[fsug-bangalore] FSF in Schools

[Suraj Kumar]

Ramanraj K wrote: 
,----
| Then, centralised  efforts may be  needed.  Assigning the task  to the
| teachers themselves  is the best thing  to do, because  they know best
| what the  students will understand and  what they wont'  which will be
| supplemented with their own notes.
`----

Same Chicken and  Egg! They teachers wont sit  for a training session!
and besides, since Demo at Schools was "extra-feeding", the teachers also
had  other stuff  to teach  the students  (like Star  Office, Windows,
etc.,.). Infact, at  one point we started considering  it "success" to
keep the  teachers in the class  while we were  teaching. Somehow they
would always slip away. ;/

,----
| It will  happen only  when the  right text books  get written  and are
| available.   Certain  concepts like  pipes  and  permissions could  be
| taught from  an early stage, and  will help the students  to think the
| right way from  the start, regardless of `marks'.   Merely pointing to
| resources  already  available  should  help.   If no  text  books  are
| available then,  a good  book available in  the market should  be made
| available for reference.  Using  primary documentation that comes with
| the program  or those written by  the authors themselves  are the very
| best.  They are often less profound than their commentators.
`----

True.   And right text  books need  a good  amount of  volunteers with
enough fourth  dimension at  their disposal.  With  Demo at Schools, that
was the  main problem. Bad news,  only two books  got completed.  Good
news, we (fsugb) need not write everything from scratch ;)

Completed stuff:

1. M K  Saravanan completed  a "cheat sheat"  kinda thing  for TCP/IP,
   networking related stuff).

2. After a  while, a person  named "John Buchanen" (spelling  might be
   wrong)  had  contributed his  book  named  "Programming Ground  Up"
   (neatly  docbookized).  It  is very  well written  and is  aimed at
   teaching Assembly Language for the newbie.

Incomplete Stuff:

1. I  started  off with  a  docbooked  thing  called "introduction  to
   computers" (with heavy  GNU fanaticism propaganda and if  I read it
   again, it all sounds like some  hitler talking about jews -- on how
   bad it is  to not share software, how evil the  term "linux" is and
   such... you know, the typical GNU fanaticism).

2. Arun was writing "Introduction to  Desktops". It probably has a few
   paragraphs in there, so $volunteer can take up from there :)

cheers,

  -Suraj

-- 
,-----------------[http://www.symonds.net/~suraj/]---o
| Veena Balachander taught himself the veena!
`------------------------------[suraj at symonds.net]---o