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

[John Walker]

On Wed, 2012-01-11 at 21:22 +0000, sharon kimble wrote:
> On Wednesday 11 January 2012 20:58:01 Philip Hands wrote:
> > 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 ;-)
> > 
> When I went to grammar school back in '67-72 we had NO computers, and 
> calculators were just about beginning to appear. Slide rules and log tables 
> were the norm in maths classes. Chemistry was still smells and stuff, except 
> when we bounced a table tennis ball across a lit Bunsen flame! That was fun 
> seeing everybody scatter from it :)
> 
> However, when I went to word processing evening classes for two years in 2000 
> all of the class were female, and the ,female, tutor actively discouraged 
> males from joining. Some of the class were also doing excel evening classes, 
> and I have a vague memory that they were working towards their 'computer 
> driving license', if there is such a thing?
> 
> Take care
> Sharon.

Yes it is called the European Computer Driving License. I remember in
2002 trying to encourage women who were learning word processing to gain
skills in fixing computer hardware. The female teacher said that such
work was not for women. I was a UK online tutor at that time. I thought
"how sexist is that?" I used to have people who were sick of word
processors and spreadsheets saying they wanted to learn how to use the
internet. They did not feel confident even after passing said ECDL or
CLAIT, another word processing qual.
John

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