Turf war: Google vs Microsoft in education

The turf war regarding collaborative platforms in education is intensifying. The combatants are Google and Microsoft, the offerings are Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Live@Edu. The turf is also increasing with both companies offering their products to all education without regard of level or organization.

In an article from IDG (http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.305758/it-jattar-slass-om-skolbarnen) it is clear that municipals are a clear target for Microsoft and Google. Both are winning over municipals to their solution.

In the article Fredrik Paulsson (http://www.iml.umu.se/fredrik-paulsson?lang=en) says " Det har sannolikt betydelse för deras marknadsandelar inom arbetsstationer och operativsystem" (This is probably important for their market share in workstations and operating systems). He also claims that the schools should focus on what the service should be used for. A clear risk is that some pupils/students with special needs are overlooked.

So, lets try to comment on these aspects.

There is no such thing as a free lunch!
Regardless what Jeff Jarvis says in What Would Google Do? I mean there is always some sort of benefit for all parties involved in an agreement. In this case many companies giving things or services to a university or a school claims it is done by the goodness of their heart. In the most simplistic way that is naturally something that has a value to the giving company, they can use the gift in their marketing or corporate social responsible program. In some cases the value can be more direct, a lock-in or at least some sort of means for a company to influence the pupil/student in the long run by making sure they are getting used to a specific product. The result would hopefully, for the company, be that the individual would influence the future employer to start using that companies product. A product the company charge for. I can also argue that in Google's case another value was to show large scale rollouts of their platform including Google Docs. In short if you accept a gift or start to use a free service you have to ponder about the consequences.

As a side note the Swedish procurement laws and the sponsor regulations state that there should be no monetary transaction when it comes to a gift. There can also not be any significant return (motprestation) in form of advertising or other aspects. This is something both Google and Microsoft fulfill and thus there is no need for a formal procurement process.

The claims about Microsoft gaining sells / revenue for PC / software licenses because of Live@Edu is hard to comment on. But in reality it should allow other operating systems to adopt and provide good interfaces to the service. I can see comments online about Ubuntu and Linux being left out or discriminated on because of these type of services. I however do not share that notion, as I just said I believe alternative OSes can be a viable option anyhow.

When it comes to online services, or cloud computing, and pupils / students with special needs the available services are not perfect, not yet. But there is good hope the vendors will continue improving their support. At LiU we have been able to sort out every need this far, often simply by letting the student use their application of preference and Google Apps (example by using imap/pop in mail).

So... Will there be a need for schools and universities to provide this special solution in the future? I often encounter the claim that the student should be able to register their own email-address and simply point the university one to that. I have to agree that this is perhaps the case in the future, currently we provision Google Apps account but the student can forward their email to their own email provider should they want to (without passing through Google).

However I completely agree with Fredrik Paulsson that the education providers should focus on using the services available and try to avoid lock-ins. In Education 2.0 (or is it 4.0 by now) all the necessary services are online, "free" of charge. We should use them in education but there is also huge concerns when it comes to privacy, reliability, search ability etc. Another argument I often encounter is the time to learn new tools, both for teachers and students.

So, in Education 4.0 the openness and awareness is very important. But don't let old thinking get in the way of the future.

Google Wave in Google Apps

Linköping university activated Google Wave in our Google Apps domain on Thursday the 18:th of Mars using http://wave.student.liu.se/. We enabled it for all of our 31858 users, the current average usage is 16825 users over the last 90 days.

There are no observed limitations in the interaction between our users and the public Google Apps domain.

I announced this in a public tweet (http://twitter.com/joakimnejdeby/status/10631207637) and a Facebook message on LiUs fanpage.

Joshua Nunn picked this up and wrote an article about this at http://firstwaves.org/google-wave-for-apps-being-rolled-out-to-some-organisations/