Re: Linux in education advocacy side Re: Edutainment

[Roman Suzi <rnd@sampo.karelia.ru>]

On Tue, 8 Dec 1998, Duane Morin wrote:

>> A major fallacy in today's computer culture is that graphical user
>> interfaces are the *only* way to present information to the user.  There
>> are many users who find GUI's cumbersome and non-intuitive. 
>
>Coming from the generation of hacker kids that learned his way around the
>machine by programming assembly, I agree completely!  I cringe everytime I 
>hear a friend of my mom's tell me, "Oh, my grandson is into computers just
>like you were!"  Yeah, except he's clicking a mouse and I was coding Lisp.

I just worry about grandgrandson. Will it be into computers  by
some brain implanted  electrod  and  even  mouse  will  not  be
needed, only desires?
It will be really "into computers" then...

And absolutely easy.

>Personally I think that many(most?) kids have got the potential to learn 
>whatever you put in front of them.  For some reason our expectations are 
>shrinking.  Parents say "Don't teach my kids concepts, just teach them the 
>buzzwords they need to get into college [or get a job]."  Don't use Pascal as 
>a teaching language anymore, teach Java.  And so on.  Don't teach word 
>processing, teach MS Word.  <shudder>

Don't they ask 'teach Linux' or 'Open Source' yet? ;-)

>Personally, I'm more of a natural language fan.  I seriously believe that the
>technology and the interface will always come down to meet the user, and that
>the more important goal is to teach what to *do* with the machine.  Teach word
>processing in a writing course, not a word processing course.  Teach spreadsheets in a statistics or accounting course, not a spreadsheeting course.

In fact, I don't agree.
I think there must be computer science in the school  and  also
some kind of "computing basics", so statistics teacher will not
spend time teaching kids how to work with a spreadsheet, and so
on.


Sincerely yours,
Roman A. Suzi

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