Re: Apple Computers-collector's items?

[shoppa@alph02.triumf.ca (Tim Shoppa)]

In article <gabrielr-1208962039100001@ts35-11.wla.ts.ucla.edu>,
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. 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.

Sure, let's just teach our kids about specific software packages that'll
be obsolete in a couple of years.  Why bother teaching them things
that might be useful in something other than entry-level secretarial
jobs?  Concepts like program solving that you might learn writing
simple programs are, as we all know, useless in life.

>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.

It's my opinion that schools shouldn't teach specific
software packages as an end.  In the world of computers, most
any specific detail you might teach them will have changed by
the time they graduate.  So stick to the basics - things that
are universal.  Don't worry about what the specific platform 
or operating system is - in any programming environment there
are plenty of things to be learned and problems to be tackled.
And a student learns much more than a particular set of commands
or a specific programming languange in the process.  (Or, at least
they *should* learn much more in a well-thought-out course sequence).
As is often said: "It's the notion, not the notation!"

Tim. (shoppa@triumf.ca)