I would like to agree totally with this article, via Ars Technica, because I hate hate hate being expected to work on a computer that I am unable to alter in order to suit my needs. The rub here is that the college is equipped with thinclients with a Sun x2200 backend server. I am less than thrilled about the Solaris, generally, for many reasons up to and including my political problems with proprietary software in general and Oracle in particular. Given, however, that I am not in a world where the choices are plentiful and the budget unlimited, I work with what is present and try to keep it working. The point of all this being that in the educational circumstances of Tanzania thinclients actually have a place, to whit, they reduce the maintenance work overhead. The IT staff at the college is, well, me, and I can barely keep 3 servers running, teach in a coherent way, and still have a life. There are 60 thinclients in the lab, and if I had to service them individually it just wouldn't happen. There's a second lab of Dell PCs running XP on campus, what for I don't know, but I try very passive aggressively not to do anything about it ever, because a room full of 40 virus riddled windows boxes that I might have to individually alter is not my idea of a good break between periods. As long as the teaching staff and IT departments are one and the same thinclients are a nod toward a reasonable workload. Furthermore, in this situation, the students do not have the knowledge to install software. Getting them to successfully login and change passwords has been the subject of several lessons, I'm not worried about them ever needing access to the nuts and bolts of the system. I have taught quite a few of them to use the shift key and that is a major pedagogical achievement. The Joy of Hacking cannot be covered in a 2 year span when the start must be "what are the keys on the keyboard and what do they do?"
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