I take everyone's points on board and I was rather devil's advocating (English is such a wonderful language that you can invent words to suit..). I am pushing Ingots at my SMT Ian but the same argument remains from Tony and Thomas that it is tried and tested things that managemant want. Many of the school's I have worked at the leaders have been very thin on technical knowledge so getting 60 more Windows boxes in is an easy option compared to a suit of LTSP. On Thomas's particular point that it is tried and tested I did say that Edexcel's Units 24/25 can only really be taught by Cisco Academys and I know there are not that many about. I would say there are as many people knowledgeable enough with Linux to teach it as there are Cisco Academys but obviously pressure and money have been applied there. On Joe's more specific example that does not necessarily negate what I am saying as I too have taught with Linux material and at a recent AQA moderation meeting I was told that the chief moderator used LAMP stuff like Moodle but added that he didn't really promote it. People who use Linux are generally more computer savvy and it would be a harsh examiner that penalised a student for something that they obviously knew as much about or more than a moderator, regardless of whether it was mentioned in the official syllabus. This brings me back in a way to Thomas's more general point that it relates to teachers. He says that in some way it relates to qualified teachers who can handle the units. That is only partly true. All exam boards offer Programming as a portfolio unit but I doubt there are more than 1% of schools in the country that have staff that could teach it properly (or networking, CGI, Computer Accounts et al for that fact). I am no complete philanthropist and if I could write good C++ I doubt I would be fighting teenage rebellions in my classroom day in day out :) I bet there are more than 1% of staff in schools in the UK who have dabbled in Linux. Every school I have so far taught at in the SW has had some ICT teacher who has set up a Linux server for the school's web. I suppose, again to answer Thomas's comments, I would create a unit to supplement the other units offered by the boards. As Joe points out, it is easy to do database and networking units using Linux but only if you know a bit about it. Why not have a general Linux unit to support the other ones. Every student could use Knoppix or similar (SuSE 9.1 live if this is still a SuSE site post-Roger) and not make a mess of the school's network and as Joe did (and in conjunction with Ian) everyone could write it up on OOo with their knowledge acquired from Ingot training. Paul -- De Omnibus Dubitandum
--- Paul Taylor <ptaylor@uklinux.net> wrote:
some ICT teacher who has set up a Linux server for the school's web. I suppose, again to answer Thomas's comments, I would create a unit to supplement the other units offered by the boards. As Joe points out, it
This is certainly a good idea. The only problem I see is that when using Linux, how would you go about it? You could, say, use Webmin and/or all the pretty GUI configs that Linux has to offer, but this hides away a lot of what *is* Linux, and if this were the case, you might as well go back to Windows. If you were going to configure a web-server, would you teach them how to do it from Vi for instance? Or would this be considered too "difficult" by the exam board? I know it sounds like a patronising comment, but having concrete reasons from the examining-boards as to why they're not willing; or are reluctant to endorse the idea would help. Then you have the issue of programming. You mentioned the very low percentage of schools that allow for that option -- this is indeed very true. It's often quite hard to know where to start and indeed, where to draw the line. This is probably why VB is used in such instances. :/ -- Thomas Adam ===== "The Linux Weekend Mechanic" -- http://linuxgazette.net "TAG Editor" -- http://linuxgazette.net "<shrug> We'll just save up your sins, Thomas, and punish you for all of them at once when you get better. The experience will probably kill you. :)" -- Benjamin A. Okopnik (Linux Gazette Technical Editor) ___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - sooooo many all-new ways to express yourself http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
On Wed, 2004-06-30 at 23:05, Paul Taylor wrote:
I take everyone's points on board and I was rather devil's advocating (English is such a wonderful language that you can invent words to suit..). I am pushing Ingots at my SMT Ian but the same argument remains from Tony and Thomas that it is tried and tested things that managemant want.
Depends on whether they want innovation. Some schools want to be leaders rather than followers and with anything new there is an element of risk. Fortunately there are enough innovators and risk takers out there otherwise there would never be any change, and I'm enough of a maverick to believe that not all change should initiate from the DfES and QCA ;-) So I think for individuals it canbe very frustrating because in their environment they feel surrounded by philistines. At this point in time getting the SMT to adopt something like theINGOTs.org might be impossible but if they know about it, hopefully there will come a point when there are other schools around them springing up as INGOT Academies and they'll say hey that's the thing you were telling me about maybe we need to look into it. That's why we also deall with individual assessors and in fact all the materials are freely downloadable for use from the web site. It only costs anything if you want "official" certificates. IMHO what FLOSS needs is a vaible business model that generates development income in a way that is not dependent on licensing software. I now have concrete evidence that schools will pay to be INGOT academies and it will be possible to finance this with ELCs. In the longer term this is scalable internationally. Now I have a source of income I can put it into further marketing - we will have an INGOTs stand at the Specialist Schools conference, we will sponsor the next FLOSSIE conference - might even do BETT if we get sufficient finance to pay for it. If people think this is a good idea, for FLOSS in education, they don't have to immediately get their school to become an INGOT Academy though obviously that would help, but branding is important ad the more familiar people are with the brand and concept the more confidence builds and we know that the current system is effectively a con! The thing about theINGOTs.org is that its fundamentally good education, very little extra work for teachers and it inherently promotes understanding of FLOSS and cutting edge ICT development worldwide which none of the traditional exams do. We are not requiring schools to change systems or do things they don't feel ready to do. We are preparing the ground work that will enable not just the tech innovators but joe average to get over to FLOSS.
All exam boards offer Programming as a portfolio unit but I doubt there are more than 1% of schools in the country that have staff that could teach it properly (or networking, CGI, Computer Accounts et al for that fact). I am no complete philanthropist and if I could write good C++ I doubt I would be fighting teenage rebellions in my classroom day in day out :) I bet there are more than 1% of staff in schools in the UK who have dabbled in Linux. Every school I have so far taught at in the SW has had some ICT teacher who has set up a Linux server for the school's web. I suppose, again to answer Thomas's comments, I would create a unit to supplement the other units offered by the boards. As Joe points out, it is easy to do database and networking units using Linux but only if you know a bit about it. Why not have a general Linux unit to support the other ones. Every student could use Knoppix or similar (SuSE 9.1 live if this is still a SuSE site post-Roger) and not make a mess of the school's network and as Joe did (and in conjunction with Ian) everyone could write it up on OOo with their knowledge acquired from Ingot training.
I'm hoping to have 100s of INGOT Academies so the income from them could pay for producing this type of support. We could also use it to lobby QCA etc from a position of grass roots strength if we are certificating many thousands of children and not just in this country. I'm working on getting industry backers using the sponsors of specialist schools which will add more weight. Deliberately avoiding exam boards at this point as it will be too time consuming wading through their bureaucracy and I don't want anything to cobble my educational ideals with excessive and unnecessary end testing etc. All this takes time and time costs me money as that's how I pay the mortgage. Now I have started to get some income I should be able to accelerate the process though so any help in getting the message across is really appreciated. Anyway, thanks for listening. -- Ian Lynch <ian.lynch@zmsl.com> ZMS Ltd
participants (3)
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Ian Lynch -
Paul Taylor -
Thomas Adam