Re: [Fsfe-uk] Membership/Recruitment

[ian]

On Wed, 2003-05-28 at 11:40, Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:
> ian wrote:
> 
> >If you want anything on education, let me know and I'll do something.
> >Plenty of options to cover things like government policy on social
> >inclusion and the environment 
> >
> What would be helpful for me is to know where exactly such government 
> policies concerning *adult* IT literacy and social inclusion is.
> 
> Do you mean 'social environment' (ie,  as in  sharing cooperative happy 
> ...) or environment as in green trees and congestion charge.?

Social inclusion policy for schools involves things like reducing
exclusions, improving attendance, providing accessible courses, bridging
the technology divide ie enabling the same access to IT for
disadvantaged as for the middle classes.

Environment policy is a wider issue not confined to education, but UK
has a very poor record on chucking things (like computers) into landfill
sites. With 25,000 schools with an average of say 100 computers, that's
a lot of junk every few years. Thin client is an obvious strategy to
reduce this waste.

> Either way I am very interested to get together on this aspect of IT too.
> 
> Once there was [www.becta.org,uk] with 'ITfor all' splashed across it. 
> Now they  seem to concentrate on schools and few other established methods.

There are Gov projects such as wired up cities or something that chuck
grants at poor localities. Snag is its unsustainable, once the grant is
done, rapid obsolescence ensues. The best way to further social
inclusion is to get the fundamental cost down. This is why virtually
everyone has a colour TV.
> 
> I suspect that there is a huge amount of disgruntled populace out there, 
> who were once taught how to use of products from Macromedia and Adobe 
> under various schemes but still unable to meet their daily software needs.
> 
> >and why they should be putting money into
> >free software to further their own policies!
> >
> or atleast stop getting behind unsustainable IT solutions which only 
> breeds scams!

Indeed.

> Also, I do want to get back at some local people who laughed at me then, 
> when I talked about free software.

My son just had a contact from someone who said he now had to eat humble
pie because 2 years ago he said Linux was just a fad. Now he is asking
for some Mandrake discs to try out and openly acknowledging he was
wrong.:-)

Just been talking to Computer Weekly so looks like some more publicity!


> Best wishes,
> 
> Ramanan
> 
> 
> 
> 
-- 
ian <address@hidden>