[SFD-discuss] FLOSS educational programmes

[Steve Olive]

On Sat, 2007-10-13 at 19:13 +1000, draicone at gmail.com wrote:

> On 10/13/07, xolani Ndlovu <xolanimart at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>                 hie eveyone 
>                  
>                 are there any educational programmes that teach
>                 computing short courses using FLOSS
>                 products ,programmes like ICDL and others?if not,
>                 OpenSourceBulawayo and others are going to be working
>                 on a parallel or alternative  educational programme
>                 to ICDL that will teach  short computer courses using
>                 FLOSS products only since ICDL and other short
>                 cources in ZIMBABWE are only taught using Microsoft
>                 products only.As we were discussing on how we can get
>                 companies and institutions to use Floss  we realized
>                 that companies send their employees to do ICDL so
>                 that  they can use computers at their work places.
>                 so with  programmes like these compinies can switch
>                 and get their people to do the programmes.if there are
>                 such programmes please let me now so that we save time
>                 work on getting them done in zimbabwe too.One of the
>                 pioneers (KUDAKWASHE ) of FLOSS in Zimbabwe has set a
>                 framework on the programme equivalent to ICDL it goes
>                 like this: In the meantime, I hereby volunteer to host
>                 the wiki on FLOSS-based
>                 ICDL 
>                 course material here:
>                 
>                 http://www.rukanda.com/wiki/index.php?title=International_Computer_Driving_License_%28ICDL%29on_Free/Libre_Open_Sourse_Software_%28FLOSS%29
>                 <snip>
> 
> This is all very well, but in the spirit of FOSS, should the use of
> any particular software package, FOSS or non-FOSS, be even considered?
> The nature of FOSS pretty much asks for forks, derivatives and
> alternatives, and any such courses should teach students how to use
> software packages for a particular purpose, not how to use a
> particular package. Is this education or training? 
> 
> Especially with the volatile nature of specific FOSS projects (what
> ever happened to Nvu?), restricting learning to a particular
> application may leave people with redundant expertise. SFDers should
> think about encouraging educational institutions to teach generic
> skills using FOSS, e.g. word processing taught on OO.org, instead of
> specifically Microsoft Word.


The difficulties with this is "industry standards", when people complete
training they expect, as do employers, that they will be able to
immediately use those skills when employed, not need more training.
Unfortunately most PCs use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office,
whether legally or from pirated versions. This results in a Catch 22
situation, whilst doing the training using FOSS is not hard, students
won't do these courses because it is not used in industry.

As mentioned by other INGOTS training is focused at OpenOffice.org
products and learning materials are already available. Another online
source is:

http://www.tutorialsforopenoffice.org/index.html

The ECDL/ICDL tests are very focused on the use of Microsoft Office
XP/2003 products to complete the exams.

Regards,

Steve

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