Re: [SLUG] certifications

From: Ian C. Blenke (icblenke@nks.net)
Date: Thu May 02 2002 - 11:17:09 EDT


On Thu, 2002-05-02 at 08:14, Mikes work account wrote:
>
> Just as a quick question, do we have any certified Linux people on this list
> who regularly contribute,,, or irregulairly as far as that goes ;o)
>
> I know of a few who are working on their certifications, maybe we could
> include those in the count.
>
> Michael C. Rock

No "Linux certification" here. There are too many of them out there with
no single certification that seems to really mean anything.

This is the problem with most certifications though. Those that don't
need the certification never bother to jump through the hoops but really
deserve some form of recognition while others that understand very
little about the topic manage to pass the certification tests and wave
them about. Ok, I may be whining a bit here ;)

I'm all for Linux advocates, but "certifications" generally seem like
such a bad idea - very corporate solutions with large backdoors to
bypass their origional purpose.

At the moment, the only certification that impresses me is a CCNE. And
that mostly due to the hands-on lab testing that *must* be passed.

We have discussed the knowledge baseline stuff here a bit at NKS. This
really needs to be a community project. It sure would be nice to have an
OpenSource "OpenKnowledge" site (or confederation of sites) with
knowledge "facts" upon which questions could be posed. Automate the
import of Linux Documentation Project facts and version/timestamp them
(facts change over time) and permit questions/multiple-choice-answers to
be attached to those facts. Write a testing system that randomly asks
questions and gauges understanding and time to take the test as well as
community feedback into the facts database to derive a salient test
score for any individual. Or, alternatively, companies might subscribe
to a specific community battery test of questions with a number of other
companies to gauge your general understanding of their core business
needs.

Not only would this give people a great starting point toward finding
out things they need to know, it would encourage community feedback into
a unified database of information rather than the disparate mailing
lists and painful searching that occurs now. At some point, it might
even be possible to throw an expert system on the front of it (maybe
with OpenCyc trained inductive rules) and ask free-form questions about
Linux and get *real* responses.

Synchronize this information between a confederation of engines with raw
XML data (like the dmoz.org project) or some form of SOAP interface for
live interation/replication and see what forms. It would really be kind
of neat for everyone with a blog to export an RDF-like personal
knowledgebase/factbase back to a central knowledge-meme like a
meerkat.oreillynet.com "open knowledge service". Something with
persistence and aging that gets updated frequently.

I really think this has a chance of being something incredible.

Anyone aware of a mailing list that may be discussing ideas like this?

As far as certifications go, I'm only sure of one Linux certified
individual in the area, and he actually made the trip to Virginia to
take the RedHat Certification test.

- Ian



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