Oolite Bulletins

oh man, what an awful photo of david braben they've taken, he needs to get that banned, Frontier Lawyer Force Activate!
Interesting his idea of getting some sort of programmable device made to get kids interesting in coding, a BBC Micro II maybe? i wonder if that Ian McNaught-Davis guy is still around, he used to get my goat bigging up the BBC micro
BTW, did anyone ever manage to download one of those teletex program things onto their computer, no idea how they worked, i suppose you had to video the television screen and feed it into the computer somehow

i used to watch the IMD's prog religiously lol. i had an Electron and the time and most of the clever stuff was for the Beeb tho
i remember one cool thing was they told you how to build a light-sensor thing hooked up to one of the Beeb ports : they transmitted a flashy box in the corner of the screen and this hoozit decoded it into a program to save you typing it. pretty cool for 1982 i thought.

I read through the discussion as well (Oolite was mentioned once! ). Much of it circles around computer education in school.

I have to say that I don't get the whole teaching-MS-office thing (or more general, the teaching-how-to-use-software thing). Why anyone would want to put that into a school curriculum is beyond me. School should be about education, and learning what basically amounts to reading the user manual of a specific product is about the most unrelated-to-education thing I can imagine.

It seems office software is taught because it's a tool which people use in their everyday lives. While this is true, the same is true for using a VCR (or HD-DVD-combo), or a washing machine. Both also require skills of a level roughly on par with those required for using an office software. Do they teach those in school as well nowadays? Are they considered an essential part of the curriculum? I hardly think so.

I am among the first generation who got computer lessons in school in Germany. In my school it started perhaps one or two classes ahead of ours. It was a voluntary subject. And those of us (read: everybody who chose the subject) who had home computers (C-64 in my case) were way ahead in knowledge of the teachers. Everybody had written small BASIC programs themselves, so we knew something about programming. In class we learned PASCAL, and while in itself it's probably obsolete today (and I haven't programmed anything in PASCAL since), learning PASCAL next to the self-taught BASIC—and thereby inadvertently comparing the two—taught us something about the general concept of programming languages, and of programming itself, and logic thinking, and algorithms and how to plan them. I always felt that this was the main point of the subject, and the only justification for it being in school at all. Learning how to point and click and type couldn't be further away from this. It's not even a caricature.

Like McLane - I agree that LIFE skills should be taught at school or more accurately - how do you find the information you need - to do what you want - to a skill level that you need.

I also come from 1st generation computer programming at school in NZ - we had BBC B's with Econet and programmed in BASIC. Yes, at Uni we were given Pascal and yes - that is dead (not used much) in the Southern hemisphere.

Kids have unbelievable resources at their fingertips these days - including the new iPad2, etc. Back in my day.. (thinks of slide rules, etc)

I reckon kids could turn their mind to *anything* they want, learn what they need at such a speed that they could easily decide "nup, not for me" and move on to another subject - get a chance to really see and experience the world instead of "12 years at school, 5 years at college, get a moderate job, earn, get a wife, etc"

Wow - the opportunities are astounding these days.

Actually Oolite is mentioned more than once,

I remember the discussion about if frontier knows oolite

Definetely they know now.

But I must admit these comments about oolite are very good.

Killer Wolf wrote:

i remember one cool thing was they told you how to build a light-sensor thing hooked up to one of the Beeb ports : they transmitted a flashy box in the corner of the screen and this hoozit decoded it into a program to save you typing it. pretty cool for 1982 i thought.

ah, i wonder if it was that which i was half remembering? Isn't this how the evil robots get issued their commands to take over the world in that recent i-robot film? See, i knew there was something rum about IMD, he was trying to get all those Model B's in our home then they'd attack and it'd all be like in that documentary i saw the other day, 'the matrix' or something i think it was called
I could have sworn there were weird telextex computer programs though, crazy pages full of symbols and squares, hmm maybe we just had the Aerial pointed in the wrong direction, away from the mast or something

you may be right about the teletext stuff, i just don't remember it personally due to having a cac memory the BBC's Mode 7 display was teletext so i guess it would make sense if they'd done something to make use of that.
ah nostalgia - i remember being a member of BeebUg and Elbug (that name didn't exactly work did it?) and getting the little A5 fanzines through, typing in all the programs and games etc. many many hours spent.

I think the most noticeable take away from all that is that 'Oolite' is now undeniably the unofficial successor to 'Elite'.

I feel the batton has been well and truely passed on. No matter where 'Elite' gets mentioned, 'Oolite' is also.

Perhaps Oolite is 'Elite 4', in all but name!

Cheers,

Drew.

drew wrote:

Perhaps Oolite is 'Elite 4', in all but name!

I can't help but to agree, at least when it comes to the musings about the future development. It makes a lot of sense to think of Oolite 2 as Elite 4.

Commander McLane wrote:

I read through the discussion as well (Oolite was mentioned once! ). Much of it circles around computer education in school.

I have to say that I don't get the whole teaching-MS-office thing (or more general, the teaching-how-to-use-software thing). Why anyone would want to put that into a school curriculum is beyond me. School should be about education, and learning what basically amounts to reading the user manual of a specific product is about the most unrelated-to-education thing I can imagine.

It seems office software is taught because it's a tool which people use in their everyday lives. While this is true, the same is true for using a VCR (or HD-DVD-combo), or a washing machine. Both also require skills of a level roughly on par with those required for using an office software. Do they teach those in school as well nowadays? Are they considered an essential part of the curriculum? I hardly think so.

I think it's a combination of existential panic ("The world is changing! Everything is different! Quick, put something shiny in the classroom!"), old-fashioned graft ("If your education authority buys £8squillion of computers and software that'll be obsolete before they're properly installed from our company, there's a nice cosy directorship waiting for you 18 months later"), and good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon anti-intellectualism ("What schools need to do is churn out more drones that industry can plug straight into the call centres. Why would a call-centre employee need to know about 'the human condition'?").

Schools should teach things like critical thinking, but that's quite difficult and it's seen as threatening by a political class who view the general population with a mixture of fear and contempt. So they teach them to push buttons and click mice.

Disembodied wrote:

Schools should teach things like critical thinking, but that's quite difficult and it's seen as threatening by a political class who view the general population with a mixture of fear and contempt. So they teach them to push buttons and click mice.

Of course I agree. Still, what astonishes me is that one school subject is treated so completely differently than all the others. Politics seems to agree that ICT (or whatever it's called in different countries; but the debates are quite similar) has to teach the pupils to stupidly use some software, because that's a 'life skill' which everybody needs. But at the same time they agree that all other subjects are not about teaching just one overhyped 'life skill'. The maths curriculum is not centered around teaching how to use an ATM, and nobody would in their wildest dreams think that it should be. The physics curriculum is not centered around teaching how to change a light bulb, etc. And it is obvious to everybody why that would be a bad idea. What is so totally beyond me is why there should be one (and only one) school subject totally different in scope from all the others.

The only explanation I can think of is that the politicians who make the curricula (well, I guess they don't actually make them, but they create the framework) are still complete analphabetic with regards to computers, so much so that they don't have the faintest idea what the fuzz is all about, other than vegetatively noticing that there are magical machines everywhere, and that something should be done about them in school, but without the barest notion what this 'something' could be. Probably it doesn't help if their grasp of what school is about is similarly blurry as well.

Commander McLane wrote:

The only explanation I can think of is that the politicians who make the curricula (well, I guess they don't actually make them, but they create the framework) are still complete analphabetic with regards to computers, so much so that they don't have the faintest idea what the fuzz is all about, other than vegetatively noticing that there are magical machines everywhere, and that something should be done about them in school, but without the barest notion what this 'something' could be. Probably it doesn't help if their grasp of what school is about is similarly blurry as well.

I think you've nailed it there ...

Oolite 2

Huh? Did I miss something?

Cheers,

Drew.

drew wrote:

Oolite 2

Huh? Did I miss something?

Perhaps?