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.-->
