> Schools are all PC farms anyway, aren't they? Ok, you'll love this story: My Dad works for Bucks County Council (not a civil servant, just a county employee). He's an educational IT adviser, which covers all sorts of stuff.
Anyway, he recently went to a school which is being completely rebuilt from the ground up - they're getting hundreds of millions from the Govt. for this, and £4m p.a. has been put aside to kit out the school with 1,000 new PCs - one for every kid. Suppose you might as well, given the cost of the tech versus the low power consumption models you can get from RM and the like specially for education. However, they're being told that they can't do this now because the school can't get any air conditioning installed, a consequence of either UK or EEC regulations regarding carbon footprints of new builds. So, there's no air circulating through the building, and there's no open windows - and many rooms are inside with no windows at all. There's a thick layer of breezeblocks on the outside of the building which apparently absorb the heat and reflect it back in the night, which also means that the inside of the school stays cool. I'm not so sure about this, because what happens in summer, when everything's hot and it never gets cool enough for the breezeblocks to radiate their heat back into the air? The school couldn't get air con installed in any PC area because of this carbon footprint issue, but by the same token they can't get PCs installed because they'd just be like one great heater, heating up the surrounding area to an unbearable level. So, they're having to look into alternatives - people are suggesting thin clients or virtualisation, which both my Dad and I are laughing at because they're so woefully inadequate... There's no way forward immediately foreseeable which will work for both the government and the school, so they'll most likely have to cut down on their educational IT spend to fall within the accepted bounds. Kind of ironic that, even with all the advances in technology, policy dictates that schools being built now can't have as many educational facilities as older schools (my last school, for example, had air con fitted in all the computer rooms that were inside buildings and had no windows, and for a good reason too), so in the end, the kids lose out. Apparently there's regulations that prohibit educational facilities like schools from buying carbon offset credits too, so they can't even go with an older implementation (air con, loads of PCs for every kid, suitably-arranged computer areas with air con) - they have to find another, most likely inferior, solution to their problem. Seem a little contradictory to you? Anyway, there's my little school-technology-related anecdote... Back to cleaning the house. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
