On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 08:08, Colin McQueen wrote:
garry saddington
wrote: On Sunday 30 November 2003 22:52, Colin McQueen wrote:
ian
wrote: On Sun, 2003-11-30 at 19:36, garry saddington wrote:
We use Open Source almost exclusively to teach ICT and I have the idea that an alternative Open Source National Curriculum would be a good thing, what do others feel?
Good idea. Ideal project for SchoolforgeUK I should think.
I am unsure about what this means. Surely the National Curriculum should not be linked to any particular ICT tool provision. Freedom of choice and all that.
We have already talked about free transfer of software skills so it does not matter what we use. The idea is that Open Source gives us much more freedom to teach the foundations of computing that are denied to our students by using proprietary software.
But it does not give staff more freedonm as they will struggle to use the open source applications.
No-one says they have to use open source applications, but it would be a good idea to make it easier for them to do so.
Installing them as well as learning to use them. Adults find it harder to transfer skills. Those that can cope and don't mind changing (they enjoy using their free time this way) probably will anyway.
So we should not be transferring these adult problems to the kids.
The present National Curriculum for ICT is limited in its content.
No its not. Have you been right through the KS3 Strategy materials? Its content is not defined in the statutory documents because it needs to be flexible enough to change with the development of ICT. Take for example the day we discover how to store graphics in a format that has the advantages of vector and bitmap.
Seems unlikely. In the meantime maybe we should just teach something about bitmap and vector file formats so the kids understand the issues rather than sweeping it under the carpet and pretending pictures are just pictures and all that matters is being able to stick them in Powerpoint and flash them up on an Interactive Whiteboard. I think this lack of attention to technical details is why the brighter kids often tend to see ICT as a bit of a joke.
It was sensible for the KS3 streategy materials to be produced in MS office format (and pdf BTW) Yes but is PDF open source and can you manipulate it as is required by the strategy?
I wasn't suggesting it was, simply making sure I wasn't just in an anti-microsoft debate ;-). You can manipulate it if you have acrobat or the skills to use the reader to export the data.
I am beginning to more fully understand the debate now. I think there will be huge resistance to changing. Microsoft are so good at adding easily accessible function to their applications that excite people.
No more so than just about any other company or any FLOSS developers. They just chuck lots of resources at marketing. Educators of all people should be rather less susceptible to marketing hype and more focussed on function and value for money. In any case, its an open standards issue not a MS specific one although MS have great influence in this so its difficult to discuss such an issue without involving that company a lot.
Time is short for teachers. Having to spend too much of your free time to adapt and work around software to come up with the excitement is a block to changing to open source.
Time is money and money is time and £100m a year go on ELCs, similar order of magnitude on proprietary operating system and productivity software. This is an issue of political will. With that kind of money all the resources teachers need could be developed using open standards and made downloadable on these nice broadband connections. They could all be free for schools to use as is *or* modify to meet their individual needs and those modified/improved versions could go back to the central resource. Far from costing teachers more time, it would be less time and less restrictions.
as they are the most common format in use in
schools AND Oo etc can read them. As I understand it the materials for special schools will use Macromedia Flash instead of Excel.
Flash is now a spreadsheet?
Whoa there... We don't teach spreadsheets in the NC we teach modelling.
Strange, I have inspected IT in many schools and I have seen a lot of teaching of spreadsheets. You can't create a model on a spreadsheet without knowing some of the basic attributes of spreadsheets and some of the quirks of the one you happen to be using. This idea that you can teach some higher order process without any specific skills or knowledge is not only nonsense, its dangerous. Anyone teaching science in the 70s knows that science went through exactly the same debates and the "process" only camp have long since been discredited. Similar attitudes in English and maths have resulted in national strategies to get the subjects back on course.
Special school pupils cannot handle spreadsheets for modelling so people are developing flash models because of the ease of doing this and because you can make it fun to use.
So if we don't teach anything about spreadsheets in secondary schools, the kids will fulfil statutory requirements and they won't have any trouble in the new pilot SATS in ICT because there won't be any questions that involve spreadsheets? They just need to know about some generic concept called modelling?
There are
one or two other examples of none MS products that are suggested for use especially for sound/video and database work.
Only because there are now MS versions that are free to use (Audacity?)
I think you missed out the word "none"?. But OK I no realise this is not simply an anti-MS debate.
Why did you assume it was?
Now if you mean produce materials and sample teaching units that use open source applications then fine. Good idea and I hope the emphasis is on K+U for ICT capability and not on skills in any particular Oo or open source application.
I'd be happy to lend my time to creating an alternative set of sample teaching units using open source file formats and applications.
If there was some incentive to do it, there would be many teachers
willing to do this. Instead we just have a fragmented morass of everyone
doing their own thing on the one hand and masses of money being
channelled into proprietary software development, many people end up
buying because they are effectively forced to, on the other.
--
ian