ubuntu-users Digest, Vol 24, Issue 154

[Alan Mckinnon]

On Wed, 2006-08-23 at 14:14 +0200, Alain Muls wrote:

> > But it's a constant uphill battle. The schools are, more and more,
> > locked into long-term, overpriced contracts to offer rented Windows
> > computers. None of the universities that my eldest daughter
> > investigated even offered Macs, and she's looking at *art* schools.
> > Geezum. It's enough to drive you to despair.
> 
> I totally agree with this opinion. It is a drill they need to reproduce 
> without thinking. 


It's the same way in my course room too :-) (I deliver Red Hat
training).

There's nothing wrong with rote drilling, especially with something like
which menu is the whatsitsname function on, s long as gthey grasp what a
menu is to begin with. I even go so far as to drill students on typical
installation/configuration - I want them to know httpd.conf the same way
their left foot knows the clutch. Again, it's understood that they do
comprehend what apache is all about - this step is often left out at
school

> And it is not unlike Alan replied in another message that 
> my eldest cannot use OpenOffice, he does btw since he has dutch spelling and 
> a dutch interface there, while Word/Excel is English and I do not have the 
> spelling dictionaries.

As it turns out I didn't fully grasp the situation you were describing
as to why your kids need to use Office. I thought they needed to submit
papers and homework and Office would be just another word processor.
Instead they are attending an MS Office 101 class...

> I hope it will change since Belgium recently adopted the open document format, 
> but I am afraid that there will be NO change in the educational system.
> 
> The teachres do not want to investigate in OpenOffice even if they get the 
> opportunity to distribute the exact same version, whatever OS, to ALL their 
> students. How is this in other countries?

It's no different in South Africa, we were discussing this last week on
the Open ICDL list - teachers are very resistant to changing to Open
Source apps. It's not that they are anti-OSS, it's more that they don't
want to change from the status quo. Frankly, they couldn't give a rat's
ass about the philosophy and politics of closed vs open source, they
have 30 or more kids to get through a program and a year to do it in. SO
asking them to change the IT platform is somewhat like someone
arbitrarily trying to get you to agree to move house to an equally
perfectly good one two blocks over, all for no benefit to you that you
can see. You'd resist it, same as the teachers are doing.

For the record, I'm an OSS zealot myself (one of the worst...) but I do
see the teachers point of view and understand why they say what they
say, even if I don;t agree with them

alan