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I agree with teaching concepts. My students use Linux and OO in a
large part of our school and Works, word, or other processor at home.
They don't use floppies to save their work, they e-mail it to
themselves and keep on trucking. There is no human-machine platform
interface problem if we just get the adult naysayers out of the way and
turn the kids loose. The biggest problem is making the adults get
their feet wet.<br>
Bye<br>
Pat<br>
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george kocke wrote:<br>
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cite="mid1080834913.23876.36.camel@tardis.london.volnet">
<pre wrap="">On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 08:47, Henry Hartley wrote:
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<pre wrap="">"This is not what the kids will see in college or the work place."
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<pre wrap="">This is just plain wrong, at least the college part. Here's a quote
from Mark Andreessen in BusinessWeek:
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<pre wrap=""> "Another key thing to remember is that everyone coming
out of college is familiar with Linux.
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That's a good point. However, it will be argued that the majority of
college students are not computer science students and will therefore
not be using Linux or that their use will be minimal.
A very stupid argument, but I've heard it used.
What needs to be done is to get people to stop focusing on training
students in the exact steps needed to do something in a particular piece
of software and to start teaching the concepts of that class of
software.
When I was fighting to keep using OpenOffice & LTSP last year, I had a
couple of teachers complain that we were doing a disservice to our
students (PK3 - 8th grade) because we were not training them to use
Microsoft Word as the high schools expect. I tried to explain to them
that learning the concepts of how to use a word processor is better than
specific training in Word. In order to help convince them, I set up a
Macintosh SE running a copy of Microsoft Works from around 1988. I
showed them that a word processor from 1988 is basically the same as one
from 2003. They weren't totally convinced, but I think it helped a bit.
Having younger teachers is not always better. I'm dealing with one in
her early 20s who is terrified of computers and one who calls HTML files
"hotmail files." The one 20 something teacher we have who loves using
Linux used to do BBSing on his Commodore 64.
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