[fsug-bangalore] FSF in Schools

[Ramanraj K]

  Suraj Kumar wrote:

>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! 
>
Evidence is now accumulating to show that the eggs came first :)  We 
have for long used expressions like `germ of an idea' or `seed of an 
idea'.  We only need to pack the right things into the seeds, plant them 
in schools, watch them being cared for and soon they can take roots in 
schools and once our seeds germinates and grows into nice tall mature 
trees, it will take feed back from its environment and produce improved 
evolved seeds that could be used the next academic year.  Looks like the 
chickens hatch from eggs, but a chicken did not lay the first egg. 
[Clue:  all life evolved from bacteria]

>
>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.
>
My goodness! Those are for Demo at Colleges.

I would say, the syllabus should be oriented towards making children 
skilled _users_ of existing programs, which a firm grounding in basic 
computing concepts. They should know atleast one scripting language: sh, 
perl or php.  Without reinventing the wheel, school patterns devised in 
Brazil or Europe could be studied and followed here.  

>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).
>
Any kind of advocacy could be called fanaticism.  But generally, pushing 
is useless, and instead we should work on pulls that can attract by its 
own weight.  Originally I was introduced to `Open Source Linux' at the 
Bangalore IT.Com fair, but soon the powerful pull from the GPL led me to 
these lists.   I have not known GNU fanaticism, and nobody pushed me 
into these lists.  Since we value freedom more than anything else, we 
can ask others to stay vigilant too.

>
>2. Arun was writing "Introduction to  Desktops". It probably has a few
>   paragraphs in there, so $volunteer can take up from there :)
>
Probably all these could get transferred to a wiki ?

Regards,
Ramanraj.