Written by In what seems a life time ago I spent a few years juggling multiple roles. One of which was managing a school network and at the same time carrying a full classroom teaching load, and providing leadership in educational technology. Weekends were spent immersed in windows code, reestablishing client connections, deleting caches and endless tinkering in order to achieve some sense of usability. Throughout the school we had numerous clients, all working off the two servers, an application server and a file server. Each server probably had the computing power equivalent to the laptop that I am currently using. Establishing a thin client network we ran 64 computers powered by these servers. I would hate to imagine the countless hours students spent at this ‘cutting edge’ school staring at the screen while a command was processed or waiting for the tings to simply start up. Of course we employed time efficient strategies of multitasking so that students reminded focused throughout the exercise. Did it add to a student’s experience? Perhaps in some way, it allowed them to access information that they would not have otherwise been able to but overall more time was wasted through machine and network failure than what was gained. Those of us as teachers who have worked in these ‘thin client’ situations are familiar with ‘processing’ pain.
Conceptually thin client set ups make sense for educational institutes. They provide an economical centralization of data storage and uniformity in access; however popularity waned rapidly as the cost of computers dropped. It would almost be impossible to find an education institute currently running thin clients. With the advent of cloud computing it is noteworthy to see a resurrection of thin clients reinterpreted.
Clouding as a concept is nothing new; fifteen years ago Bill Gates preempted the scenario currently transpiring, where applications no longer exist on your hard drive and are purely accessed through a web browser. Furthering advancement from web based applications, evolutionary wise, is a cloud based operating system. A terminal would consist entirely of a web browser through which you would access applications through your tab browser. Right now Google is releasing ‘Cr-48’ a device similar to a netbook to advanced users for the glory of simply being an advanced user. If anyone is going to in to competitive whining, don’t bother this group is the stellar crop, crème of de crème. This stellar group is dedicated to be the first one to tag a problem with their name. Check out ‘A walk in the cloud’ by Jason Kincaid.