Re: [seul-edu] linux.com and cnet cover seul-edu

[Jan Hlavacek <jhlavacek@sf.edu>]

On Tue, Mar 07, 2000 at 09:55:12PM -0500, Roger R Dingledine wrote:
> http://www.linux.com/articles.phtml?sid=93&aid=7582
> appears to have a lot of discussion starting about linux in education.

This is very interesting.  It seems to me that a lot of the
contributions confirm what I repeated several times already,  and what I
am going to repeat again :).  Teacher preparation.  Most of our future
teachers learn how to use windows,  and that's what they will want to
use whan they get to classrooms.  It is very nice that we try to
introduce linux into our schools,  but we cannot stop there.  We need to
introduce linux into colleges and universities.  The funny thing is that
that is basically where linux originated.  But lot of colleges, and
especially ecducation departments, are now dominated by microsoft.  In
general,  I think the teacher preparation as far as computers are
concerned is pretty poor.  Part of it is that it is mostly done the
wrong way:  people learn how to use some specific (microsoft, usually)
applications to do administrative tasks,  instead learning how computers
work, what they can do to help us teach, and how to use them in a
creative way.  This problem doesn't really have anything to do with
linux, except that the open source model can probably help a lot in
solving it.  Maybe there should be some organization, something like
seul/edu, which would somehow coordinate efforts in improving teacer
computer preparation.

-- 
Jan Hlavacek                                            (219) 434-7566
Department of Chemistry                               Jhlavacek@sf.edu
University of Saint Francis               http://199.8.81.3/Jhlavacek/