From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Subject: Re: Book REview
Date: 1996/05/10
Date: 1996-05-10T00:00:00+00:00 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <4musoq$88i@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 4muo9j$4hp@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU
ok@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU (Richard A. O'Keefe) wrote
>Don't
>think of
Which should have read
Don't think of me as a lone madman, think of me as a miner's canary.
Coincidentally, after posting that message, I received the results of a
local survey of *post-graduate* students.
- "more than 50% were migrants
or permanent residents who had not been in Australia very long"
- about 50% of the students have worked overseas or had been asked by
their employers to work overseas during the course (roughly split as
50% Asian countries, 25% Anglophone countries, 25% European counties).
- most students saw internationalisation of the post-graduate program
"as having been achieved"
- "the majority of the students could not find any subjects where the
subject matter is Australian-centered" except that
* some case studies (including one relating to Telecom Australia)
were Australian-related, which was something of a problem
* some students commented that 'most of the material' is US-oriented
and that was a problem
* some data base materials were identified as "very 'Western'";
this is a code word for 'American'.
- most students wanted an "internationalised" course
if it wouldn't cost them any more or impair their job prospects
- about a quarter of the students commented that they wanted our
program to have more overseas content.
Now, this was a survey of POST-graduate students, not CS 1 students, but
"more than 50% migrants or recent permanent residents" describes our CS1
students pretty well too. They come from a variety of Asian and European
backgrounds. So an "Australian" edition of a textbook would switch off
half our students. Not a good idea.
The bottom line for textbook authors and reviewers here is that
"Americanisation" _is_ an issue for Asian students; they _are_ aware of
the cultural biases in the text-books and it _does_ bother them.
--
Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++ ???
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~ok; RMIT Comp.Sci.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~1996-05-10 0:00 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 25+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
1996-05-06 0:00 Book REview Richard A. O'Keefe
1996-05-06 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1996-05-07 0:00 ` Richard A. O'Keefe
1996-05-08 0:00 ` Michael Feldman
1996-05-09 0:00 ` Richard A. O'Keefe
1996-05-08 0:00 ` Michael Feldman
1996-05-07 0:00 ` Michael Feldman
1996-05-08 0:00 ` Richard A. O'Keefe
1996-05-08 0:00 ` Dave Jones
1996-05-10 0:00 ` sxc
1996-05-12 0:00 ` dave
1996-05-12 0:00 ` dave
1996-05-13 0:00 ` Richard A. O'Keefe
1996-05-13 0:00 ` Richard A. O'Keefe
1996-05-13 0:00 ` Theodore E. Dennison
1996-05-10 0:00 ` Richard A. O'Keefe
1996-05-10 0:00 ` Richard A. O'Keefe [this message]
1996-05-13 0:00 ` Dave Jones
1996-05-12 0:00 ` Todd Coniam
1996-05-14 0:00 ` Simon Wright
1996-05-15 0:00 ` sxc
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
1996-05-09 0:00 John McCormick
1996-05-12 0:00 Dave
1996-05-13 0:00 ` Theodore E. Dennison
1996-05-13 0:00 ` Tucker Taft
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