[K12OSN] LTSP Teacher Forum

[Jay Pfaffman]

On Thu, 09 Dec 2004 10:52:17 -0500, Tom Ventresco
<aust_txv at access-k12.org> wrote:

> BUT the problem comes from the university courses that teach
> Dreamweaver,  promote MS Office and raise tuition to purchase the MS
> campus license, Photoshop, AutoCAD, all the big ones.  I will say it . .
> . many ( certainly not all ) of these students after they leave one of
> these course are MS robots and their basic skills still stink !!!
> Shoot, you would think I was asking these knew teachers to speak ancient
> Greek, ("Open Office, what is that ?  What are file types ? You mean I
> don't save my documents in My Document.")  The "Technology Teaching"
> classes are the worst.  Universities have turned their backs on their
> own.  I am passionate about this issue because it is aways used against
> me...

As someone who teaches in a university with courses that teach
Dreamweaver and promotes MS Office, these are some of the issues I'm
working on changing.  Hopefully NVU will be getting stronger soon and
OpenOffice will be usable on OS X (without requiring X) and I'll be
able to push my colleagues a bit harder.  I'm starting to develop an
argument that teaching teachers to use proprietary software when OSS
alternatives are available is irresponsible.  The trick is to do it
without sounding like a lunatic.

It's especially difficult because 10 years ago when I started using
LInux on my desktop, I was a lunatic.  I'm almost surprised to find
out that now I'm sane.  When my mom's computer was infected with some
unwanted piece of software that kept her antivirus software from
running, I moved her over to Fedora.  It's taken a while to get her
system tweaked, but I think we're about there.  And this time I know
that I won't have to re-do it in 3 months.  I really don't understand
how anyone uses Windows.
-- 
Jay Pfaffman                           <pfaffman at utk.edu>
Asst Professor of Instructional Technology, U. TN, Knoxville
Experimenting with gmail, please honor the Reply-To