[LINK] Bring your Own Device

[Glen Turner]

Michael wrote:
> The Lenovo netbooks supplied in NSW were bios password protected centrally
> to stop kids changing stuff and to maintain a single standard OS image.

This "standard operating environment" approach is the exact opposite to 
the "bring your own device" approach.

The SOA is dead in universities. The decline was started by notebooks, and 
tablets, phones and universal wifi rammed the stake through the heart of 
the idea. You'll still see it on selected machines -- administration, 
computing labs. But most staff want IT as far away from their laptop, 
tablet and phone as possible, until it goes wrong.

There's still a huge role for IT organisations within universities; the 
joint won't work without them. Providing the infrastructure as 
economically as possible. Stopping staff from buying retail. Helping 
researchers with their applications computing. Providing basic 
"infrastructure applications" such as e-mail, web, learning systems, and 
so on. The help desk starts to look more like a combined retail shop and 
Genuis Bar. More like a "roadside service" organisation and less like 
administration. Which might lead to increased love for the uni's IT 
organisation.

The trick with the SOA--BYOD spectrum is to find the sweet spot for your
organisation. There's no reason to expect that sweet spot to be the same
for differing types of organisation.

I do think that schools could substanitally let go of the reins.


Answering the Chromebook thing. They're lovely hardware for the price: 
good keyboard, average screen, average trackpad, small/middling CPU, small 
RAM, small SSD for around A$400 (we're being ripped off as usual). This is 
the sort of hardware you could give to a schoolkid in the knowledge that a 
proportion of laptops never make the distance.

It's not going to be able to do video editing. But I'd take the savings 
and buy a trolley of laptops for that task. Most kids use their laptops to 
write essays and browse Google and Wikipedia.

The assumption of ChromeOS that there is ready access to the Internet does 
limit what the machine can do. Google are trying to change that whilst 
staying true to the essentially "appliance" philosophy of the machine.

You can remove a screw and install a traditional Linux distribution. 
Making a nice "on the road" laptop. Probably too fidly to install to be 
considered as a standard laptop issue for school kids (who wants to 
disassemble a few hundred laptops to remove a write-protect screw?)

The competition would be cheap 10in Android tablets and a Bluetooth 
keyboard.

-glen

-- 
Glen Turner <http://www.gdt.id.au/~gdt/>