From: Michael Treacy (delphi91 at domain hotmail.com)
Date: Fri 04 Feb 2000 - 19:25:34 GMT
>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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