[seul-edu] Re: perl or......

[Michael Totschnig <michaelt@supernet.ca>]

Manuel,

your arguments for Latex seem all very convincing for me, but only
because I already know Latex and use it. If we try to propose Latex
for education to teachers and students who are not familiar with it
yet, I think other arguments have to be chosen.  

Above all you cannot deny that Latex is not accesible for every
individual on its own, it needs an institutional context, like a local
user community that provides a well administered system, and helps in
the burdensome first steps in using Latex, and shows how to find the
necessary ressources for answering the questions you keep running into
even if you are already on an experienced level.  If this context is
given, I think Latex can be a very intersting tool in education,

- because it helps to learn principles of structured document
preparation
- because a local community can develop its classes of style, which
are then easily usable by everybody.
- because it helps to develop an ethics of computing based on open
standards of communication

For example educational computing provides many standardized text
genres like exams, homework, reviews of assigned readings. With Latex
an educational community can develop styles for this genres that
improve the logical and typographic quality of these documents.

Regards,

Michael

P.S.: By the way, I have followed the discussions here for some while
as an interested lurker. I am a Ph.D student in Montréal, Canada,
working on computer-mediated communication and interested in the use
of free software in higher education.