Bonnie - > 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.pil...@ieee.org gpg id: 746809E3 _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
