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Re: [Sheflug] Re: courses
begin R E B Holland quotation:
> Very unlikely you will find any at colleges etc. They are virtually all
> teaching the same thing. My wife is a college lecturer on ICT but I am
I am teaching a couple of courses (one at the moment) at Sheffield
Uni's Institute for Lifelong Learning (no publicity scam, mind you
:D). I have asked in the past to use free software, but to no avail.
The rhetoric is that people take this courses because they want to
have Word, Excel and so on on their CVs. Having said that, if enough
people show interest in a course on GNU/Linux, it could possibly be
arranged (there was talk of giving a networking course, and that was
going to be based around Apache, Samba and all that).
Having said that, I am suppossed to teach a course on PHP next
semester (funding is still pending), and the some of the other tutors
are very familiar with UNIX in general. The problem is, if most people
who ring in actually demand a Word course, the Word course is on
offer. As far as I can tell, no one has ever requested a Unix or Linux
course, so these are obviously not on the menu.
I am aware of short courses (15 hourse) that are run here as well
over the summer. A "Beginner's Linux" could be an option... I can
enauire about that, but presumably, we'd have to use some sort of
Linux Live eval or some other stuff...
> Microsoft based at these institutions, despite an argument which suggests
> they should be teaching skills not packages. I hope the install fest in May
> will do a bit to stimulate demand for Linux training - if local businesses
> start to take a serious interest then the demand will increase - hence the
All of my students use Linux. At least, they FTP stuff to a Linux
server, and use Apache on the server. Some of them have asked for
Linux distros in the past, and I have burnt copies of Mandrake for
them (and directed them here. Since I haven't seen any of them around,
they either found the process trivial, or they didn't bother to try
:D). This semester I burnt a cD Rom for Windows full o' free software
goodies: OpenOffice, The Gimp, Apache, Zope, Python, loads of
documentation freely available, Emacs (the original OS (TM)), which
went down quite well. The idea is that if they get used to that
software on Windows, then the transiation to Linux in the future will
be seamless... anyway, people were quite happy both with openoffice
and the gimp. emacs was a bit of a disappointment, so I shall also
include vi next time.
But as before, most people tend to see Linux as a learn in your
own time thing or simply as either too complicated (the famouse "I
can-t be arsed school of though") or not Windows. Most of the people
seem mystified about the 12 year old server they use going on and on
for months though....
That's my 2p
Jose
--
José L Gómez Dans PhD student
Tel: +44 114 222 5582 Radar & Communications Group
FAX; +44 870 132 2990 Department of Electronic Engineering
University of Sheffield UK
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