sorry for cross posting. but as linux lingam pointed out, the school list
doesn't seem to be working. I am not getting any mails. (or is it no one is
posting??)
cheers
tripta
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: ://Lap/resourcebase_schools/tripta/fieldnotes02
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 19:59:49 +0530
From: Trinity <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The field notes01 will soon follow, in the wrong order.
cheers
tripta
__________________________________
St Xavier's School
Rajpur Road
Contact person: Mrs. Archana Venkatraman and Mr. Jaishanker
Inspite of a prior appointment could not meet them as they were busy in some
meeting. However, will be able to talk to them at length tomorrow early
morning.
This time gave me to converse with few students who were hanging around after
the school hours. One of them who was quite forthcoming and was the one who
Marjory did the talking.
There are three streams, at the senior level, Medical (Biology) Non-medical
(Maths and computer science) and Commerce (accounts/business studies etc).
The students i spoke to were from the commerce stream and i found them
hanging around the computer lab itself. All of them had `computers' as one of
their subjects.
The course content for the commerce streams: microsoft word, excel and fox
pro. They also were aware of the fact that fox pro is very very old and
pretty much redundant, when asked why they did not question the teachers
about the same. Shalini replied that they have and got the answer from the
teachers that they can't do much as it is part of the syllabus and nothing
much can be done about it.
However, i was told that the medical and non-medical streams(section C) is
very good in programming and work on visual basics, java, c++. <!--tomorrow i
am hoping to get talking to some of the medical and non-medical students-->
The design of the syllabus to a large extent remains at the discretion of the
individual schools as CBSE only gives specific directions for class 12th
otherwise mostly there are only guidelines made available, which the schools
may or may not adhere to. Even for class 10th there are no specific course
structure as computers is not a subject included in the CBSE curriculum.
I was told that although they are doing word and excel in class XI th (all of
them have been studying in Xavier's for last 11 years) the students in class
4th and 5th are already working on these things. In the junior school,
students are allowed to play games which is restricted in the senior schools
as `students then do not complete their assignments and keep on playing
games'.
When asked what sort of assignments they were supposed to do, it essentially
boiled down to making power point presentations for which `the practical time
is not enough'. In a week of the five classes devoted to computers only two
were practicals of half an hour each. However, although i did not get to
visit the lab from the inputs i got it is a big lab with 50 computers, all
running on windows.
>From windows the conversation drifted to other software, free software and
opensource. None of them had any idea about free software or open source and
did not know what the `source code' meant. This lead to an impromptu 10 min;s
conversation on source code, proprietary software and what it does to the
source code, Richard stallman, free software, information, right to
information and freedom. The students were highly interested and intrigued by
the whole issue and i gave them leaflets pf Richard stallman's `right to
read' and some basic document on `introduction to GNU/linux operating
systems'. They all promised to read it by tomorrow and discuss it further.
They asked me, `how come their teachers did not tell them about it?' and i
definitely would like to raise the issue with the teachers tomorrow.
On asking why they never questioned how the software they are using works,
the nonchalant reply I got was because it works and why do you have to know
about things that work. Only the things that don't work need to be
questioned.
This again got me thinking about the cultural impact of proprietary software.
The battle against the gamut of proprietary software is not against the price
tag but the curiosity and questioning level it has brought down by constantly
providing packages which are seemingly absolute and complete in themselves.
No exposure to hardware is provided to the students. <!--It would be a nice
idea to hold computer hardware demo's at a regular basis. One of them
defiantly is going to be part of the ://tml/tech_fest in Nov-->
However, the school has an operational computer club `abacus' and holds a
computer quiz event `Bits-n-Bytes'. This happens at three levels. sub-junior,
junior and senior. I could not gather much details about it but hopefully
tomorrow i will get to converse with some members of the club.
<!--The impressions that i got from this conversation was that along with
talking about free software and imaging situations of generating awareness
about open source, it is equally important to talk about `Internet' and the
immense potentialities it has. In the schools there are no internet access
terminals and all the students i spoke to haven't been on the net ever. This
essentially means being access denied to plethora of information and resource
base and the entire gamut of controversies and conversation of the space
called `cyberspace'. But it was nevertheless quite nice to talking to the
young ones, the class room controversies and concerns about not being in
medical/non-medical streams and the colleges to choose and careers to
make.-->
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