"Open Source is not just about feature sets and tick boxes, but about growth in skills, potential and developing an ability to think on your feet and mobilise."

Proprietary software encourages learners to become passive consumers of what is available from a limited set of commercial companies.

Open Source software encourages collaboration and participation, which results in growth and improvement; to the software and the individual.

Here's a good read for anyone interested:
http://www.jonobacon.org/?p=687

The difference between "traning" and "education" is that people in "education" tend to be hopelessly out of touch with the real world. We have this problem in the UK, the schools and to a large extent the universities teach things that are not very relevant.

You can be educated *and* acquire practically useful skills at the same time, but it requires the people specifying the courses to have some contact with the business world.

Mike's comment on open source in education is sadly typical among "higher" education types (I am similarly employed).

Mike has confused training with education. We can train monkeys to fly spaceships, but a proper education permits human beings to pick up new skill sets on demand.

Further, mike's assumption is entirely dependent on his specious assessment of what "the workplace" consists of. The results quoted from his "survey" reveal more about his own preferences than anything else.

Don't like the idea of re-training (try to remember the distinction between education and training)? Then find another career. You've entered a field that changes fairly rapidly. Get used to it, or get out.

Its about time that Bacta got schools off dependence on Microsoft products.
Microsoft products like XP, Vista amd Office are far too expensive for the average school IT departments to afford.
I think that the children will benefit by being challenged by open sauce software.

My mums's a tech (IT/Food/Textiles/D+T) teacher, so its time to with teaching the teacher!

I would have to say that Open Source in education is overall not that useful though it is a chicken and the egg subject.

Having open source drives the labour market to become more skilled in open source software, which in turn drives businesses to adopt open source software - since their workforce has those skills...

however it's really painful if you bring up a workforce fed on opensource to launch them into an actual business world of windows. 

You can see this in universities, in a survey in our university 60% of all graduates going into programming jobs were taking .net positions, with the other 40% made up of cobol, C++, python and PHP. Yet our university course has 1 module on .net out of a possible 18 modules (3yearsx6modules) which mean's theres this massive gap between what we are taught and what is used in the workplace... which brings to question what the hell is the point in going through education to just be re-educated.

never happen, its all to get a better deal from the micropoofs

Just so you understand. This cannot happen. Microsoft is the Scientology of the software industry. First they offer deals and rebates and kickbacks. Then software for a nominal sum. Then they give it away.

Then they will pay you to use it.

But if you stray from the one true path, they will never find the bodies.