In our curriculum workshop earlier this week, and elsewhere in these forums, the issue of exam boards or similar agencies requiring, explicitly or implicitly, teachers and students to use particular applications has arisen.
If this is happening, then this is clearly wrong and we'd be very interested in hearing about the details - links to or quotes from the specifications or other published materials would be particularly helpful.
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I'd just like to say a bit on the background to this. The biggest problem is ignorance - rather ironic in an education technology industry! Such is the resistance to change, even if we basically point out that something is unlawful, we get accused of advocacy. The facts are that the law says that two dominant players in a market are treated differently from other types of undertaking. An Exam board or Tech support company in a dominant position in it's market sector (over 20% market share qualifies) acting together so that other products are blocked to the detriment of the consumer is plain and simply illegal. It's not a matter of advocacy, it's a matter of enforcing the law. Another irony in the situation in technology is that the monopoly is so all encompassing people have just accepted it as the norm so it hasn't been questioned much in the past. Now it is starting to get topical, those that should perhaps never have allowed the situation to arise are in a sticky situation. The law says that a company found guilty can be fined up to 10% of its entire annual turnover. If no-one complains, nothing will get done. If many consumers complainn just watch how quick things start to change when fines in the hundreds of millions start being applied. All it takes is an e-mail to the Office of Fair Trading stating a rational case.
World trade agreements require governments to use ISO standards where these exist. The ISO standard for documents is ISO 26300 the Open Document Format. So irrespective of how popular other formats currently are, all government web sites should be making files available in .odt and odp for example as well as .doc and .ppt. Yes it will be a bit of hassle in the short term and many working in those offices won't have a clue as to what odt is but the law is the law and trade agreements should be honoured. This is not advocacy, it is simply requiring the administrators to comply with the law.
one point that was mentioned was that the teaching of databases is heavily focussed on Microsoft Access and that OpenOffice.org Base isn't thought to be sufficiently fully featured to be an alternative and there was discussion about it not being relational. I had never really used Base and I haven't seen Access being used in the wild for a decade, but I thought I would have a quick play with OOo Base to see what state it is in. It is actually pretty good from what I can tell. It most certainly is a relational database. I could create tables and define keys in them, I could join them with other tables using a GUI designer or SQL. There is a forms thing for building a front end to the data, this uses OOo writer and I think relates to XForms which is fully buzzword compliant. The report writer seems perfectly operational. I could create queries and views and join them to other stuff. Overall it seems to me does much the same as Access 97 did (like I said, haven't used it for a decade). Is there some feature in Access that is required by the curriculum that isn't in OOo Base?
BASE / Access? ICT AS G062 Task 4
OCR set a data base task based on a carpet shop for AS that requires the following features:
1. A form level validation that compares one date with another on the form. Easy enough in Access but a bit of a pig to teach AS students to do in Base (or am I wrong???)
2. It requires a subform with subtotals, a dropdown list of products in the subform so that new items can be added. The main form's totals and discounts are calculated from subform's subtotals.
3. Calculations in the main form for discount and fitting are calculated and added to the totals which in turn are based on the subform subtotals.
Now I found enough difficulty building this in Access 2007, but managed it without a line of basic. I would love to hear from someone with a fully functioning and documented Base version. Having seen the struggle my students have had even with all of Access 2007's features I would be very reluctant to make it any harder.
excellent, that is a really specific challenge. Do you have a link to the full task description? I would not expect this to be trivial (if it was trivial it wouldn't be an AS level question) but having had a quick look I think all the required bits are there. Can't say I have ever seen a subform before, but they seem to make sense. Is this you by the way? http://www.ocrict.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1822
update: I found the link http://www.ocr.org.uk/Data/publications/prerelease_materials/GCE2008_ICT_PRM_Unit_G062_Jun_2009.pdf
Alan
Yes, I posted that challenge on the unofficial OCR ICT forum - so far no one has come forward with an OS offering so I must conclude that most schools are using Access to do this task. With only approx 5 weeks to teach completely inexperienced AS students with no DB experience it would be a very tall order to attempt it in anything other than a database package. ICT students don't do ANY programming in their course and v few ICT teachers would know SQL.
I conclude that if I were to create a Linux-based network, Windows and MS Office would have to be made available to certain users via some form of client-virtualization, perhaps through VMware remote access portal. This would mean that most users could be supplied with Open Office and FireFox on Linux. VMWare Windows client portals would be selectively made available to staff and ICT students. The VLE of course would ve Moodle and the CMS system JNuke or similar. I would have to research media players and video streaming technologies for multimedia delivery to classrooms.
The costs of rolling out Win2K8 even at educational rates actually are significant for a 2000+ college with 200+ staff so I am happy to avoid the overhead of windows clients everyware.
cheers
J
From a practical point of view this sounds a sensible strategy. Previously compatibility meant one platform hanful of suppliers, now it is all about interoperability, net standards and wider choice. Are we preparing children for this future world? Since we don't insist all children speak only one language in schools I don't see why we need insist on a technological monoculture. In terms of the 5 weeks to teach a database application with no SQL savy teachers, it seems rather like saying that we should miss out all digital electronics from Physics syllabuses because teacher weren't taught it at uni. I was taught the triode valve amplifier at A level but I still taught transistors and Op Amps later. It seems a sad reflection on the state of the IT education world when supposedly Advanced courses are so out of touch with the way the world is changing. If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well. I'd say better to scrap the database section altogether and replace it with a grounding in open systems and uderstanding technological change.
I have to admit I am struggling a bit on the form user interface bit of the challenge. I can't find a non-programming way to do field validation in an OOo form
[quote=J Stephenson]
I would have to research media players and video streaming technologies for multimedia delivery to classrooms.
[/quote]
VideoLan http://www.videolan.org/ should meet both you multimedia playback and streaming needs. It's ability to play almost any file format is impressive http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html and can also be used to do file conversion between formats.
VLC is open source, originally developed by a French university and now has an improved interface. It is also cross-platform whcih is important for all open source tools as pupils should be able to choose their platform of choice whether Windows, OS x or Linux.
Databases seem to be a good example of where the academic world has lost touch with reality. If you asked a professional database designer to tackle these problems, would they be thinking in terms of Access? I doubt it. Much more likely a SQL solution with something like PHP or maybe Ruby on Rails etc. I suspect the main reason not to specify a real world solution is that teachers of IT don't yet have the required knowedge and skills. Of course taking Access as a starting point and defining questions for it is a likely line of least resistance but that does call into question the quality of what is being offered. Best for learners or most convenient to teachers?
I have to agree to an extent. In fact in the decade I spent not looking at Access I designed and built lots and lots of applications based on Lotus Notes and dealling with Oracle and MSSQL and MySQL back ends. However looking at the actual task set I can't see any reason why a full credit answer couldn't be provided with MySQL and PHP.
This brings up a wider issue. What is the e-strategy (government glossy that is more about aspiration than strategy) doing to help support learners become the technology professionals of the future to make UKplc competitive? So far 500m has been spent on curriculum on-line yet there is still no coherent web base support for a 20 year old Naional Curriculum that is freely available to schools. Wikipedia cost a fraction of that money. In fact COL has entrenched the desktop paradigm preventing natural change. We see exams that are 10 years out of date in their approach to a major application field such as databases, we have monopolies acting illegally and no-one doing anything about it. We have BSF that is only accessible to the same large corporates that have the most to lose from a shift from proprietary applications. We even get accused of "advocacy" if we speak out. Then we get asked "Do you have to use proprietary applications?". The really surprising thing is that te answer is only partially yes and getting less yes as time goes on. The great irony is that those that can say no haven't been on courses, they have learnt from the community and a general interest in technology embracing the concept of lifelong learning. Some members of the edcational establishment are great on rhetoric about lifelong learning and preparation for technological change etc apparently as long as it doesn't apply to them ;-). Change is tough, but it is also inevitable, a matter of how long rather than if and of course "all progress depends on unreasonable men" (Shaw) :-)