On Saturday 02 February 2002 20:25, Nick Clarke wrote:
however I believe students MUST be able to succeed in any task they are set,
Hm, not much of a preparation for life. While I would agree that for the most part success is necessary for motivation, the occassional failure is also necessary to ensure that they are stretched. No sportsman alive has ever reached the top without pushing to the point of failure. One of the real difficulties in education is level of expectation. Its very easy to schedule tasks that can always be achieved, much more difficult to challenge at the limit of capacity and that's where learning is most effective.
All the languages I've mentioned will give you a head start if you go onto uni to do cs.
Sorry must differ here. Recently surveying 10 Unis around the Midlands none demand that potential undergrads had studied programming
But that's not what he said. If they know how to program properly they will find things easier. Even back in the dim past when I learnt Algol W, those who had prior experience found it easier. (some joined the course in Y2 and had to pick it up whereas others had been taught in Y1)
As a professional teacher I need to use the tools that will teach students in the most successful way.
As a professional inspector, I need to ensure teachers really understand the difference between levels of success and potential ;-).
I think that there are many reasons to go open source, but the balance must always be between available expertise, cost and efficacy. VB is very much more effective as a teaching tool, well known and there are many good teaching resources available, so the cost may be overbalanced. We pay for the tool that works best, not the cheapest, or indeed the one that is ideologically the superior.
A good teacher can probably motivate and teach well with almost any tool. I have never done anything with VB, but I know average Year 7 kids can program simple games in BBC Basic and be motivated to do it. A level physics students can be motivated to write assembler routines to modify a data logger to become a seismometer. They key to these is finding an application that theyt think needs doing rather than worrying about the particular language used in its implementation.
I suggest that we get back to the original idea of this thread and try to put together a distro that will enable schools to MANAGE their computer networks as easily as with RM Connect.
Many schools manage their networks effectively without resorting to RM Connect. I don't think you need a Linux distro to do this, just a set of configuration rules for an existing distribution.
With 400+ machines on our network we rebuild up to 20 a week - not because they are totally broken, but because with limited technician time it is quicker and easier to do this than to troubleshoot a 'flaky' machine. 30 minutes after putting in a disk and hitting reset the system is back up with all software installed and it is available to use totally from then on. Until an alternative system can do that we cannot expect hard pressed schools to even consider Linux.
30 minutes! That's an age. The Linux systems we put in rebuild from the server in a lot less time than that, and there are several methods of achieving the same thing on NT and 2000 networks. Its nothing specifically special to do with RM Connect.
Climbs down off soapbox and settles down to do some real work on my Linuxbox - but that is as a consultant, not in school!
What sort of consultancy? I'm curious. Regards, -- IanL