On 2003-12-05 17:27:05 +0000 Stuart Hammond stuman_uk_42@hotmail.com wrote:
I think the idea of the government using OSS (eg Linux OS) on school desktop computers is slightly narrow sighted for education is there to allow people to go forth and gain employment
How is general education meant to do that, though? It's not meant to be about learning specific tool skills: that's apprenticeship and vocational education. Any specific computer tools taught now are likely to be very obsolete by the time today's 10-year-olds join the workforce. That's even more true when you remember that school systems are often 3 years old before upgrade. What workplaces are using now is pretty irrelevant.
General education is meant to be about education in general. If they can work input devices and have the general concepts about different types of storage (permanent, volatile), processes, communication and so on, then they have general computing education. Working a specific word processor really won't be that complicated if they have the basic concepts and its interface is good.
So how do you spin this out into years of study without going into programming skills, ergonomics and so on? Don't teach them too many general concepts. Teach them specific applications and let them guess at the general things. There's always another specific application to teach and they'll screw up because they guessed the wrong underlying concepts.
Really, using the best value tools for general computing education instead of trying to mimic businesses will free up money for education. I expect we can all think of some uses for it. It will also help our businesses. Some of them use Microsoft products simply because that's all the new employees have been taught. That is: their employees are not sufficiently educated to adapt! (in their opinion) It's more expensive to generalise a vocation education than to specialise a general one. They're not the general education service, after all.