Difference between revisions of "Challenges"

Challenges (view source)

Revision as of 20:59, 15 December 2006

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→‎Education System: sankarshan's views added

Pravs

Bureaucrats, Administrators

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 Students in most institutions (exceptions are IITs, IISc, NITs, et. al.) live in their own shell, without any exposure to the real world or the industry. So,
-they don't have the technical know-how or skills for any development, let alone FOSS development.<ref>[http://mm.glug-bom.org/pipermail/linuxers/Week-of-Mon-20061204/055839.html Shakthi Kannan in glug-bom]</ref>
+they don't have the technical know-how or skills for any development, let alone
+FOSS development.<ref>[http://mm.glug-bom.org/pipermail/linuxers/Week-of-Mon-20061204/055839.html Shakthi Kannan in glug-bom]</ref>
 There is a _huge_ gap between academia and the industry (exceptions are IITs, IISc, NITs, et. al.), so the academia folks have absolutely no idea what the
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 * Encouraging more "relevant" industry interaction (and not "lip service")
 * Establishing local mirrors for various FOSS operating systems<ref>[http://sankarshan.livejournal.com/11456.html Sankarshan Mukhopadyay in his blog]</ref>
+ "Here's what I think needs to be addressed when talking about education at the
+ collegiate level. Do note, I hold the belief that we don't have bad students -
+ the sheer numbers of Indian students doing exciting work in the US, UK, ANZ
+ regions are proof enough. What I think is that we have a system that is flawed
+ since it was created to meet a different demand set. And what I additionally
+ think is that instead of fixing the system from within we are trying to put in
+ patches that might just take the car across the culvert but never over the
+ highway that our country is trying to rush through." - [http://sankarshan.livejournal.com/11940.html Sankarshan Mukhopadyay] (list below)
+So, where's the list of that needs to be done ? Here goes:
+* Catch them young: Start off a culture of code sharing and more importantly coding in small module bits that can be integrated to projects
+* Encourage industry to talk: Encourage and in fact aggressively court the industry to be part of both the curriculum designing process as well as the curriculum content delivery methods
+* Teach the methods: Teach the methodology for collaboration of content ie be it documentation, source code or patches. Teach students how to do it, wherefrom to learn, whom to turn to and why it is important to have peers review the work
+* Teach FOSS: Put in a module for FOSS that talks about programming techniques rather than programming languages. Think about integrating and incorporating pieces from SICP and HTDP along with the GNU Coding Standards in order to ensure the output of quality of code
+* Setup Linux Labs: Deceptively simple to setup if one has servers and reasonable bandwidth. Includes setting up of a Version Control System for code commits, a staging server and a development server, a couple of OS mirrors or at least their update mirrors (local) and a few workstations. Set them up on the network, get the network services up and running, put in place a nice printer (one that will take in duplex heavy duty print jobs) and you are reasonably done
+* Encourage content sharing between institutions: Take a look at OCW from MIT and figure out if the same can be easily applied in the current context
 ==Financial Constraints==