--- E Lea <ed@centralmanclc.com> wrote:
Thomas Adam wrote:
I cannot comment from a teaching point of view, but I certainly feel that Microsoft do have a de facto dominance in schools.
This is not something that is generally school specific
I am 20 and throughout all my school life (and even now at University), everything we do one computers (or have done), has been centred around Microsoft. We are almost forced to use it, and given no alternative unless we go and look for one.
Bringing school children into IT (as is the government's initiative) means that they should be made aware of Linux,
I disagree. I don't think forcing Linux onto school children is going to help anything. Reducing the problem down to the common Linux advocacy arguement of Windows == Bad, Linux == Good is misguided. For children to be
You mis-understand me. I never said "force", I meant school children should be made *aware* of the alternative.
truely IT aware their awareness needs to be platform independent; and I don't mean teach them all Java. There are so many more platforms out there than Windows and Linux. A lot of people in the Linux world are (and have been for many years) predicting that Windows can't carry on as we know it much longer, and in the next 15 years or less won't exist at all. Whether this is true or not it would be arrogant to assume that Linux will exist in its place.
I agree, but that observation is mere speculation, and deviates from the original question at hand :)
I agree that making children aware of Linux is a good thing, but chosing Linux purely for the sake of Linux is not the solution. Ideally IT would be taugh in schools at some abstract level giving children a skills set they can apply to what ever platform is put in front of them.
Indeed, but the converse of this is true in that MS is *the* de facto OS in most of the schools I have seen.
Obviously that's not going to happen and as things stand it probably is true that Linux is the best, non-Microsoft alternative for the classroom
That is by-the-by. -- Thomas Adam
I cannot stress to you just how annoyed I am when even now some of my lecturers at University stipulate categorically that they want our assignments in MS-Word format. It is a farce -- and to think that I am doing a degree in Software Engineering. You'd think that they'd expand your knowledge of computer OS's.
I find this very surprising indeed. Which University do you go to?
===== Thomas Adam "The Linux Weekend Mechanic" -- www.linuxgazette.com ________________________________________________________________________ Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/