Re: [seul-edu] Another threat

[Cameron Miller <cdmiller@adams.edu>]

Ed Lawson wrote:
> On Mon, 13 May 2002 14:14:50 -0700
> "Kevin Stiles" <kstiles@pasco.wednet.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
>>With this in place it will be extremely difficult for any
>>alternative software to get into our schools.
>>
> 
> I could not tell from the sites what was being required, but it did
> mention other Office Suites such as those of Word Perfect and Lotus.
> 
> Nevertheless, the purpose of many classes in high school business
> departments is to prepare students to work in the exisitng office
> environment by training them to use specific tools which are found
> there.  Until that changes it is unlikely anyone is going to train
> them on Open Office or whatever.  It might be a more  realistic goal
> to get schools to use AbiWord or Open Office in the lower grades
> where the instruction should be on concepts, etc. as opposed to
> teaching tools.
> 
> Ed Lawson
> 

Huh? Till recently the closest thing I had heard of to a "high school 
business department" was typing class and the junior achievement club. 
The only computer classes were math related introductory programming 
courses.  If you were lucky you got to use a word processor from your 
folks office to do papers instead of the old portable typewriter.  The 
brand of word processor was completely unknown to the teacher.

Now we have high school courses running training programs for office 
software, apparently trying to compete with vocational schools.  And I 
thought that situation was confined to the college level.  Whatever 
happened to learning to read and think well enough to simply RTFM?  A 
brave new world.

A small disclaimer, I am not a professional educator so I may be a bit 
disconnected from the current reality of public secondary education.

- cameron
-- 
- cameron miller
- UNIX Systems Administrator
- cdmiller@adams.edu