[Gllug] open source centric ICT in Schools from Sept 2012 ?

[Philip Hands]

On Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:05:49 +0000, Alain Williams <addw at phcomp.co.uk> wrote:
...
> How to write email is one that I would cheer if it was taught. This is an
> exercise empathy - understanding how your email will be read - and something
> that most people fail dismally at, evidence: failure to trim irrelevant stuff,
> putting too many people on a CC list, answering several questions without
> saying which answer is to which question (ie top posting), ...

And where are you likely to find a teacher who agrees with or even
understands most of those points, given the fact that Outlook has
produced a world of top posting morons, and then the iPhone has made it
slightly worse if anything, by providing some of the few people that do
know what they ought to be doing an excuse not to bother.

> It would be good if (2) could be managed - give people some insight into some
> of the most important tools that they will ever use - but we must not be surprised
> if some people show zero interest in it.

I don't think there's any chance of finding more than a handful of
teachers that will be able to keep up with the more motivated kids, so I
do wonder if we should bother -- better perhaps to let the kids loose.

When I was at school, we had an RM machine running CP/M -- a friend and
I wrote a Forth interpreter for it, starting from a book that gave a
fairly high level overview, and writing our own disk drivers etc.

We were lucky enough to have a teacher who let us do what we wanted, as
long as we could demonstrate that the machine would still boot into CP/M
at the end of the day -- we wrote a simple CP/M emulator IIRC in the end
to see if we could get away with leaving it running Forth ;-)

The teachers were definitely learning from us back then, and I'd imagine
the same would happen now if people let it.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
|-|  HANDS.COM Ltd.                    http://www.uk.debian.org/
|(|  10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London  E18 1NE  ENGLAND
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