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Application-Centricity in Our Schools?
bccomm asks: "Here on Slashdot, we continually hear about new successes in bringing free software closer to the desktop. What about schools? I am a student and was once asked to redo an entire presentation because I had used Prosper instead of PowerPoint. The explanation I received from him was 'the curriculum says I'm supposed to teach Word, PowerPoint, etc, not word processing and presentations.' How is this for irony: presentation has to be about volunteer work/hobbies, and I chose to show that my computer runs a daily NetBSD snapshot. I think it just lost some effectiveness. Is anyone else bothered by this?"
... as stupid as this sounds, if the project were to be done using Word and Powerpoint about your hobbies, you should have at least made the attempt to make it look like you did it on Word and Powerpoint, regardless of your personal viewpoints. The easiest would have been to put it in an MS compatible format when you were doing it so that you could display and turn in what you had to in a form that the teacher would have liked. Being an ex-tutor, there were some stupid things I had to adhere by and one of them was that all electronic documents had to be in an MS readable format for some of the courses (they were A+, Net+, and MCSE courses). Now, being the Linux tutor also, when it came time for things to be done at home (research, projects, etc) the only thing my students had to adhere to was keeping the documents in MS readable formats so that other tutors could review if necessary. This kept everyone happy as they got to work in what they wanted (Linux, BSD, OS/2, Winwhatever, etc) and still kept with course guidelines.
CliffH
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
I, too, have run into this type of problem, although the explanation is usually a compatability issue. "How can I get a copy of this on my computer when all the school supplies is PowerPoint." With so many students it's hard for teachers (especially in subjects outside of technology) to 1) have heard about OpenSource technology 2) have the time install OpenSource projects.
Also, many of my teachers like to distribute the student's presentations later online so that all of the students can view them again, it's also nice for students who were absent. Conflicting formats make this difficult.
You can look at it as indoctrination if you wish, however, I do see a lot of convenience issues that go along with all of this.
In my line of work no one cares if you used power point, or a pointy stick and little dots of colored ink on a membrane of transparent plastic to make a presentation. The end result is what matters. Often you get the idiots that ask "Hey, this dinner was great! You must use really great pots and pans!" Those in education must learn to make their corsework reflect the needs of the real world. Whatever the best tool is for the job, that's what needs to be used. Be it a Micro$oft product or opensource...who cares, as long as the results are what the customer wants. PERIOD.
This guy (assuming a guy) should be praised for using the tools at hand to get the job done. PERIOD.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
So, let me get this straight, you run BSD, and you need to take a class on how to use PowerPoint? Are you some kind of idiot savant, leet enough to grok the command line, but with a crippling mental block that keeps you from being able to intuit your way through what 99% of computerdom considers an easily guessable user interface?
Many opinionated people would say, perhaps prejudicially, that the job of any teaching institution that is not explicitly a vocational/technical training program is to teach principles and not isolated methods; that a good curriculum implements goals which could be accomplished to equal effect with many different tools; that in the rapidly changing landscape of the computer world, such a teaching approach is the only one that's likely to have any serious long-term benefit to students; and that the presence or absence in the curriculum of restrictions to specific applications, OSes, and programming languages is actually good indicator of the quality of a program.
As it happens, I am such a person. Give these bozos hell.
(potentially offensive blanket statements follow) I found that in High School, doing better work that required independent thought even though it was not assigned was, in almost every case, not understood and often treated critically. In my experience, at the University the opposite was true. The example above is perfect because it illustrates how, in some cases, following the instructions is more important than actually learning. I never followed instructions well either and my high school grades show it.
-Sean
I've noticed this, too. For handed-in projects which the stupid/clueless/pressed-for-time instructor must open, I try to do a final-pass export to the requested format. Sometimes I've been able/allowed to use PDFs for papers, but mostly I just export to .doc whenever requested. I'm the computer god, I can be the one who worries about formats.
I never, ever use the requested application if I can help it (Access can import and mysql can export, you know...). But that doesn't mean I'm obnoxious about it.. I only mention what I used to the instructors smart enough to not mark me down for it. If they can stand a little mild advocacy, I do that then.
My advice to you: suck it up, export to powerpoint.
I want my Cowboyneal
Yeah, and I wish my neighbors would clean up after their dogs, too.
It's hard to know what to make of your particular issue, since you left out such details as what the subject of the class is. But even giving you the full benefit of the doubt -- there are going to be things in life that are done in a less than optimal way, and your needing to do a presentation in a perfectly appropriate application instead of some new thing you found on Sourceforge is hardly the worst case you'll encounter.
Just be glad they didn't make you do it in Excel.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
A lot of people only know how to use applications. For them, the application's interface is the program - that is what they see, know, and understand. The operation of the machine is summed up in that interaction.
In a school environment, you have to look at the practical picture. What are you trying to achieve by working with these programs? Are you teaching examples of GUI driven tools, the effectiveness of slideshow presentations, how to type, etc? Most of these courses are designed to teach students how to use their computer. This often translates into "how to do task-x with y-program on a computer".
Since Powerpoint is the widespead example and definition of a slideshow app, it seems logical to use Powerpoint and not another program. Forcing one app over another shows a lack of understanding on the institution's part (try not to blame the teacher) if the end result is the same. If students learn how to make slideshow presentations effectively, isn't that the goal? If this is Microsoft Office training, the end result is not entirely the same. Also, there are technicalities with different apps which might make the teacher exert more effort just to accomodate a few students. I am not saying this is bad/good, but I can understand wanting to do things one way, even with sacrifices.
It all depends on what the goals of the course actually are, vs. the specifics of how to reach the goals. Too many institutions and teachers are hung up about the "how" and stress formula or rule compliance to achieve their goals. In essence, they have lost the purpose of education - not conformity, but developement (i.e. improvement). OTOH, some teachers have found the extreme opposite.
Frankly, national governments in countries which have education branches should embrace open source. No reason why OpenOffice cannot be improved a little (a few less bugs, maybe a few more features) by government funds at least. The pay off is software which has no license fees and can be easily extended and ported. The software could be used in other places like libraries and government offices as well.
Education should be stressing alternatives rather than catering to the business world's trends. I understand that getting a job means you need experience in certain applications - courses for specific apps have their place. But in general education, especially requirements, the end result should be learning how to use a computer, not simply how to use $PROGRAM on a $CURRENT_YEAR computer running $OS. Sometimes these two goals are the same, but we should not assume that is always the case.
While I'd prefer an open classroom where everyone has the freedom to perform a task with the tools they can acquire, I also have to sympathize with the teacher, who has to teach and mark in an even-handed manner, without necessarily prejudicing either the technically gifted or the technically challenged.
I'd suggest to the poster to ask the teacher if he (not the teacher) can give a half or whole class session on the software he was using, so that others can know that there is always an alternative software available for those who are willing and able to use it. Planting that seed of knowledge is worth more than any immediate restriction in knowledge.
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
Remember WordPerfect? Actually when I was a kid it was WordStar, but I never used it, since we had Apple 2s in school, and Atari (400) at home. Whatever word processer those systems used is what I used, when I wasn't useing pen and paper.
By the time I reached high school they were braging about the computer labs which taught WordPerfect 5.1, which was exactly what industry was using.
Then came college and MSWord was on all the non-unix systems. I used that when I had to. More often I used Emacs, or when I needed something more complex FrameMaker was on the Unix systems, and I generally spent most of my time writing programs for Unix so I was on them anyway.
Then I got into the real world and I only had an X terminal on my desk so it was FrameMaker. Eventially they switched us to Outlook for email, but it was done via Citrix, and Word was avaiable there. There I mostly used either whatever was built into the tools we used (a code generation package) or ed. (yes ed, when you telnet to a system without curses you use ed)
At the next job it was gvim on windows. I had MSWord though, and sometimes had to use it. Standard was to export everything to rtf before distribution, though I'm the onlyone who actually did that. Likely as close to the real world as I've ever been.
Today I'm unemployed (though I might be called back to the last job if they find more money). I don't have MSWord, and see no reason to buy it. I have kWord and it works great. I have vi, and it works fine. I also have emacs, though I haven't touched it in a long time, and OpenOffice which I just installed cause some potential employer sent me a word document.
In short, they will make you learn something. Learn it because that is what you have to work with. In the real world exactly what you use will change, so be ready to learn new things.
At my university (ewu.edu) every student is required to take a computer "literacy" (more like computer penmanship, I think) test to prove that they are computer literate.
Not only is this test MS product specific (PeePee, MS Worse, Eksell...) it is specific to the point where questions ask the student to do tasks using specific mouse clicks (or so I'm told - I'm doing my best to avoid the whole area myself) and the exam software won't let you do it in any other way.
And CS students can't graduate till they pass it. They can be expert coders in C, know low level OS internals, whatever - but if they can't get the right sequence of mouse clicks in MS worse to change a font (or whatever) they won't get that piece of paper.
It very much depends on what the course is called, though. Although the "curriculum" states Word & Powerpoint, we don't know whether the course title is that or id it's "Word processing and Presentations". So the OP may not have taken a course that was titles "Microsoft Office", but was then told that that's all he could use.
The centre where I'm currently doing IT Support teaches "Computer Literacy" classes. There's nothing in the actual course titles about Microsoft Products. (Yes, I know some places offer "introduction to Powerpoint", but that's not the type of course that gets taught here.)
But the course material itself not only is based around MS Office, but seems to assume/imply that this way is the only way to use wordprocessors/spreadsheets/etc.
Plus, to make it worse, course materials always seem to be printed using the lastest version of Office on the latest version of Windows. And rather than teaching/examining, say, "Spreadsheets", they're doing it on "Excel from office XP under Windows XP".
We even have the worst-case-extrapolation in some of the exams. In that the expected results as taught by the course are not what you get on our hardware. And we're not in a position to mass-upgrade.
One of the Computer Literacy exams was so XP-centric, that the results gained under Windows 98 simply didnt tally. I ended up going through the mark-scheme with the tutor to get a consistent set of answers that would arise under our classroom setup when following the instructions to the letter.
The course is supposed to be teaching "Computer Literacy", dammit. Yes, I know you have to have a basic direction from which to teach things, but you can't really automatically assume that everyone will run the software that you mandate. Especially if you're a nationwide examinations body, you can not assume that every centre everywhere will have upgraded to the "next big thing" (or even "next best thing") yet.
TiggsTiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."