Monday, December 01, 2008

Attention Zombie students and district leaders

The lead story in today's OpenOffice.org email newsletter has this bit of news:
A breakthrough in curriculum change for 201 m students and adoption of Open Source Technologies in schools

...finally had a major breakthrough with NCERT, the body responsible for setting curriculum for 201 m school students in India. In the last 30 years, this is the first time that they have come out with a syllabus that has no reference to Microsoft or Oracle products. This impacts more than 201 m students in India.
The details of the syllabus can be found at

http://www.ncert.nic.in/html/syllabus.htm
Here, in Pittsburgh, and in the US, people are worried that the right flavor of black history, women's history, international history, world creation, etc. is taught in the schools. All are worthy discussions.

However, the one discussion that should be of prime focus now, in Pittsburgh, is that the right flavor of technology is being taught and deployed with our schools. In September of 2009, Pittsburgh Public Schools is to open a new Science and Technology High School and Middle School. That school will span the grades of 6 to 12.

I want to work to insure that our kids in Pittsburgh are being exposed to, in a day-to-day basis, open-source software tools, principles and methods. This is something that INDIA is doing now. And, Pittsburgh should not be left behind in the dust.

CMU is a world leader in many realms with open source technology. CMU generated more lines of code in LISP than anywhere else in the world. All of it is in the open.

We need the Science and Technology School to embrace open source software.

We need to discount the Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp license agreements and expenses. They are, after all, all about what the older white guys have to say -- not ethnic and culturally diverse -- if this was put into the same apples and oranges bucket. Yes, Bill Gates = Christopher Columbus. Yes, Bill Gates = Andrew Carnegie too.

Pittsburgh's new public high school and middle school built around science and technology needs to be built with a strict adherence and devotion to open-source software, such as is offered with OpenOffice.org and thousands of other software tools.

Finally, the school's sports team mascot should be The Zombies!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

The game, typically lasting five days, is won either when all the humans are made into zombies or when all the zombies starve, which means going two consecutive days without consuming a human. Humans can stun zombies by hitting them with socks or Nerf gun darts.

----------------------
kesha

Viral