[K12OSN] Which Windows apps stand in the way of Linux use at your school?

[Petre Scheie]

Have you shown them GimpShop?  (Not that it would do any good, from the sounds of it).

One question we, of my school's technical advisory committee, have been kicking around 
for the past year or so is what we should be teaching kids, within the context of 
computers, to give them the skills to not just get jobs, but to be able to create jobs, 
create new companies.  The discussion was inspired by "The World is Flat" by Thomas 
Friedman (who is from our city, coincidently), which some of you may be familiar with. 
The book's premise--as I understand it; I haven't read it--is the question of how do you 
create and keep good jobs in your community when seemingly most any technical job can be 
done overseas for less money?

If your kids are only learning how to click on things, those skills can be easily 
replaced by someone somewhere else who will do it for a lot less money.  If, on the 
other hand, your kids learn about computing by working with tools they can 'take apart', 
change, and share, they'll have a skillset of knowing how to build things, not just use 
them.  Knowing how to build a house is a more valuable skill than how to live in a house 
or than how to clean a house.

Back to GimpShop: The value of GimpShop is not just that it provides a free tool for 
people coming from PhotoShop, but that it also demonstrates how OSS can be modified by 
anyone to fill a need.  It also demonstrates how none of us is as strong as all of us: 
The GimpShop mod was originally done on a Mac; someone else took the code and compiled 
it for Linux; another person ported it to Windows.  OSS allows us to teach kids that 
they can control their own destiny.

Petre


Terrell Prudé wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-10-03 at 10:09 -0700, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> 
>>On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 08:10:32AM -0400, Terrell Prudé, Jr. wrote:
>>> In no particular order, here are the major apps that I know about that
>>> our schools use.  Any one of these is, sadly, considered to be a show-
>>> stopper.
>>> 
>><snip>
>>> - KidPix
>>> - Adobe Photoshop
>><snip>
>>
>>Any reason Tux Paint and Gimp aren't suitable replacements for you?
>>
>>-bill!
>>
> 
> Yes.  Because the administrators and management won't allow them to be.  
> Sadly, the teachers are complicit in this lunacy.
> 
> --TP
> 
> 
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