[ILUG] More Linux in the classroom!

[Michael Treacy]

>What's really missing is any kind of well-formed IT curriculum for Irish
>schools.

Here in Limerick, a number of schools are involved in a "pilot" program 
involving a computer science curriculum for Leaving Cert. It was started 20 
years ago in conjunction with a local school and what was then N.I.H.E., 
Limerick (U.L.)

At a recent meeting to discusss the course, where it was at and where it 
should go, an interesting point was made. There were two people at the 
meeting, the Chief Inspector in the Dept. of Ed and also a guy who works for 
the NCCA (who design curricula). Now the NCCA have been working on a 
computer science curriculum for a while and I believe will be making some 
recommendations to the Minister of Ed.

But after this guy had his say, the Chief Inspector then commented that 
while he didn't think that the NCCA were wasting their time, it was very 
unlikely that the Dept would accept the new course. His reason? Well, it 
seems that there are already 32 different subjects on the Leaving Cert and 
very little room for anymore!

The irony of this of course is the big I.T.2000 program that the Dept of Ed 
introduced a couple of years ago. Every school got a free computer, an ISDN 
line (or a phone line if they didn't already have an phone line for net 
access) and Eircom donated something like an hours free web access per day 
for two years. What they neglected to mention was that while the web access 
was free, the line rental wasn't! So, in theory, while you may not have been 
able to make use of the web access, you were still paying line rental of 
around £30 per month!

There already is a computer science curriculum in place - it is an option 
for the Leaving cert Maths course. I don't know how many schools attempt it, 
but since my school is involved in tecahing this pilot course from U.L., we 
register our students as having done the Maths option. I don't know the 
exact contents of this course, but when I last looked at it, we seemed to be 
covering 99.9% of it in the other course.

My argument is that once you know the basics of word processing, etc, it 
doesn't make a blind bit of difference what the package is! It can be MS 
Word, StarOffice, CVorel Wordperfect, Applixware, KOffice, TeX, whatever... 
So, why shouldn't we go down the Linux road.

Actually, if I was to install a "suite", what would people recommend? I use 
StarOffice myself, but it is a hungry beasty.

Mike



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