> When I first heard about the POSSE workshops, my reaction was "Why aren't they doing these for university/college IT staff?". And I still feel strongly that some kind of workshops or training needs to be organized for the IT folks if any real headway is going to be made. Why? Consider the situation at many smaller teaching oriented schools. At these schools, many of the people teaching computer science do not have computer science backgrounds. Often, they are primarily mathematicians or physicists or business educators, who have been asked to teach computer science courses. This is the case at my current school, and at the school where I last taught. At these schools, the faculty teaching CS tend to be very dependent on the IT staff. Unless the IT staff can install the software and show the faculty how to use it, they simply won't use it in their courses.
I think your observation is quite correct. The IT staff in the schools I've
seen in Singapore/Malaysia/Thailand/Philippines/India/China are indeed
MS-centric. Anyone who spent time tinkering with software would probably
NOT be doing what is essentially mundane IT stuff.
I think the idea of a POSSE for IT Staff is worth thinking about.
Last Thursday and Friday, I ran a mini-POSSE in Kuala Lumpur for about 25
professors from 4 universities. They are from CS, Electrical Engineering, High
Performance Computing and related areas, but other than the HPCC folks,
none of them use Linux on a regular basis. It is also not because they can't
- their IT support staff are MS-centric.
I think we need to explore the idea of POSSE for IT Staff further and will
have to take a different complexion and flavour to the current POSSE.
--
Harish Pillay h.pillay@ieee.org gpg id: 746809E3
_______________________________________________
tos mailing list
tos@teachingopensource.org
http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
No comments:
Post a Comment