They do not have Zotero installed. For students the FF-plugin Zotero would be a great tool to make bibliographies.

Does anyone yet compiled a list of things which may not be missing in a perfect IT environment in a school? Perhaps I can lobby some teachers to improve their environment.

juh

Some thoughts: A perfectly designed IT environment for a school is not modeled on the commercial private company with a closed shop IT department responsive to users in the rest of the company. Rather, given the school is supposed to be teaching IT skills, the students and faculty together co-manage and plan the school's IT functions. There is no sense of us-and-them, although some students and faculty choose to become more deeply involved than others, given temperament and predilections. Perhaps one gets assistance from consultants or district geeks, volunteers in the private sector, but faculty and students are still responsible for their own school's internal network at the end of the day. There is no separate IT department per se, only a set of positions that people rotate through, sysop A for awhile, sysop B for another spell, and so forth, with responsibilities partially overlapping. Classroom content includes explaining and training for these jobs. At the hardware level, a decision is whether to have standalone workstations with local hard drives, perhaps sharing a server, or dumb terminals, with servers doing a lot of the processing. ** At Free Geek, we would convert some of the former into the latter species by removing hard drives and installing booting ethernet cards that would take one directly to the LAN. Everything was server-based. In some ways, I think that's a better model for a school, as local drives tend to over-specialize the workstation in question. Best if you get access to all your files and projects no matter which terminal you choose, be that in your dorm (presuming dorms) or the library (presuming libraries). Of course it's not either/or. Students and faculty may have personal laptops or netbooks, with the school providing only terminals, but with USB ports. Laptops may have VPN access to server-based personal accounts via wifi or ethernet. Letting faculty and students govern the shared infrastructure does not mean falling away from best practices necessarily, though the standards should be different where academia is concerned, as here a premium is placed on openness in the liberal arts tradition (presuming a school of that character, not saying all of them are). Students experience a lot of freedom to download and install, to experiment with new material. The shared operating system needs to be tight enough to permit local experimentation, without endangering or corrupting the work in neighboring accounts. That's what the great multi-user operating systems of this world are designed to provide: relatively well insulated processes and channels, that allow individual users ways to mount devices, manage a branching file system, with user-controllable sharing with peers and limited powers to wreak havoc. The corporate IT curricula are training sysops to lock everything down pretty tightly in hopes of frustrating any cyber attacks. A problem with this approach is one starts to treat every employee as a potential threat and IT becomes both adversarial and prosecutorial regarding company infrastructure. In an academic setting, this fortress mentality puts a damper on scholarship more generally, resulting in a dumbed down internal culture -- a vicious circle that may lead to a school's suffering some loss of reputation. The ideal liberal arts academy or think tank is transparent enough to not care about proprietary scholarship leaking out, as the whole point of research is to share it with the public. Of course that's a completely idealized view, whereas in truth many secrets are jealously protected within academia, where people have the same human impulse to sometimes keep stuff under wraps. A 4-way collaboration between local faculty, students, alumni, and a cloud computing platform, customized specifically for a given school, is a likely long term pattern. Students don't necessarily want to drop their accounts just because they graduate from the school. Alumni include faculty as well. If the school provides public-facing web pages for students, faculty and alums, then we're looking at a pretty serious IT operation. Finding ways to keep it manageable would be a constant curriculum challenge. One could argue that no school should grow beyond it's ability to manage its own internal IT. Simply providing logos for alums to stick in their own Facebook accounts might be the better way to go. Why reinvent the wheel? Kirby ** cached local memory on Flash drives might be a part of this picture.