Re: Apple Computers-collector's items?

[tcompter@nyx.cs.du.edu (Thomas Compter)]

I'll contribute my own 2 cents here...
Gabriel Rossman (gabrielr@ucla.edu) wrote:
: 
: I don't care if its flamebait, I stick to my opinions and here's why.
: The "getting the job done" idea might work except that computer education
: is an end, not a mean, as schools don't have sufficient computers to use
: them for every subject.
Ahh, but computer education SHOULD be the means.  Children should
be taught to use computers as a TOOL that allows them to produce
higher quality work, (such as doing book reports with a word processor)
and to investigate quickly what would otherwise take hours of 
drudgework arithmetic (using a graphing spreadsheet) or to organize
information coherently(with a database).  

And by the way, if schools had spent their meager budgets on upgrading
and buying more Apple IIs, instead of blowing them on high-powered
MACs and PCs just to keep up with the Joneses, they could probably
 afford to put one on almost every student's desk!

: The fact is that a kid who knows that it takes 10
: minutes to initialize a disk, writes fluent BASIC, doesn't know what a
: hard drive is, and has never heard of MS Word or Excel is going to find
: that the skills he learned in school have little to no use in the real
: world.
: Just as it would be idiotic for UC Davis to teach it's students to do
: everything with a hoe, when they'll be using combines, airplanes, and
: trucks in real life agriculture, its stupid to teach kids BASIC and
: appleworks when they'll be using Windows, Mac, or Unix and GUI suite
: software in the real world.

Sorry, but that's just plain bullshit. A kid that can build a 
spreadsheet in Appleworks can build one in Excel.  A kid that learned
what a database is for by using Appleworks can put together 
an Access database in a matter of minutes.  And most importantly,
a kid who has written a few basic programs, and thus understands
HOW a program works, and who incidently can think logically and in 
an ordered fashion, is likely to be FAR more successful in the 'real'
world than a kid who got 1/2 hour per week cruising the web with
Netscape in his school's computer lab. 

And by the way, all of my Apple IIs have Hard Drives.  See above
about budgets and upgrading.


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