In the same week in which Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev placed the first pre-emptive strikes against a possibly negative report from the European Commission over the lack of progress in Bulgaria’s fight against organised crime and alleged abuse of European Union funding, other parts of the Government appear to be finding innovative and creative uses for EU funds.
Deputy Education Minister Kircho Atanasov signed an agreement on June 12 with the general director of Microsoft Bulgaria, Ognyan Krikov, on the occasion of which the two announced that Microsoft would invest US$1 million (0.65 million euro) in the Bulgarian education system. While any investment in education is to be welcomed and despite the fact that $1 million won’t buy you what it used to, it was not specified for what the money would be used.
The agreement was signed with Microsoft Bulgaria, not with the Bill & Melinda Gates Charity Foundation, and is therefore a business deal, not an act of charity.
Central to the agreement is Microsoft’s Partners in Learning (PiL) programme, which claims to aim to “advance the quality of education and provide alternative channels for economic progress”. If I were cynical, I would ask “whose economic progress?”, but I won’t – not just yet.
The PiL programme consists of three branches: Innovative Schools, Innovative Teachers and Innovative Students, the goal of which is to, in short, get Microsoft technology into schools and into the hands of teachers and students.
Under PiL, teachers and students are provided with a free Live@Edu e-mail account, and, using the accompanying Windows Live Mail application, they can (gasp) “read e-mail from multiple accounts in one place”. If that is not innovation, I don’t know what is.
The best part, however, is reserved for students. Under the agreement, the Education Ministry has obliged itself to order (and presumably pay for) a minimum of 10 000 laptops within one year. These laptops would all have the Microsoft Student Innovation Suite (MSIS) installed. Under the agreement, the laptops would not go into the schools and classrooms, but be given to students explicitly for their home use!
No one at the ministry seems to be wondering why the Government has to fund computers for home use, let alone why those students would need to be given a package that consists mostly of an outdated operating system and a trimmed-down copy of Office. MSIS contains the Windows XP operating system, which is already in extended overtime and is slated to be taken off the shelves worldwide at the end of this month. The version of Office included is the Home Edition, containing only Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote, but not Access, Outlook or Presenter, for example. Furthermore, the conditions for MSIS clearly state that Microsoft will not provide “guaranteed software support”.
Additionally, MSIS also contains what Microsoft calls the Learning Essentials, a set of “step-by-step writing tips and preformatted report and presentation templates”. Another obvious innovation winner.
As for innovative funding ideas for this whole bag of goodies, Bulgarian daily Sega quoted Atanasov as saying that the money for the programme could be sought in EU funds.
There is not enough room in this column to discuss the insane idea of the Education Ministry providing computers for home use for a select group of “innovative students”. By the way, to get an idea of what magnitude 10 000 laptops is in Bulgarian education, according to Sega, this year’s high school graduates total 70 000 students.
What should be given serious consideration is, if those students are to be provided with computers, why should the ministry pay licensing fees for a product that is all-but end-of-life-ed. Especially if you consider the alternatives; with the same amount of money, a small technical team could have been set up to compile a special linux distribution that would be customised to the requirements of the Bulgarian education system. This solution would have provided local jobs, increased local competence and knowledge and have given students a superior product to the end-of-life-ed throw-away they are given now.
Of course that alternative scenario would not have given Microsoft access to “alternative channels for economic progress”.
I think I missed this episode of Pinky and the Brain.
“What are we going to do tonight, Brain?”
“Same thing we do every night, Pinky, try to take over the world.”
