On Wed, 2004-06-30 at 15:53, Paul Taylor wrote:
Hi all:
Apologies in advance if there are any colleagues here working for exam boards.. I got a letter this week from OCR telling me they were dropping some optional units from their AVCE ICT. They (the exam boards) are all changing over to an applied VCE in a year or two so this is the last run of this specification. In light of this I thought it would be a good time to phone with a speculative foray into changing their specifications to reflect the real world of IT. I thought that given Apache runs 70% of all web sites and that IT Week this week says that Linux server adoption is off the scale it would be timely for exam boards to reflect the interest and up-take of Linux in the industry and offer a Linux unit in their optional choices. I was prepared to write something up (with the approval and support of this community) and even support it with moderating and exam papers if necessary. I phoned OCR first, "what's it called?", mm, not a good start. They seemed less than keen to get involved. The main person was not there but I was assured that all of the materials had been written already and there was no real plans for additional ones for the next few years. I then called Edexcel who currently have Unit 24 and Unit 25 which equate directly to Cisco Semesters 1/2 and 3/4. They had no idea what I was talking about at all (a quick crash test on their server revealled IIS which may explain this lack of knowledge). I was told again that the "exciting" new applied material would be published in the Summer but there was no room for any development of this or additional material. I know I am somewhat biased in that I am on this site and have been using Linux for several years but any casual perusal of mainstram magazines will tell you that Linux is not some backwater freak show. All of the big players are adopting it in some form and even Microsoft take it seriously enough to try to rubbish it in adverts. When will the exam boards reflect reality? At my last school I ran a Cisco Academy and due to expense (and personal interest) I had Linux as all the servers and some of the desktops. The kids were rather dismissive of my evangelising but learned it reluctantly. I have kept in touch with most of them and whether they have gone on to jobs in IT or University courses they say that the thing that did it for them was not the Cisco but the Linux experience. So endeth my rant.
Just ran the first course to-day for assessors of theINGOTs.org, a grass
roots led ICT accreditation framework that is very FLOSS-friendly. I
guess we will have our first 6 or 7 INGOT academies from this and we can
then transcend al the above. Why not join us? The more schools that do,
the more weight we will have with the powers that be and we can lead
from the bottom instead of the top. Details on www.theINGOTs.org.
PS I did the whole session using free software :-)
--
Ian Lynch