On 10/13/07, xolani Ndlovu <xolanimart@gmail.com> wrote:

hie eveyone

are there any educational programmes that teach computing short courses using FLOSS products ,programmes like ICDL and others?if not, OpenSourceBulawayo and others are going to be working on a parallel or alternative  educational programme to ICDL that will teach  short computer courses using FLOSS products only since ICDL and other short cources in ZIMBABWE are only taught using Microsoft products only.As we were discussing on how we can get companies and institutions to use Floss  we realized that companies send their employees to do ICDL so that  they can use computers at their work places.

so with  programmes like these compinies can switch and get their people to do the programmes.if there are such programmes please let me now so that we save time work on getting them done in zimbabwe too.One of the pioneers (KUDAKWASHE ) of FLOSS in Zimbabwe has set a framework on the programme equivalent to ICDL it goes like this: In the meantime, I hereby volunteer to host the wiki on FLOSS-based
ICDL
course material here:

http://www.rukanda.com/wiki/index.php?title=International_Computer_Driving_License_%28ICDL%29on_Free/Libre_Open_Sourse_Software_%28FLOSS%29

<snip>

This is all very well, but in the spirit of FOSS, should the use of any particular software package, FOSS or non-FOSS, be even considered? The nature of FOSS pretty much asks for forks, derivatives and alternatives, and any such courses should teach students how to use software packages for a particular purpose, not how to use a particular package. Is this education or training?

Especially with the volatile nature of specific FOSS projects (what ever happened to Nvu?), restricting learning to a particular application may leave people with redundant expertise. SFDers should think about encouraging educational institutions to teach generic skills using FOSS, e.g. word processing taught on OO.org, instead of specifically Microsoft Word.