Linux in Italian Schools, Part 1

In many Italian high schools, general use of information technology as
well as what is taught in the classroom is limited to proprietary software. Some
institutes, however, are using GPL products daily, and this is
the first article in a series that focuses on these schools. The reasons why
these schools discovered and switched to free software are quite varied.
Some simply needed basic network services, including e-mail, shared printers,
Internet access control and so on. Others wanted to run their Web sites
and maybe offer e-learning services through them. Finally, some teachers and
other personnel turned to free software to help them produce didactic material
for students or simply to manage unavoidable paperwork.

The Istituto Tecnico
Commerciale De Sterlich of Chieti Scalo in Central Italy, uses
free software for several of these reasons. The school, which offers specializations in
accounting and information technology, serves about 700 students with
80 teachers. Linux adoption started at the school thanks to a small number of
teachers and students, but today the entire teachers council as well as
the principal are backing it.

The first penguins entered De Sterlich in 1998, when the school
decided to build a local area network to serve the whole building. On
that occasion Linux was selected over Windows NT, thanks to its price
and the fact that one of the business economy teachers already had
some professional experience with Linux.

After the initial enthusiasm, simply having an internal network turned
out not to be as useful as some had hoped. Therefore, the school
decided to set up a Web community. They knew that a system of this kind
could not and should not substitute for traditional face-to-face
interactions, but it was believed it could be a complement. Still, the
school wanted a better and more integrated infrastructure in order to
share resources and guarantee better communication among school management,
students and their families.

For this reason, in September 2000, De Sterlich started to use the
Harvey
content management system (CMS). This product was selected by the teachers because of two things they read
on its Web site. First, Harvey was created specifically to improve
on-line school communities, not to make some nice HTML course brochures.
Second, all registered users of Harvey, be they teachers, students or parents,
can participate in and monitor closely the activity of all other members.

Harvey was installed on the school server by a recent graduate, the
only skilled person available at that moment. Initially it was accessible
only inside the school, because no permanent Internet connection was available.
Even in this phase, however, the teachers managed to localize the user interface
and part of the documentation.

In January 2002, a new permanent broadband connection made it possible
to offer a whole series of independent Harvey sessions, each devoted
to a separate school service or study subject. Following the launch of
this official school
portal came
a separate space
where students can learn how to use the system by being the
administrator of their own sub-sections or simply fool around and greet
friends.

During this same school year, Harvey also was used to run the on-line
portion of a training course for new teachers. Each pupil had 25 hours
of lessons from home, under remote supervision of a tutor.

In January 2001, the school found itself with about 25,000 Euros
available to renovate its oldest computer lab. This facility, devoted
to word processing, sported about 15 Pentium desktops, each equipped with 32MB of RAM and
Windows 95 with Office97. Having been shared by many classes over the
years, the machines had became unusable. Students continuously messed up
the configurations; worms and trojans were usual guests; and it was impossible to track who had done
what. This is what led the school to try building its first Linux-based computer lab,
running Red Hat 7.0 and Star Office 5.2. The choice was simple: Red Hat
already was running the school's server, and Star Office was mandatory for
compatibility with MS Office file formats. This first experiment took three
weeks to set up, because no school technician had ever worked with Linux before
nor used a command line.

The management strategy of this new lab was as primitive as it was
effective. Every student always had to work on the same machine, using
a single account for the entire year. Although computers were
shared across classes and students, accounts were not, and they only
existed on one machine. They also were easy to track as they were
named ComputerNumber_ClassName. The password for each account was known,
theoretically, of course, only to the one student who would use it
for the duration of that course. However, because everybody had his or her private
home directory and always used the same machine, abuses practically
disappeared. And when they did happen, they were much easier to
track, because everything was logged.

The end result, as the teachers said, "were amazing". A course that had
become practically impossible to teach came back with no problems. Everybody
could see first-hand the great benefits of free software in education: more stability,
efficiency, features and, above all, learning.

Encouraged by these successes, in March 2002 the school created a new
computer lab to be used by students and to host courses for CCNA
(Cisco Certified Network Associate) certification. The effort required
to build this second lab was smaller, as this time the necessary Linux
and networking know-how already was available in-house. All the computers
had the same configuration, both hardware and software. The system administrators
had installed the entire reference system--Red Hat 7.3 plus Java, StarOffice 5.2 Free
Pascal and others--on a single machine and then mirrored that setup
on all the other computers. This time the accounts were set up with
NIS, so the only manual configuration left was the IP address of each
host. Eventually, the total savings in software licenses amounted to
several thousand Euros, which was used to buy more hardware. The school also
started to offer on-line classes with excellent results through the
GPLed Web-based learning management system
ILIAS.
What Next?
As of May 2005, Linux is being used at De Sterlich in four labs:

• lab 62: about 24 PCs in dual-boot configurations (XP
  plus Linux Mandrake 10.1) for several tasks
• lab 67: about 22 Linux-only PCs (Mandrake 10) to teach
  math, information technology and business economy
• lab 94: 27 additional Linux-only PCs (Mandrake 10.1) for the
  same courses. In this lab, authentication is managed centrally through
  NIS; a migration to LDAP is scheduled for next year. Already, though,
  each student has his or her own desktop and private files always
  available with the same configuration from every computer in the
  lab.
• lab102: used for word processing, this lab has 27 PCs
  running Red Hat 9. It also is expected to migrate to Mandrake 10.1 or
  10.2, because in general, Mandrake has been found to be more user friendly
  than its predecessor.

Was It Worth It?
Linux is at De Sterlich to stay, even if some obstacles remain.
Money-wise, the result so far has been quite different from what some
teachers expected from reading the literature available when the project
started. For example, in one of the labs it was indeed possible to
save about 6,300 Euros on Microsoft licenses. At the same time,
however, it also was necessary to buy 500 Euros worth of manuals and
one boxed set of Red Hat 7.0 (150 Euros). To this must be added 2,000
Euros in consultant fees and 1,100 Euros for an 18-hour internal course for
teachers to train them for the migration. Their conclusion is you do
save money with Linux but less than you thought, because the costs
and effort for the initial setup cannot be ignored. At the same time,
the switch greatly increases productivity and reduces maintenance
costs even more. Overall, the school is quite happy to have taken
this path.

The most common obstacles still found by De Sterlich Linux fans are of
a cultural nature--the simple fact that most computer users simply
don't like change. Sometimes, even the interface differences between
MS Office and OpenOffice.org are enough to stifle
enthusiasm. Unfortunately, this problem is made worse by the objective
fact that many school manuals "teach" word processing, databases or
spreadsheets simply by listing which buttons should be pushed in their
enclosed screenshots of MS Office, Access or Excel. If these manuals
explicitly covered OpenOffice.org as well, probably much of the perceived
difficulty would vanish.
Credits and Contact Information
It would be great for the teachers and students of De Sterlich to
share experiences and work together with colleagues of other nations,
be it on Harvey or any other Linux-in-Education project. To find out
more, contact
delromano@desterlich.ch.it Professor Paolo Del Romano.
I'd also like to thank him and the school principal, Mr M. Salardi, for
their assistance in writing this article.

Marco Fioretti is a hardware systems engineer interested in free
software both as an EDA platform and, as the current leader of the RULE
Project, as an efficient desktop. Marco lives with his family in Rome,
Italy.