Well said Wesley. There has been a lot more heat than light on this thread that a simple google could have addressed. I would also like to suggest ICDL II or ICDL Plus that would extend the above and empower students with basic programming skills that can be reused in their careers, *not necessarily as programmers*! I'm thinking these skills will allow students to be more effective in their work by automating their day to day software using tools like macros. Whose syllabus would look like so: 1. Introduction To Object Oriented Programming (C++ or Java or C#) 2. Introduction To Scripting Languages (JavaScript or Python, Ruby) 3. Introduction to Web Programming 4. Programming Project On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 11:27 AM, wesley kirinya <kiriinya2000@yahoo.com>wrote:
Thanks Dr.Ndemo. The following concerns came to my mind:
I believe the government can use a variety of software (proprietary or not). Those software have the features in ICDL but they might be organized differently or the user needs to go through different steps to achieve same results. Therefore I think it might be very useful for anyone who has gone through the ICDL to have learnt atleast 2 of the same kind of the most popular software that the government uses e.g. for Word processing, MS Word and OpenOffice Writer. One may argue that this may take longer time to teach ICDL but I don't believe that time is significantly long. Once a candidate has learnt the fundamentals of Word Processing through one software, it's now a matter of seeing how the same can be archieved in a different software. I believe this has benefits for government and kenyans in general. Incase government migrates to different software e.g. OpenOffice Writer to MS Word, then the migration is smoother.
On the same subject, I think it's good to teach about interoperability of different softwares of the same kind. E.g. importing and exporting documents between different Word Processing softwares. If the government is having a hard time deciding which cars to drive I won't be surprised that some want to use MS Word while others OpenOffice Writer.
So my point is that I would suggest the candidates of the ICDL course be exposed to a variety of software.