[K12OSN] LTSP vs PC

[John P. Conlon]

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.
Bye
Pat

george kocke wrote:

>On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 08:47, Henry Hartley wrote:
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>>>>"This is not what the kids will see in college or the work place."
>>>>        
>>>>
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>>This is just plain wrong, at least the college part.  Here's a quote
>>from Mark Andreessen in BusinessWeek:
>>    
>>
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>>	"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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