[Opensource] Australian Curriculum consultation paper [Spam score:10%]

[Oliver Murray]

Well said Paul, concise and to the point.

ICT changes so fast and interest groups have strong beliefs (eg LAMP Vs WIMP) leading to curriculum authorities that require a written exam setting up vague curricula and we the teacher end up teaching much irrelevant theory in order play the "guess what might be in the exam" game.

Years ago I suggested an consultative curriculum that changes every year. A consultation group of interest parties (industry, teachers etc...) designs the curriculum at the end of each year. Imagine a large part of the curriculum devoted smart phones last year, tablets this year, and so on

Regards,

Oliver Murray
Head of ICT

-----Original Message-----
From: opensource-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:opensource-bounces at edulists.com.au] On Behalf Of Paul Shirren
Sent: Tuesday, 21 June 2011 8:17 AM
To: Open Source Software Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Opensource] Australian Curriculum consultation paper [Spam score:10%]

On 21/06/11 7:05 AM, Donna Benjamin wrote:
> I initially had problems registering with that site.  I wonder if it's
> not quite standards compliant.

The client side is good. HTML5 doctype, pretty clean looking semantic
code. jQuery. They even have a Creative Commons licence. I would say
they are ticking all the boxes. Much better than the majority of govt sites.

It is developed in asp.net and served by an IIS server which sounds like
a crappy combination to me but some fairly competent people make a
living out of it. They might have issues with scaling the site but I
have seen plenty of naive Apache/PHP sites fall over under almost
trivial load (Drupal and Wordpress, cough, cough)

I haven't looked at the docs yet. I am not sure if there is much point.
You can't predict the future and no subject is less predictable than
ICT. They should leave the curriculum guides to history and maths and
leave ICT out of it. If the writers have any sense they will have filled
the document with non-specific waffly language and cashed their
consultant cheques on the way to the airport.

There is too much pressure from ACCE/ACS types to make ICT into a core
subject to satisfy their own objectives and ambitions. All they will do
is make themselves look more irrelevant as their curriculum diverges
further from reality. I suspect the only thing that stops kids being
orders of magnitude more competent with technology than they are is the
lack of challenges in their dreary school days. Probably not the sort of
feedback they would want.

BTW I haven't had my coffee yet so that might have been over the top.
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