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Old Software or Open Source?
Pakled writes "I teach a high school multimedia course. We were scheduled to get new software this year but due to several pointy haired bosses, no software was ordered. The software I have to teach is Flash 5, Dreamweaver 2000, Photoshop 7 and (god help me) Movie Maker. The question is: is it better to teach old commercial software or their open source counterparts (Komposer, Gimp, etc.)?
Is the steep learning curve and slightly less uniform design worth a little student frustration to teach them software written in the past 5 years?"
Yes, next question?...
In my opinion, a gathering of both would be far better... I mean, realistically in the commercial world, it tends to be the "high flyers" which companies go for, (Photoshop, Flash etc) however, teaching students the opensrouce alternatives, gives them a better feel for newer software, and shows them how adaptions have been made.
Well, is a little of both an option? For some of them at least. Flash 5 is almost a completely different program from the modern versions of flash, the actionscript has changed almost entirely, and the layout is very different. The other legacy programs still have *some* semebelence to their newer versions, so letting them get their feet wet might be a good idea. However, you can present it in a way "this is what photoshop looked like a couple years ago and it still looks pretty similar. Due to restrictions we can't show you a current copy, however here is a free alternative called gimp that can do all of the same things, and you can play with it at home!"
Although Gimp resembles Photoshop it isn't the same. Some skills are transferable but if you are teaching graphic design it's silly to teach anything other then what industry uses. It means they must relearn many skills once they enter the job market. If your teaching at a higher more theoretical level then it might be acceptable because more of it transfers. But if it's a trades school or technical college you're better off teaching the actual industry tools regardless of cost.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Refuse to teach the class citing insufficient materials. The software required is not there, so you can't do it.
Then give everyone a copy of gimp and ubuntu anyway.
The question is: is it better to teach old commercial software or their open source counterparts (Komposer, Gimp, etc.)?
What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to teach them design or are you trying to train them in the use of software programs to accomplish any old goal?
If you're trying to teach them design principles in general, then I don't see what the difference is between outdated commercial software and their OSS counterparts. If you're trying to teach them to use software skills in software packages they are likely to see in the real world/college after graduation then that's not the best way to go about it.
If you're trying to teach both, I really don't know what to tell you. Probably retool a bit to put more emphasis on the design part and less on the use of specific software. Design skills change but not like specific software needs.
Good luck.
Dumb question. This is /.
Use whatever software allows you to teach the concepts to your students in the easiest manner. The tools change much faster than the concepts so don't fret too much about which tool to use. Whichever one is easier for you to use and teach with, use that
No wonder why the dropout rates are so high!
How about a sheet of paper, and get this: pen AND pencil.
I would use both. The Open Source stuff is not too bad and increasingly used. Having one (painful) session with the old stuff will mean they will not be shocked when they are face to face with it in the workplace.
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Gimp clearly cannot compare with Photoshop, and you'd be hard pressed to find Gimp in any professional office. If these students intend to find work with their skills, then Photoshop by far is the best option of the two.
it doesn't matter, just don't teach them the program, but teach them what the program does.
It doesn't matter if its gimp or photoshop, just as long as you know what the diffrent between ansharpen mask, blur and gaussian blur is.
Is this vocational training, or are you trying to teach them how the software works? If you're doing future-job-training, then you have little choice but to teach what they would be expected to know in the workforce. You won't be doing them a favor by giving them obscure and not-in-demand skills. Older versions of commercial software are largely the same, as vendors don't rewrite from scratch, they generally just add new features. However, if you want them to learn how a graphics filter works, using open-source software is obviously a huge advantage. Why not expose them to both?
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It's probably worth teaching the students on a selection of software, concentrating on "how to get stuff done" rather than on what particular apps to use.
People who were only taught a single app for a single purpose often have problems adjusting to other programs, they don't understand what features to look for but rather just where to look for them which ofcourse falls over if the software changes, even between different versions of the same application.
It's also worth considering, even if you teach the most up to date and widely used software today... A lot can change very quickly in software, the apps you teach may not be used anymore when your students go out into the world of work, or there may be much newer versions in use. Conversely, many companies keep using even older versions of apps because they still get the job done.
So basically teach the widest selection of apps you can, explain the differences and similarities and focus on the job that needs doing rather than the tools for doing it. Also for anything that is open/free provide your students with a copy of it so they can take it home.
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"Good" students should learn how to learn a variety of applications to accomplish a variety of goals. That way they are comfortable when Version++ appears, some future innovation spawns a new application category, or they work someplace that uses nonstandard IT. Mediocre students should learn the least number of "the magic incantations" that make the dominant vendor's application do the job.
Get whatever (including open source) for the first group and get Genuine Microsoft/Adobe stuff for the second group.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Oh come on. Is PS7 really that different than more recent versions? Not really. Better to teach them on old commercially viable software, where there is a real market for the skillset. Very very few people get hired for their skills with the Gimp.
As an instructor who does have access to the latest and greatest commercial programs (like Adobe creative suite) I would suggest the open source route (at least w.r.t photoshop/Gimp, Dreamweaver/NVU). That will allow your students to lawfuly download the software for home, and still learn the underlying techniques and skills you are trying to teach.
That being said, for employment the students need to list the latest trends that the phbs all over the world recognize. Transitioning from Gimp -> CS3 or PS7-> CS3 will take about the same amount of time IMO.
So perhaps introduce both types of software, and then utilize the one that is best.
How about teaching your students the principles of what they are going to do, so that (with some acclimatization) they can adapt to any software within the category you've taught.
For instance, as far as image editing is concerned, it would be nice to talk about brushes and layers, and filters, all the while showing that while different software can have various options, located in various menus, the work can be accomplished on either, as long as the person knows exactly what they are trying to do.
That way, your students would be more than just click-monkeys, who know little more than what sequence of buttons to push according to a flowchart.
Because otherwise they will wind up like our Pathology department administrator who, when I suggested that to save the school tens of thousands of dollars a year they should use OpenOffice and discontinue the MSOffice site license, turned to me and asked: "But without MSOffice, how will our people do any work?"
Just out of spite, what would be the free/opensource alternative?
Multimedia course in high school, just great~
Anywho...Are you teaching them how to use tools or how to get a job?
I think OS is better because it tends to teach the theory, and it saves school a bucket load of cash. If you goal is to make cogs, go with what you have. If your goal is to make people who can think and achive a high standered, go OS.
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I would go with the OpenSource. It is free (mostly as in beer) and there is generally great community support. You could trial it for a year and if it fails then go back to the old software..
The biggest hurdle in open source software imo is getting people out of their comfort zone in order to use it.
In saying that I am slightly bias as I disagree with people using the likes dreamweaver for anything other than RAD. Better to code by hand, you learn more. The number of people I have using dreamweaver/contribute that come to me with problems that they could have solved if they had even a basic understanding of HTML.
A lot of apps have OS counterparts that do the job as well or better.
Even in work I use OOo instead of MS Office while everyone else uses MS office.
Is the goal to teach them the principles of the software they'll be using, or is it to teach them how to use a certain program? If it's the first, then either should do the job equally well (assuming they're both capable of exemplifying the principles you intend to teach). If it's the latter, then you should clearly use the software that's already there. The next question is one of support--who will be installing/supporting the software? If it's someone else, have you discussed installing OSS on the machines with them? And are you expecting them to troubleshoot issues for you when something goes wrong? Having run a computer lab, there's nothing worse than someone coming along saying "I want to teach this program" and then constantly coming back to you saying "Figure out these issues for me, because I don't know how to troubleshoot." It's not a problem if you're given a chance to use the software for a while beforehand and catch up on the issues/fixes in various forums. But when it's just thrown in your lap, it can be a royal pain.
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How old is the hardware? Something to keep in mind is that an older version of Photoshop may run better on older hardware than the latest version of Gimp.
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to Movie Maker. There is nothing anywhere near that simple to use or basic. The few projects I know of (kdenlive, avidemux) are still overkill by comparison.
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I'd hope the class is more about how to use software than it is about how to use this software and, as such, I'd use whichever software you're more comfortable with. If you already have notes and lessons planned around the existing, old software, use that. If you have to make new notes anyway, why not introduce your class to the world of Open Source?
Ian
The older software will be your best bet - why? Many places still use older versions of the industry standards. It wasn't until recently that my place of employment upgraded to CS2 on every primary production machine - some machines still had Photoshop 6, and I think we've got one with 5.5 still that some sales reps use (this is at a newspaper). Second, the UI will still be relatively uniform and familiar in subsequent versions.
It sucks, but better to teach them something they are more likely to encounter in some version or another. Don't hesitate to introduce them to open-source alternatives, but keep in mind that they will rarely be used in a professional environment (cue flames here - I'm an open source user myself, but I have yet to encounter any place that uses The GIMP in any sort of professional high volume production)
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Why not teach students how
- to think along procedural and functional lines
- to consider the information in the abstract
- to decompose the system and troubleshoot the gazintas and the gazoutas
- to RTFM and search the web when the politician hits the fan
- to calmly view ideas that one finds objectionable (Creationism, proprietary licensing)
- to implement sound practices (version control, unit testing)
Binding the conversation to specific software versions seems a cop-out.Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
If you teach them how to do things without teaching them how any one particular application works then the learning curve won't be nearly as bad, and they'll be far more proficient when they go to a new job with a different peice of software and they can just 'pick it up' since you've taught them how to think more about what they're trying to accomplish. If they really know what they are trying to accomplish, figuring out how to get the tool help them do it is a lot less difficult.
Most people learn how to make a peice of software do a few specific things and then call themselves graphics artists. They usually end up working at McDonalds after they get out of school as well. Since they aren't really capable of being graphics artists, they just know how to use XXX application to do a few things.
Along with this line of thaught, you can use both open source and commercial software to teach them. You can show them exactly how bad a user interface can be by letting them use Gimp, then show them the same bad UI design in commercial software by using MovieMaker.
Jokes aside, if they don't get tied to a specific tool/software package, they will benifit more from your lessons than if all you do is teach Photoshop/DreamWeaver 101.
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You should be teaching them what the industry dictates, surely. With the exception of The GIMP, I don't think you've got much choice. If you're teaching them the older versions, it's likely to be more useful to them if they later on get work in the industry that use the newer versions of that software. As opposed to them learning a different GUI, and potentially different software-based concepts.
Not entirely sure this is the best place to be asking, anyway.
ilovegeorgebush
It's obvious. Teach them the open source alternatives. Is your job to teach *interfaces* or *skills*? Teaching the skills required to do a half-decent job in video editing, web-design, and image-editing is a greater problem than how to navigate a particular interface. Teach the kids how to look at what they are designing, how to interpret the results of their actions and how to adjust those actions to get the results they want. *Those* skills will carry them much farther than learning a particular interface.
So, that said, it doesn't really matter which platform you use as much as it matters that it is an available platform that they can easily (and legally?) get their hands on. When I was taking programming classes back in '86-87, one of the most frustrating issues was that while we had Pascal at school (Apple ][e's) we didn't have it at home (mix of C-64's and trash-80's). That meant that whatever we learned in school had to be translated into something else to use outside of school.
hmm... now that I think about it, maybe that was a good thing. Whatever. Anyway, the platform the kids can get their hands on to use outside of school, legally, would be the open source ones. This is based on the assumption that not *all* the kids are in a position to just go out and buy/crack Photoshop...
man, I feel like mold.
What is meant by pointy haired boss? Is this a reference to Dilbert?
I'd vote for teaching the newer software whether it was open source or not.
How to perform a specific function (the menus/keystrokes/whatever) will most certainly change over the years - if you know "what" and to do and "why" you are doing it, then figuring out "how" to do it shouldn't have that steep a learning curve
Personally I'm still waiting on the computer I can give voice commands to...
Dear Choir:
I teach a high school theology course. We were scheduled to get new books this year but due to several pointy haired bosses, no books were ordered. The books I have to teach are (god help me) pagan scrolls from the 3rd century BC. The question is: is it better to teach old religions or their open text counterparts (Christianity, Hinduism, etc)? Is the steep learning curve and slightly less uniform world view worth a little damnation to teach them religion founded in the past 5000 years?
At least with the Open Source software, you can easily give your students a way to use them outside of class and continue to use and grow their knowledge.
With the commercial software, especially the packages you mentioned, the costs are prohibitive for high school students. So, they would get started in your class, then have no easy way to continue learning or put it to practical use.
I would try to stick with software that has good multi-platform support, including Windows support, so students can easily run it without installing Linux on their parents' computer. Or, if not, work from a Linux LiveCD environment, which the kids can replicate at home.
And, if the open source alternative doesn't measure up, stick with some commercial software and do a mixed class. It doesn't have to be either/or.
Seriously: if you can find a F/OSS package that's analogous to Flash in behaviour and output, then yes, by all means, teach them the F/OSS stuff - they'll learn to think outside the GUI, which will do them no end of good. If, however, you can't find a suitable replacement, then don't. Flash 5 is not even remotely appropriate any more - it bears little to no resemblance to the current versions of Flash. Photoshop 7 is fine, although the layering method has changed a bit: you can now nest them, as well as play about with layer comps, which you can't do in pre-CS versions. Dreamweaver - well, do you really need to ask? As for Movie Maker: you can download a free version of Avid, or try and get hold of Kino or something along those lines. Teaching them Movie Maker will not do anyone any favours.
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Photoshop 7 is still close enough to CS2 and CS3 that honestly, translating from one to the other isn't much problem. Also, although PS7 is old it's still very powerful and very useful. The learning curve fropm PS7 to PS CS3 will take maybe a week for most people to make the transition -- but GIMP and PS CS3 are like two different planets.
They're letting you make the decision? Woah. Most places I can think of would have mandated a set of standard applications. Granted you didn't get the applications you should have got, but you still have the previous standard ones, so I'd be surprised if you weren't required to use them.
However, if you really do have the choice, I would definitely at least *show* the alternate apps to your students. Preferably, teach them how to use both sets of apps, and emphasise how they do things differently -- It's a very powerful learning tool to see how two different apps achieve the same goals; it makes your students think about what the goals are and thus getting a deeper understanding of what the software is actually doing, rather than just learning a single app parrot fashion, where they may learn how to do specific tasks, but never get the ability to imagine what else is possible.
Since you are talking about highschool and not college, I'd say go with the open source option and touch on the older versions of the commercial software. Here's why...
-If they find that they enjoy what you are teaching, knowing an open source (and FREE) software tool will make it easy for them to continue tinkering with it at home. They can download the same tool they used in the classroom and continue to hone their skills at home if that really is their area of interest/career path. In the end, it's their eye and talent as an artist that will determine if their career at this early stage, learning the software is secondary. Practice is key. Chances are a student can't afford a legal copy of Photoshop for their home computer.
-Odds are that it will be a few years before they get into the working world anyway, so even if the school board gave you the latest versions of the commercial software, chances are that what they end up using in the working world will be several versions in the future anyway.
- Once you've learned one tool, it's usually easy to learn another of the same type. Like learning programming languages. Once you have the basics, the icons for the tools and the menus are trivial.
- Many artists do freelance work when they are first trying to break into the graphic design/art world. Knowing a free tool will keep their costs down.
- It will help support the free/open source software movement, and make them aware of the wide variety of awesome free/open apps available to them.
- Many employers even if they provide a commercial graphics program, will allow you to install and use your own preferred tool if it's free/legal/legit/compatible.
- Giving them an additional taste of the old version commercial software you have will mean they've been exposed to two different tools- an advantage in the long run. Choice is good.
Yes, it is worth it to use open-source alternatives. It's a waste of opportunity when a course that is actually a training course for specific applications is misnamed with a more general term. I remember way back when taking an 'digital composition' university course that was by all rights simply several weeks of Finale! training.
Not only is open source entirely suitable for an academic environment, but any interface shortcomings will allow/force you to focus on the actual fundamentals of, as you put it, multimedia. (I didn't see any audio app mentioned.)
Which course would be more useful in the long run: one that focuses on the novelty features and interface of the latest commercial applications, or one that focuses on the design process in general and treats the apps as the tools they are rather than main focus of the course? Learning how to learn unfamiliar applications is far more valuable than developing overly-specific fluency with a few of the latest.
And yes, they might actually use these skills. I took a desktop publishing class for fun in high school and learned to use PageMaker. I then got a job during college that involved creating publicity materials for an academic department (flyers for events, etc) in PageMaker, and from there got a job doing layout at a local paper also in PM. And no, I'm not a graphic design major or anything - I was a cognitive science major and am now in a PhD program, but layout is a hobby of mine (and possibly the only visual art-type-thing at which I have any skill). And that newspaper job paid much better than anything else I could have gotten at the time.
If some of the other open-source programs are more similar to the standard clossed-source ones, they might be valid alternatives. Or you could let them explore with both programs (for example, more advanced students might be able to do projects comparing the capabilities of two different programs).
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Yes, the percentage of your class that will be in the industry will be using Photoshop and Dreamweaver (although those programs will be totally different in 5 years).
But, I think you're better off encouraging students' curiosity for use *at home*. Which would you rather hire to use Photoshop, someone who's spent 100 hours using Photoshop 5 in a classroom a several years ago, or someone who's played with everything in GIMP for 600+ hours, built some webpages, entered some silly photo-editing contests, etc, and is still using it?
In reality, of course, if you subtly imply that Photoshop is the only way to go, they'll just pirate it to work at home. This is pernicious. I'm betting 'moral education' is a part of your school's mission statement. Live it.
Teach students to use Open Source software. Hand out discs with the PortableApps files. Accept ODF/RTF/TXT/PDF files as well as DOC.
From a short-term practical standpoint, i don't see a problem with teaching e.g. GIMP instead of an old Photoshop version - as long as you don't require features the free alternative doesn't have (GIMP has no HDR) you should be fine. Additionally, kids can also use the software at home and when they have completed the course, which is a big benefit - I am required to learn Maple [1] and didn't pay up for the draconian license which would require me to wipe it off disk as soon as i am no longer an university student. Also, old Photoshop knowledge most certainly won't help them in the job.
Ethically speaking, as a good teacher you should absolutely abstain from proprietary concepts: Your obligation is to teach them something useful for society, not to teach them something useful for Adobe. Proprietary software essentially says that research into the functions and cooperation between people is forbidden, while free software actually encourages sharing knowledge and cooperation for a mutual goal. Read Stallman's essay on the topic [2] and decide what would be the ethically correct alternative.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple_(software)
[2] http://www.linux.com/articles/32587
However you should not neglect the factor that your students may need the buzzword factor - it may be more helpful to them to have the right tools listed in their resume. Of course if the commercial application is not suitable for practical use anyway (feature set too small, unstable ....), then the OSS version would win out again. The priority must be your students needs. I think you need to evaluate all factors carefully for each application.
Screw dreamweaver! get them off that piece of crap as soon as possible. If they are going to be doing any kind of development, they should be learning how to do it properly in a real IDE. Sure Dreamweaver has come a long way but why would you pay money for something that you can get for free that is used by more developers than dreamweaver.
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Your students are far better off using tools that people used 8 years ago, than tools that no one uses today.
In particular, anyone who suggests using the GIMP over any moderately recent version of Photoshop for serious work should be sacked, tarred, feathered and shipped to Guantanamo. Photoshop 7 is light years ahead of GIMP today, and I will bet anyone here $5 that it's way ahead of where GIMP will be in ten years. (GIMP will then be twice as old, and if it's twice as good then it will still suck rod.)
Dreamweaver and Flash are also non-negotiable components of any web authoring introduction.
The students who are good candidates for open-source software will usually find their own way there. Don't force them to use OSS tools which are practically assured of leaving a bad taste in their mouths.
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I do web development/design for a living, so I will try to provide a little bit of insight.
I use Photoshop CS2 for the majority of my work... the problem being that I use Gentoo Linux. I have a WinXP install running under VMware just to use it... this is mostly because I learned how to use Photoshop when I was young, and I just stuck. I use gimp for the quick edits, and it does this VERY well. Examples: Crop/Resize, Add Text, maybe add a drop shadow, etc.
When it comes to Dreamweaver, I've always hated it. It was slow, and a painful mess last I used it (version 4 or 5). I'm a programmer, so I suppose I am a little biased, but I code all of my X/HTML by hand. Teach your students how to code HTML by hand. Students tend to use Dreamweaver as a crutch. They learn how to point and click with it, but never really understand what exactly they are doing. When I was in high school, I used to attend a national competition called "Skills Canada". Every year in the national round, there was always at least ONE person who freaked out and dropped out of the competition because Dreamweaver was not set up the same as they used to have it back home. Now, I, and others, used notepad or notepad++, etc (Ya-ya! I know Dreamweaver has an IDE built in -- I still don't like it). We had no issues because we saw, and built the code whereas the competitor who dropped out did so because they were dependent on the visual interface ("It's different, what the hell do I do!?").
When it comes to Flash, there isn't much of an alternative... Flash is what you need. I personally own Flash MX2004 and I like it fine. I'm planning an upgrade to the next release (CS4 I think it will be?) or if there is a nice update to the latest version (like a service pack)... I've heard it has some issues (mostly interface stuff).
As for my recommendation, someone above mentioned for you to teach until you receive the required materials.
As a web designer I still use Photoshop 7 and Dreamweaver 2000 and I don't think anyone would know unless I told them. Why would anyone else care what software I use anyway it's all about the results I can create not about the tools I use. By the time these children grow up there will be the same amount of colors in the world, Photowizzbang Version 17 will still use a mouse or a pen tablet for input and Dreamwizzle 2020 will still have a text based source editor.
From the suite that you gave, with the exception of certain new features, the core of those programs have not changed much over the years.
Here's the thing that I noticed about most good software titles: if their original premise is held and the public accepts it, the basics usually don't change. The core of Microsoft Windows, for example, has not changed since its inception (it's quality is debatable, however). Neither has open-source software like emacs, grep, etc.
The tools that you are teaching them are the ones that they are most likely to use in the field. If you teach them alternatives, while they might have knowledge of how to use GIMP, for instance, that's not going to get them really far in resume comparison as supposed to if they knew Photoshop, even if it's version 7...
Well I'll be haarrd-pressed![1] I work for a small business, and I use GIMP to prepare product images for the web store.
[1] Said in the tone of "Well I'll be dog-gone!"
Since this is a high-school class, I assume you're not expecting them to leave with something they can put on their resume. By the time they're in the job market, the software will have shifted yet again. Therefore, anything that illustrates the basic principles will do.
That said, it looks like you have a choice between Gimp and Photoshop, no real alternative to Flash 5, possible alternatives to MovieMaker, and as for Dreamweaver, the only advantage it has over hand-coded HTML + CSS is in saved time, and even then, only for people who already know HTML + CSS and can fix any problems that Dreamweaver creates.
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How does it make a difference knowing what "dodge" or "burn" means in a photo application where the tool is held?
How does it make a difference knowing what happens when you change Gamma, colour balance or use a gaussian blur when it's accessed in a different panel?
As the other poster says, you're teaching theory, not "how to get a job as a Photoshop 7 user", which is just as well because it'll be Photoshop 2010 (the year we wore contacts?) by the time they leave school and start work. And knowing PS7 won't help any more. Unless the pace of "innovation" slows down a lot over the coming years...
Teach them the concepts, not the specific software itself. You're not an adobe or macromedia trainer, why pigeon-hole their education to a particular vendor's products? The software industry is always changing but many of the concepts in the software stay the same..
Teach methods, not applications. To use the standard example as illustration: there is no point teaching MS Office because "everyone uses office". Everyone does not uses office, especially the version you will be teaching. By the time your students leave, go through university and get in to the real world, everyone will be using a much newer and probably quite different version of MS office.
To generalize, software is becoming modified and updated continuously, and will throughout these students lives. In other words, if you teach them only a particular software package, and not the basic methods and how to learn then the teaching will not be useful for more than a few years. By way of illustration, I remember my old school had RM Nimbus machines with DOS 3.x and Word version something rather small. That was 15 years ago.
In conclusion, it probably doesn't matter if you use OSS packages (The difference between Open Ofice and MS Office today is tiny compared to the difference between them now and $FOOOFFICE in 15 years). It's probably best if you have both available and make your students learn and use more than one package for the same kinds of jobs.
PS I know it's not about Office in particular, but that sprang quickest to mind as an example.
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I would to point out that GIMP doesn't have cmyk support, so it's pure insanity to teach students program for graphics which has no use in real print world. If I were you, I would stick with Photoshop 7 (or 6). Except few features (multi-layer selection, smart objects, healing tool) I do not miss anything in PS7 or 6. They are much faster and not bloated with things you will probably never use. Remember, newer is not always better. If you have seen movie Final Fantasy: Spirits Within, it was done using maya 1 beta through maya 2.5. http://www.lava.net/~shiro/Private/essay/gdc2002.html . And so far, I have seen only one movie which surpassed it in quality (another Final Fantasy movie). And today we have version 8.5 and it is not much mirrored in quality of CGI movies made... and that's 6 years from 2001 when FF:SW was made. I do not know about other open-source software you mentioned(Komposer) but my guess would be that they are no match for commercial software (but if you mention Movie Maker, maybe they are :). Still, who would cut video in movie maker...
my last sentence: if people could live with old software, so can you...
You didn't mention it, but, for example, concerning Corel Draw, the older version are the best.
Everybody can pick like, Version 4 or 7 and do a heck of a job with it. Today, it is most fluff, bloat, etc.
Stick with the older versions, which doesn't mean you shouldn't use any OSS.
how long until
Photoshop clearly cannot compare with Gimp, and you'd be soft pressed to find (a legally licensed copy of) Photoshop in any professional office. If these students intend to avoid jail with their skills, then Gimp by far is the best option of the two.
If you teach them to use Gimp, then they can legally and without cost do their assignments at home. They could also use the skills you've taught in order to, from home, make nice art for friends' web pages, etc.
If you only teach them PhotoShop, they may be forced to (a) use a pirated copy at home or (b) not use their home computer at all.
The old stuff, every time. My reasoning, even though it is old, it is by the same companies, so presumably the newer software is a logical progression on their features, so even though it'll be different, when the people you are teaching encounter the new stuff they'll have a basic understanding of the purpose of the programming, how the particular coders work and the step up shouldn't be too hard. Think of it like this, it's easier to learn italian when you know latin than when you know English.
However you do have to decide whether you value educating people to use software that you think is ethically better over the small difference in the relevance. I personally would find myself as a teaching deciding to use the old software as that's what I think will give the best education, but each to their own.
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...its been said a million times. Teach concepts and the ability to extend knowledge of those concepts into the real world. Don't teach specific applications.
;)
Face it, when the slashdot faithful were in school we were taught on a different set of software than what we used at uni, and later in the workplace. Software changes on a year-by-year, month-by-month basis. Rote memorisation can get you far in, say, simple mathematics, but it doesn't extend so well into areas that change rapidly. Heck, I was brought up on ancient Acorn Archimedes machines that had approximately 0% penetration in the workplace but our teacher was bright enough to teach us what a windowing system was, what a hard drive did, how networks worked, how databases worked... no specific implementations, just concepts.
Current teaching, as I've experienced it, has fostered a generation of computer users who are stupefied if they come into contact with an application they've never used before. I've even seen people confused by using the same app in a slightly differnt setup (e.g. Office with customised toolbars). Such a mindset has further fostered the idea, IMHO, that people can't cope with being given a choice in using the best tool for the job since they'll be incapable of using anything that differs from the norm.
In answer to your query, if I was given the freedom to I'd like to show children an example of each popular variant of each subset of programs - here's one word processor, here's another one that does this thingy differently, here's a typesetting program that comes from an entirely different direction - all the while stressing the functionality they have in common and what differentiates them from one another. The same methodology can be extended to almost any app that has more than one example out in the wild databases, image manipulation programs, animation software, video software... here's a linear video editor, here's a non-linear video editor... pupils will learn how to spot what bits of apps do from being exposed to that functionality in other programs.
Disclaimer: I am opinionated and have never worked in a school environment. Can you tell?
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Definitely better off teaching them old commercial software. Why?
Because no one is going to get a job for knowing Gimp of Komposer. However they could actually get a job for knowing Flash 5 and Photoshop 7.
As education departments tend to operate on a shoe-string budget, many will gladly accept discounted commercial products from vendors. The vendors do this, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but as a marketing ploy to reel-in future customers. Why do you think Apple gave away all those computers to the grade schools? Why does Sun deeply discount their computers to colleges? My 16 year old daughter was bashing me over not having a windows system at home with a graphics package. I handed her a laptop with SuSE and Gimp installed. Within a couple of days she was creating wonderful drawings. Sure, it took her some time to learn. But now she loves it! All of the vendors offer professional training on their products. Lets keep public education in the open source category, and when the kiddies grow up & jump into the workplace, then their company can send them to the product specific courses.
By the time your students reach the workforce, the packages will have gone through many revisions and what you're teaching them will have little bearing on what they'll have to know.
I'd say use both - the versions you have as well as open source. And tell the PHBs that since what you're teaching them will be sorely out of date by the time they're in a position to use these skills, not to waste money on commercial software again.
If you were a college teacher you wouldn't have these problems.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
You should look into Paintshop Pro (or whatever it is called today). It's actually a decent program for around $100. Does 80% of what Photoshop does and 110% of GIMP. If the students go off and become graphic designers they will have plenty of time to learn photoshop.
I'd strongly vote for the commercial stuff as it's more relevent -- and even old versions will do enough. As your budget permits, buy a educational license or two for those who really need the most advanced features. (It's unlikely that most students will really need the features of CS3 for most work.)
Because if you have I don't think you would be asking. Gimp has a horrible user interface. It has an OK feature set but the user Interface makes it almost completely useless unless you HAVE to use it. I don't know about the other OS equivalents. Don't teach GIMP though.
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You'll be able to show the folks what a decent UI looks like, even if it isn't 'the latest thing'.
There's lots of similarity between Flash 5 and Flash MX Studio thingy-doo, just make sure to focus on concepts of the Flash engine (Symbols, the Stage, the Timeline) instead of saying stuff like 'Click this specific button to do something'.
Some people choose to memorize material in order to get good grades, whereas others choose to learn the material. Lots of people will pick memorization over learning, whereas the reverse does not happen very often.
If you are going to teach with software from OpenSource, with the idea that these students will be able to make use of this knowledge in the future, you need to promote learning over memorization. Hence, if you are going to teach word processors, you need to pick more than 1, and they need to be as different from each other as is possible. This should make it more difficult to memorize how to operate a word processor, so that they have to learn how to use a word processor.
Making a stand in the primary school system isn't easy to do if you don't have tenure. Even with tenure there's a pretty good chance they'll replace you with the worst possible candidate and shuffle you off into a corner somewhere.
I took a class in university on multimedia production, and the same thing happened: all the software we were supposed to have in the labs wasn't purchased. As a result, we spent more time on the theory and also had to use free tools. The advantage? After that class finished, we could all keep working on our projects at home because we didn't need expensive licenses or lab time to do so.
Having been modded as redundant I feel need to elaborate
That was priceless! Thanks, you made my day! As to your point, I agree completely. What's wrong with pencils and rulers? The newest software will be out of date by the time these kids get out of college.
All a REAL artist needs is mud and a stick, and he can do without either in a pinch. You have to learn to see before you can learn to render.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
You *could* have each student download a trial copy of the software, namely Flash and Dreamweaver, and use that. It gives you 30 days to play with it.
HTH
I think it doesn't make sense to teach those skills with ancient software. When the students try to put their acquired knowledge into some work on the "outside" they are likely to have more recent version and totally different environments to work in (What good is a Dreamweaver for HTML when all you do is PHP and Javascript?) Some skills are so basic that they apply to all software but most of them don't and I don't really need to know how to use 5-10 year old software techniques when none of them are used anymore. Above that Open Software is a great way to teach diversity on the fly because you can simply compare programs, show the inner workings of different desktop environments and demonstrate many features of software architecture that you could never do with closed source or license fees (Think of explaining a program by showing excerpts of the source code ... where is that with proprietary products? Think of teaching students about filesystems and -browsers instead of "Click on C:"). Someone who understood using three different text editors knows how to do it, someone who used e.g. Word exclusively is screwed once they are confronted with a different system or version. Open Source lets you broaden your approach to conveying skills.
So yep, get closed source out of the school, now!
Don't teach 'software.' Teach concepts. Whatever you use that lets the kids be productive with the concept should be fine, right?
In college we used some sort of cad software that I don't even remember the name of. That didn't mean that the concept of snapping, lineto, center, tangent, etc didn't translate when I used autocad (which I most certainly did not take a class on) for a few things before becoming a full time computer geek. Same applies to firewalls and routers and such. If you know TCP/IP and Routing and such, how to configure the stuff is simply a matter of looking up how to do it on that particular device in the manual (how do I define a tunnel, how do I define a route, etc). I *hate* working with cisco guys who took their class, and can't think beyond the ciscoese (bringing up partner IPSec VPNs being the best example of this).
I ended up with a BFA in painting. I originally wanted to go in to graphic design or illustration. The school that I went to had an illustration class and then cancelled it after one year, the year I was suppossed to get in to it. I did take the Typography, a prereq for the graphic design classes, but was failing it miserably the first part of the semester because my hand is not steady and 99% of the first half of the semester was hand calligraphy - we weren't allowed to touch a computer til the mid terms were over and then a few weeks after that.. so since I was failing, I ended up dropping the class completely... I think I ended up putting it off and dropped it on the last day you could drop it, 5 minutes before the registrar closed that day... The professor was a nutjob, and very anal. I think at the end of the class, my friends in the class said that everyone gave her a bad report and she never taught the class again - and stayed where she belonged, over in the university printing press dept. Looking back, I'm glad that I went the route I did. Oil painting styles change over the years, but the basic materials haven't... same with sculpture... If I had taken those graphic design classes, I'd have been learning in Photoshop, version 2, and 90% of the knowledge about it would be way outdated by today's standards. As it is, I learned hand on how to work with encaustic painting, oil painting, pastel drawing and painting, how to draw with charcoal, did in-depth studies of history and art and philosophy and learned tons of other things that aren't going to be outdated next year when new software versions come in to being and need to be bought by all those loosers that were in the graphic arts classes that had steadier hands than me and could do calligraphy better.
I'm glad we are doing such a nice job of giving the poster a good mostly unified answer Reading through it though I think the main answer is, "depends on what you plan to teach" If your teaching design then OSS or the old programs are both OK, but if your teaching program specific, using the old programs would be the best solution, but try to get the newest programs by any means necessary. And concepts do go a long way. I'm working on a VoTech degree in web design and management and our classes all use Adobe CS2. When I got CS3 it only took me about an hour to find all my tools in the new program, and since I had the concepts I was able to get right back to what I was doing. Although there is a big difference between photoshop 7.0 and CS3 (which is version 10)
Depends. Is your directive to teach Flash, Photoshop and Dreamweaver, or is it to teach digital graphics design? Too often people confuse the tool with the subject. Which is more important to your students, that they memorize the menu structure of a given application (which will most likely change in the next release anyway) OR learn the concepts behind what they're trying to do. Hint: a good understanding of the underlying concepts will go a long way regardless of the tool the student ultimately gets saddled with in the real world.
Teach the basic theory how the multimedia software works and how to apply it to solve practical problems, not just the specifics of how to use a particular version of a commercial package... that's what going to the vendor's proprietary school should be for.
;-)
Just like my database class, I expected to be taught something specific like how to use Oracle or MS SQL. NOT! Instead we got taught how active databases work inside... the nuts and bolts under the hood, per se. And also the most generic form of the SQL language itself, not any vendor's specific implementation like PL/SQL or T-SQL. Now instead of knowing Oracle or MS-SQL, I learned how to work with all SQL-based RDBMS's.
(I just kept flunking that part of English grammar about not using an apostrophe + s to denote plural forms of acronyms that end in "S")
Since it's high school it's safe to bet that most of the kids in you class are not going to use the skills you teach them professionally (and if they do, they'll get more training somewhere else first). They'll use them for fun, to touch up their myspace pictures and make silly YouTube movies; so, you might as well teach them how to do stuff with applications they'll have access to later.
One of the most beneficial classes I had in college was an Object Oriented programming class that used a book written by the professor, and taught the fundamentals of Object Oriented programming through C++ and Java...at the same time. We didn't learn Visual Studio IDE, Eclipse, EJB, or whatever...we learned command line compilation and JIT, and we learned how these technologies made a difference. When I got out into the real world, I had to learn an IDE and apply my knowledge taken from this class and apply it to Microsoft and Mac kernels. Since I chose to go with C++ out of college, no one looking for Java programmers want to talk to me. But it's the same thing. I can debug Java just as easily as I can C++. The problem is obvious by reading some of the comments for this post. The people that you have to impress want you to have experience with specific tools. To impress and test yourself, it's better to have a full understanding of why this tool exists in the first place, so that you will be able to use it to it's full potential. If you want to teach multimedia, then teach multimedia. The tools are there to make their lives easier. If you want to teach tools, then unfortunately, it sounds like you'll have to make a better case for getting the tools to the suits in charge.
If you inform Adobe about your situation, they might be able to hook you up with newer versions of trialware or educational software. It would seem to me that it would pay to at least ask before proceeding with Photoshop 5.5 or 6, both of which are seriously out of date. You're giving them the chance to get their products in front of and established with potentially life long users. It would seem to be in their interest to work with your budget limitations.
I personally use Gimp and like it, but the learning curve is fairly steep. It would almost warrant a separate class all by itself.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Being a teacher would suggest that you know something the students do not know, namely these applications, so I assume you know either the older commercial apps or the open source apps in question here. If that is the case, teach them what you know. If you don't know either sets of apps....how can you be an effective teacher?
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
I'll second that second. Use both. A good craftsman can use any tool, old or new. An analog in science is when I teach kids to graph data. First we do it with pencil and paper. it can be arduous (lotsa time series data). They grumble. Then we do it in Appleworks (for simplicity's sake). They see how quick that is, and are upset of a minute or two, but they now know how to actually do it, and how to hire a computer to do it. Then I convert it to .xls and show them the big guns. Usually I'll hear "so that's what Excel is for" 'cuz odds are they never actually used it for much. Kinda like knowing how to make a hole with a brace + bit, a power drill, and an excimer laser.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Which will be the easier transition: Photoshop 7 to Photoshop CS3, or GIMP to Photoshop CS3?
If the answer is the old version of the commercial software, then you should teach the old version of the commercial software.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Photoshop is best to stay with, but show them GIMP as well and allow them to use either. Tell them it can be scripted with Python and a few will try and figure it out.
Flash 5 is probably worth a shall segment, but it has changed dramatically and there's no practical reason to teach it.
Dreamweaver is also worth a small segment, but why not teach them HTML + CSS? It's really not that hard. Make it easier and have them design for Firefox and go into the quirks of both at the end. Frankly, WYSIWYG editors aren't used that much in professional circles except for intranet sites from everything I've seen.
That looks like a sound and defensible approach to teach kids how to work in CODE.
What he is doing here though is teaching kids to work in WYSIWYG graphics applications. How the hell do you expect somebody to unit test a jpeg or a swf?
For the most part I think you can safely use the software you have. I can't speak to Movie Maker and Flash 5 because it has been so long, but as far as Photoshop and Dreamweaver, I can't think of any vital features that would be lacking for your uses. Remember old doesn't mean useless, the software you have available is still able to accomplish all the tasks that they did when they were new, and you can still teach that. Most of us who currently use the most recent versions professionally used these older versions in the past and got along just fine. Most of the basic features in these have not changed much, if at all. Additionally, each of these programs has more features than you be able to touch upon in a High School level class. So I would be surprised if you will have an opportunity to run into limitations using these older versions.
It sounds like you are in a position where you can make available both the "industry standards" and the open source software. I think this is a greater opportunity than you realize. Photoshop can do things GIMP can't do, and vice versa. I use both in my work, using the strengths of each to accomplish my end goal, this gives me more options than someone who only "knows" Photoshop. That applies to most software really, like eclipse or Komposer vs. Dreamweaver, etc. Generally they each have their strengths.
For the people that are suggesting that you use only the most recent versions, consider also the hardware you're using. Newer versions would likely require better hardware, which if you don't have a budget for newer software, is likely not an option.
Regardless of what you choose, I hope that you teach concepts rather than just methods. Make the tools available to the students, then be available as a resource to help them apply the concepts you teach with the tools they have available. This will encourage the most important thing that a student can take away from any good education, the ability to continue learning on their own. If you do this you will be giving them skills that enable them to take what you have taught to any programs or software version: a skill for their life, not just the life of the software in question.
My subtext is just a figment of your imagination.
Teach what you think will cover the basics of croping color balancing and the like. Most other functions will not be used enough to matter.
If you are going to teach them to put a web page together, have them use NotePad to create the code for the page. They will then never forget to close a set of tags and will become familiar with the actual code and not the fancy help that is provided by the tool.
Have them test their HTML against the W3C site to see if it comes up to the standards. That is the big piece lacking in current web, not using HTML the way it is intended, but being sloppy.
Teach principles. Software's an implementation detail.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Young people in the industry don't understand how to use the newest programs because they don't understand the metaphors. You just don't find a new employee under 20 that knows what a paste-board really is. The younger generation doesn't understand that cut & paste really meant using scissors and wax.
PhotoShop 7 is a great program. It's simpler, and in an education environment, simpler is better. I've seen job applicants that know where all the cool filters are, but they don't know how to use curves to color correct a simple scan.
As I've seen in a couple other posts, you should be teaching them methods, not software. Movie Maker isn't going to win any awards for sfx, but learning the storyboard and planning process are real-world skills that will be used if they pursue the field as a career, or if they just get assigned to help produce something for marketing in the future.
How about teaching your students the principles of what they are going to do, so that (with some acclimatization) they can adapt to any software within the category you've taught.
And for this reason, you should teach the old commercial stuff. You can certainly use it to teach the theory, and the students can put "DreamWeaver, Photoshop, Flash" on their resume. That's a bit more eyecatching than "KSomeWysiwygHtmlThing, Gimp, CrayonsAndPaper". Pragmatism does have its merits.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
The older versions of Dreamweaver work better. Dreamweaver 3 is a good WYSIWYG system, and produces reasonably correct HTML 3.2 without much trouble. The user interface makes sense and does what you'd expect.
Dreamweaver 8 can't even produce code that passes its own validation, let alone the W3C validator. What you see is sort of like what a browser will display, but not quite. Even FTP worked better in the earlier versions.
There's something to be said for teaching from the older versions. If you teach from the current ones, much time will be spent teaching workarounds for Dreamweaver bugs.
How long will this class be that you're teaching? if it's a short class, but you think the budget will come around, can you just download the trial versions of the software?
Teach them "Industry standards"? Oh great, so limit the industry to using only the applications they've been using in the past?
The solution is simple, it's been spelled out repeatedly in this thread, but I've seen enough of these mindless arguments to spell it out again:
Schools should teach students how to learn and adapt to ANY software.
The industry will train them on the "industry standard" software of their day, when they are ready.
Some software ages better than others. Dreamweaver, for instance, sucks in every version, but sucks consistently. Therefore, "teaching" on 2000 is not much different than the latest whizz-bang version. Photoshop is good in every version, but not much changes between them. Flash, however, is still young-ish (particularly ActionScript), and there are major differences between AS version 2 and the latest, version 3. I can't speak for the OS packages you mention, having not used them. -Purr
You mean to tell me the millions of dollars that are taken in from all those poor people who play the lottery to pay for the education system was not able to help you purchase any educational software?
Since this is high school the odds are that less than one student a year will go on to have anything to do with this as a career. Therefore, what you are teaching is going to be how to use this stuff in their lives. Therefore, go with the open source stuff. This way they will always be able to download the newest version for free. And it has the benefit of having the students get used to the notion of open source software.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
You make a very good point. Rather than teach the student to rely on a certain implementation of Flash or GIMP/Photoshop style graphics program, teach them the thinking behind them all. The problem is, it must also be stimulating for the students. A kid who's taking a computer graphics course wants to DO computer graphics, and not just learn about them.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Photoshop 7 was IMO the last usable version for day-to-day image editing. CSfoo is so bloated, slow, and memory hungry that unless I need its features, I do my work in 6. You're teaching high school students what a pixel is and how to do some basic retouching, color correction, and layer effects. You don't need much. I'd avoid the GIMP for UI/standardization reasons, as well as the fact that you're going to be the defacto fall guy when something goes wrong.
Dreamweaver 2000 is more problematic, though, as web standards have changed to the point where teaching WYSIWYG HTML without CSS is doing the students a disservice. I'd advocate Notepad and Filezilla with a heavy dose of CSS for your web development curriculum.
I have to side with teaching the concepts rather than focusing on the software. One of my biggest complaints about most people that enter the workforce is that they think they know everything because they know how to use a piece of software. Dreamweaver is one of those things that really is a pain in my side. All too often I see "programmers" that claim to know how to program, but if it isn't preloaded in Dreamweaver they're dead in the water because they can't write code for Sh*t.
I know that it's a useful program but to base a career on the use of a single program is nuts. Every company I've worked for has had a different software package that they used. By all means the theory and concepts over the software is the best choice.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
Honestly, people still use Dreamweaver?
For what you're going to be teaching your students, there are plenty of good coding programs to use. Sure, you can use Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG, but that results in horrible coding and a big question mark of what's under the hood.
As for Photoshop and Flash, can't you get a discounted Photoshop by getting CS1 or CS2? But I wouldn't even get CS#, because that would be a huge waste of money. Just get Elements and your students will be able to do all that you expect of them for a highschool class and a hell of a lot less expensive.
So, recommendations: Drop dreamweaver, and select Photoshop and Flash CS2.
You're doing your students and your community a total disservice by teaching to any particular software. Instead, teach them the concepts, the theory - the basics of 'how' - so they can and will be equipped to use *any* software for that type of job.
By teaching to an application - instead of the functional concepts - all you're doing is being a shill for some publisher. May as well just put up advertisements on a TV screen at the front of the room and test on that.
Teaching to an application is NOT education. At best, It's vocational training and should be done by those that support their products.
Senior NCO in the fight against entropy. I've seen things, man. Things no one should have to see.....
Mr. Margulis is an old-time graphic artist, the type who learned when paste and x-acto knives were the tools of the trade, but who saw very early on that Photoshop would revolutionize the field. His book instructs its readers how to do amazing things to photos using only a handful of tools. The key to many of his techniques, though, is the ability to switch to/from the CMYK and Lab color spaces, which as far as I know GIMP just can't do. And, he's a fantastic writer. I put these books in the same category as Mastering Regular Expressions: if you felt you needed to go find some text to search after reading that one, you'll feel you need to go find some photos to correct after reading these books.
Sample chapters can be found here.
*** Work like a king, command like a slave, create like a dog.
One reason we're stuck with so much crappy software design is that most people seem not to know or care what is good and what isn't. As a design guru said: Or
Wish I could counteract the shortsighted individuals that modded you as "Troll".
You are right on the money.
that means that if the approved curriculum is dreamweaver, DOS 2.3.1, and punch cards, that's what you have to teach. or your on-task score at contract renewal time is ZERO.
doesn't mean if you have time to bring something else in, you can't "introduce alternatives" as an augment. but you have to cover the approved curriculum as an instructor.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It's really going to depend on what the goal is that you're trying to accomplish...
If you just want to teach the concepts behind page layout, design, image composition, etc. you'll probably want to use more than just software. Give them a camera, a dark room, have them do some old school copy & paste. Teach them the concepts and then the digital tools they choose won't matter so much, as long as the tool does what they need it to.
If you're teaching towards something specific, like being a web designer, then you'll want to aim more for what they're likely to use. Teaching someone to use GIMP isn't going to do much good if there's a 90% chance their job will have them using Photoshop instead.
If it's supposed to be some kind of multimedia software overview type class then you'll want to try a little bit of everything. Teach Photoshop, but teach GIMP as well. Demonstrate what each tool does well or not-so-well.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
If you have a unit test that produces, say, an image of a Union Jack, and show how to verify that against a desired stock image of a Union Jack, you shall have taught a fistful of valuable analytic skills.
Guess I'm recalling my undergraduate machine vision course, and how the lack of rigorous thought about how we approached the coding aspects of things really (IMHO) fell short of helping us.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
With a lot of those products and of course their commercial brethren, I can only say this: open source=not finished. But by not finished I mean not fit for public consumption. I would absolutly love to use OS software, but it's just so....not quite there. Always leaves me wanting just a bit more, which may very well be familiarity. See, the problem with most OS products is that you must scour the internet looking for a solution to get it running on your box, never installs quite right or works just so. A recent example is when I gave Ubuntu another shot on my lappy, and I went to install a PHP developing program, Zend. It said it needed Java to work. No sweat. sudo apt-get install jre And the damn thing failed. So I restart, try again. Nope. Head over to the package manager. It says it Java is installed. Try installing Zend again. No luck. Uninstall from the package manager, init 6, install from the package manager again. init 6 just to be safe. No luck with Zend. format, head back over to windows. Get the installer going for Java, take a dump, come back, it's done. WOW. Away I go!
NO. My answer is NO. Do not teach DreamWeaver 5, or Quanta or NVu or Photoshop or GIMP. Do not do it, STOP doing it.
What you should do instead is to teach about web developing (HTML, etc), image manipulation, etc. If you teach only how to press x or y button you will be robbing the students because when the next version of X program goes out they wont do how to achieve that misterious effect the teacher shown them how to achieve which made the picture look better.
You do not need to teach them the science of what they are doing (i.e., no need for an extensive programming class, just HTML and the basics of web design). But you could very well teach them the concepts and apply the conecpts in your "old" propietary software and the "new" open source. In that way, they will be able to onder the benefits and disbenefits of each tool.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
You could use both types of software, commercial and open source, to reinforce the abstract concepts. In Photoshop, for example, the basic concepts are layers, selections, filters, brushes, levels, curves, etc., but when a digital artist plans an image, it's an abstract process, wholly independent of software interfaces (although familiarity with a particular interface can boost productivity). Many of those same concepts transfer to web design and film editing.
Also, the commercial versions of the software you mentioned are expensive, so your students might like to know that there are freeware alternatives to piracy.
Because you are faced with a time constraint, though, it might be better to go with the commercial products. There will be fewer technical snags, more options for further education, more employment opportunities and so on. Besides, as others here have said, the commercial versions available to you are quite advanced. More recent versions have cool tools, but artists got by without them for the longest time, and had to be very creative to get past those limitations.
What are you using the software for? Is it to teach graphic fundamentals or just WYSIWYG sort of stuff? I remember going through high school and all we were doing was just learning how to use the software not much on actually learning how to design. If it's graphic fundamentals open source would work just fine. GIMP will be able to deal with just learning the fundamentals... so would a piece of paper.
Remember that there is a lot of open source software for Windows that can be found here: http://www.opensourcewindows.org/
Also I would recommend teaching Paint.Net over the Gimp, just personal preference.
teach them the old software. it's not a question about whether one piece of software is better than another, but having worked at design/interactive shops for years you cannot get a job without knowing the adobe products. in the cases of video editing, graphic design, and flash development tool usage is more important that understanding concepts. and yes, i've used the open source alternatives for most of these applications (at home for fun projects) but it's a lot easier to ramp up from photoshop 7 to photoshop cs3 than it is to go from gimp to cs3... if they ever want to go on to careers in this industry please please teach them the adobe product line.
that said, in the case of html the opposite is true, you can teach them text pad instead of dreamweaver and it wouldn't make a lick of difference.
My wife's been a web designer for about a decade and as her home sysadmin maybe I can relay an opinion or two.
.swf projects are any better as learning exercises than Flash 5 and Flash 5 is a problem. Maybe you have to gut through that and scream for Flash CS3 in the future.
My understanding is that you _will_ use Dreamweaver -- but should you care? You want to teach the code and you want them to see how the code looks in the range of browsers so why not emphasize that in the learning environment? My wife has been perfectly happy with bluefish at home but of course that's linux (with Win XP running in a qemu window). I believe Quanta Plus would work and give you content management if that is important. You could even be remembered as the teacher who was hard core and made them code in Notepad2 -- so they'd at least have syntax highlighting. Or maybe consider going the opposite direction from austere and starting from scratch on a full-ranged IDE like Aptana on Eclipse with Dojo if that isn't _way_ outside the range of the course? Picking up Dreamweaver should be a run through the menu options.
My wife is happy with Photoshop 7 -- "integrated" or not. I'm not sure she has anything much newer at work. I've tried promoting the GIMP. I've sneaked GIMPshop onto her laptop. ("But honey! It's laid out like Photoshop!") She won't have a word of it. But, like I say, Photoshop 7 is OK with her.
Flash is another story. Like people say, it is mutating rapidly and the mutations aren't backward compatible. I don't know whether any of the open source
Either way, you will likely have to teach the theory rather than the application.
The interface of cs3 hardly resembles photoshop 7 anymore. Either PS 7 or The Gimp are well suited to teaching the basics of manipulating bitmaps.
The Gimp has the benefit of being freely (and legally) available to your students for home use.
Of course, this is high school. I can't imagine trying to keep a bunch of high school kids in line while teaching them something called, "The Gimp"
I can't easily draw outlines of geometric shapes such as circles and squares. Right click menus aren't very context sensitive.
The majority of what you are teaching them is not application specific. People are constantly having to learn new, different, or upgraded applications. This can be a painful period of adjustment, but it is not starting from scratch. Once they're comfortable with the new app, they begin leveraging all the bulk of their prior experience acquired from previous apps to getting actual work done in the new app.
If you see what I mean.
For that matter, in practice, most of us keep a selection of apps and choose the best one for the task at hand rather than insisting on trying to do everything with a single app.
So, while the choice of app may have some importance, it isn't hugely important.
That said, I agree with the advice to use multiple apps. It ensures you cover more ground (rather than missing features/techniques that a specific app doesn't support), and it teaches your students how to deal with switching apps.
It could also be interesting to assign different groups of students different apps for the same project. Then have them compare their experiences.
I would go with a mix. Teach your students the basic concepts, and then let them try each software out. Explain to them the importance of not learning a tool, but rather a technique. Then let them decide which tool they prefer, and have seminars where the different user groups show each other how they accomplished their task with their software of choice. As for Gimp's UI, i like it. It is consistent with the GTK toolkit, easy and clear. Granted it is not perfect, but the interface is not at all a problem unless you are a complete Photoshop addict. And as a side note, I've gotten hired explicitly BECAUSE I had Gimp knowledge. So it is not wasted effort learning it.
Can't you get special deals on education software?
Also, why not appeal to the business community for some cash / software donations.
When I was trying to recruit programmers back in the 80s, there was a real skills shortage - still is.
We (my team & I) started to develop relationships with local schools & technical colleges, so that we'd get first dibs on the smart grads.
Cost us some time, but not much cash, especially compared to paying professional recruiters.
As a side benefit, we were also able to feed back to the education establishments exactly what we wanted...the kids who did well in school were virtually guaranteed a job when they graduated, and integrated the team quickly, were productive...all good.
So, a long way of saying, why not get out there and engage with the market?
Realistically, to answer the question, it's NO. N.O.
If a family member signed up for a class to learn Office, and I heard they were being taught Open Office, I'd be furious. Same with taking a PhotoShop class and being throw lessons on using Gimp.
You have to remember, some people are going to be putting this stuff on their resumes. If you have them put apps nobody knows or cares about, you are defrauding them, both realistically and intellectually. Now of course something like 99% of Slashdotters are going to disagree, but they likewise believe nothing done, no matter how immoral, would be wrong if it can be made to force people to use FOSS.
Don't be a dick. Just give the people what they are paying for, even if it's an old version. Better to learn dated software than useless software.
I still use PS7 at home, and I don't notice a lot of difference between it and the CS2 and 3 releases. I've tried the Gimp a few times, and while I admire the effort I'd stick with PS. It's the standard, and if kids learn on version 7 they can easily transition to the latest version. Gimp uses different terms for many tools, menu structure(although that can be a moving target among PS versions). Not saying it's bad, but it's different enough to make moving to PS a challenge.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Old software isn't useless software.
In fact, it may be better to use Photoshop 7, because the interface isn't as messy (if I remember correctly).
The functionality may be less than CS3, but hey, back in the day PS7 was the king of the hill.
Now that MovieMaker thing, I'm not sure about. But as a tip, the most important part of a Video is the Audio. I've seen a lot of movies where the visuals are great, but the audio sucks - and it really takes away from the effect. Good audio and bad video is better than bad audio and good video.
Schools should try to license academic versions of commercial apps, while software developers should learn from those already providing them. Academic versions make sense for software houses because they help to strengthen brand awareness and fight competitor threats (such as other commercial apps and open source), while allowing the students to gain proficiency in the tools that are already being used in the real world. For schools it is equally attractive as students are not fools and given the choice they will choose where to go (If I'm spending time and money at school I'd rather be learning something that will help me land a job)
I don't like GIMPS free-floating main window for file operations, brushes, tools, etc. It's window management pain and things are generally buried. I think good right-click menus would speed things up. Just my 2 cents.
I don't know if it works in this sort of software, but I have always been under the belief in Schools (Elementary,Middle School, and High School) to teach the idea of an application. Take spreadsheets for example. instead of an Excel class have a spreadsheet class that doesn't teach Microsoft specific functions nor Open Office functions just what a spreadsheet is and one it's good for. So much of teaching today has gone textbook, no theory involved. Why would I want to use a spreadsheet over a database. Most every class I have seen is copy from the textbook and hurry to get it done so you can play games. That is my 2 cents worth. --John
Normally I'd say stick with the commercial stuff, because those re the programs they'll encounter in the workplace.
I know a lot of people are gonna say, "Teach the theory, not the program," and so on, but realistically, a huge number of people out there, from high school kids to professionals, are REALLY BAD WITH COMPUTERS. As in, they learn a few tasks by rote, step-by-step, and are afraid to experiment with anything they haven't explicitly been taught. (I worked in a newsroom where people were shocked and awed when I showed them how to "insert special characters" in Word.)
Yes, ideally anyone working in a modern setting SHOULD know the basics about computers and not call in "the nerdy kid" every time they see an unfamiliar menu. But that's a bit beyond the scope of one multimedia class. Public schools already HAVE a lot of computers and a lot of classtime dedicated to learning them; it's up to teachers to stop spending all those resources having kids play Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and browsing the Internet (which is most of what I recall from computer class).
HOWEVER, the key difference here is that we're talking about high-school kids, and there's an additional benefit to open-source in this case: you can tell the kids to download the programs themselves and mess around with them at home, even after the class is over. Some of them still won't get past that rote "First I click 'File,' then I click 'New'..." mentality, but the more computer-literate among them will have a lot more cool stuff to play with.
In the undergrad course I took on word processing, we learned both Word and WordPerfect. The reason was to point out that they both do the same things, but that the commands were different. Teaching only one leaves the student with the idea that, say ESC+SHIFT+F12 is how you do something, rather than them learning the concept that you do a certain thing, and the command to do it is arbitrary. This not only teaches word processing rather than either Word or WordPerfect operation, it makes it possible to migrate to other software, even in other operating systems. "Old" and "open source" are irrelevant to this. If they learn to perform the operation rather than push certain buttons, they can move on to other stuff after they leave and find work. The same argument goes for having both PCs and Macs (if not also *nix) for them to use, even if they're "obsolete" versions. I believe this has been called learning to run the computer rather than having the computer run you.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
First of all, open source is getting easier. Secondly, it's free, so the students can download to their own machines and be able to get much more experience using the program. Third, look for programs like GimpShop - a Photoshop clone done using the Gimp. I have heard you can use Photoshop tutorials to teach GimpShop!
Fourth, industry standards are changing - and the tide seems to favour open source. I work for a leading software manufacturer and the traction that linux is gaining both in house and for support is astounding, especially compared to last year at this time.
So yeah, I'd say open source all the way!
It goes something like this:
1. Tell Microsoft you're going to teach high school kids Linux.
2. Micrsoft bitches out Adobe to send free products.
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
*Note: Step 2 may be replaced with "Microsoft assassinates high school teacher"; Step 4 remains unchanged.
Since the school is already too cheap to buy new software you might as well teach them whatever software applications come with the OLPC computer as it's only a matter of time before its impoverished enough to qualify for the program.
My main problem is that unlike most graphics programs, I am never quite sure where the tool that I want is located. In most programs, tools come from a menu that is fixed/attached to the window that contains the image that I'm working on. In GIMP, all tools are selected from a myriad of windows that are opened for various tool sets.
Then if I want, for example, to select the colour palette, then I have to find the window - if it's open. And the problem there is that it could be anywhere on the screen. Heck it could even be hidden under another window. And I have to hunt d__n near every time I want to use a tool that I haven't used in the last five minutes.
On the other hand, in most commercial applications, I slide my cursor to the menu bar, pick the correct drop down and slide the cursor down to the tool. And it will always be in the same place.
You might want to look at Don Norman's essay on Affordances and Design or read his book on "The Design of Everyday Things".
Public money shouldn't be spent on teaching software the students can't afford themselves. To complete studies using proprietary software students are inadvertently taught both: how to use the specific software in question and how to steal it so they can do their homework.
Instead of yielding to the idea of teaching 'Industry Standard Software' (as the vendors like to hear us chime), teach students portable design concepts and approaches to using the computer to extend themselves. It's better to cover a few different tools than become dependent on one software's particular metaphors and usability model.
Most students of design are these days entirely dependent on Adobe products, the schools they go to are veritable extensions of the given company's marketing division. Kids come out of school with the same combinations of key presses and clicks as 100's of 1000's of others and have few tools for thinking outside of the workflow and plugin menu of the sole software they're taught on.
In essence, teaching kids to use just one image editor, HTML editor or vector drawing program is to teach them to mistake the tool for the purpose.
You can give the students a copy of The Open Disc on the first day of class. I doubt Adobe would be pleased if you did the same for their products.
I work at a small computer school where they teach basic windows, ms office, photoshop, visual studio, and so on. But then I started using linux as backend services with proxy, traffic shaping, blocking pr0n, (all)Messenger, game and anime sites, etc. Then I moved the oldest pcs to become LTSP.ORG terminals that use rdesktop to show windows on top. Then I installed openoffice, the gimp, eclipse, among other things without removing the programs that where originally promoted for the courses, so by then, all teachers are starting to ask questions on how to use those new programs and then they came up with their own ideas on how to do things faster and or better with the new counterparts! So, you may be doing something a little more radical than I since you will just not have the traditional packages available, but I asure you, that your plan is viable. No doubt. So good luck and have fun! ;)
You absolutely want to stick with Dreamweaver.
It really is the only useful way to get anything done fast in HTML cutting without necessarily producing an enormous pile of shit HTML. It's also the only truly sane editor for graphic designers to use later on when they need to work with programmers and templating systems.
Of course, it still IS capable of doing it horridly, so the normal rule of "require the first assignment to be done in Notepad/whatever" still applies.
Speaking as a programmer who's had to work with lots of designers, nothing else is remotely as good for not breaking everything.
Fundamentals are more important than learning a specific program. So show them how both applications work so that they are equipped to handle ANY software they encounter in the "real world".
With the commercial software, you have a finite number of licenses (assuming you are also going to teach about not pirating software). Install the commercial software you have on how many machines you can. Install the OSS on all the systems, including those that already have the matching commercial software.
When you start teaching, give examples using both applications. This will teach the students not to assume that the goal they want to accomplish is always named the same and in the same menu. "So Photoshop calls it this, but if you look at GIMP, it's called this. They both work the same and here is how it works."
And as long as there is not assigned seating, you'll find certain students will gravitate to the machines that have the commercial apps, while some will just go where ever. Those that don't care will be the ones that will end up more capable as they can just sit down at any app (even custom designed ones) and be up and running quicker because they know the goal they are trying to accomplish and not just the buttons they need to push.
Well I think it's a tricky question because its depends. I think thatr you don't have any problem in orderto teach GIMP instead Photoshop, but I prefer Dreamweaver instead any open source alternative, if we're talking about Flash is a very old version vs nothing!!!, so in your shoes I'd evaluate each case separately. PD: Sorry by my English, I'm still learning it.
I've read a few comments touching on the point that you can teach kiddies what you like at school, but when they want to work at home and they can't, you snuff out that enthusiasm. I'm a teacher and we distribute http://www.theopendisc.com/education which is great for home use. The school have even started using some of the tools. Those educational software licences can be a real killer. especially with the yearly 'subscriptions'
"all through my house i set up traps, it seems like the rats have a map, so now i feed the rats crack" - Donald D
OSS, just do it.
That, that really grinds my gears!
Without having read the article, the summary, or any comments for that matter, I can tell you: posting this question on Slashdot means you already know the answer, but you want to hear it from more people.
:)
Which is good, in this case!
I have the sum of $20 million dollars in my Nigerian bank account, but I not able to access it since last one was destroyed in tsunami.
I hope you are dispose to sent me $2000 for purchase me new computer and I showing gratitude to sending you $2 million for compensate you on your times and efforts.
Pleasing you to keeping this on the utmost confidences that I do not want suffering complication with local authorities.
Much regardings,
Hallu Salaneen
Look at each programm by itself:
... Use some current cheap Video NLE tool if that one you've got sucks.
DW2K: Utterly pointless. Built for times when static pages were the norm. You'll get way further with jEdit, Firebug and a working central CMS for all to load pages into.
Flash 5: Almost pointless, except for the most basic vector stuff. There is no OSS replacement for Flash, so you should upgrade to Flash MX 2k Pro at least. Buy used licences or something.
PS7: Perfect. If you need PS (the filters and the 3D stuff) stick with it. If you don't need the PS filters switch to the newest Gimp. It mostly plays in the same league for image editing and tuning.
Movie Maker? Never heard of that one.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
OK. Obsolete software is no good to me as a producer of documents and of software to accompany the systems I throw together. Up to date software is the expected standard in most industries, particularly in the areas of clerical and research. Problem is, when said up to date software obsoletes the older software to the point of breaking file format compatibility (ARE YOU LISTENING MICROSOFT!?) then it instantly becomes no good in and of itself, and alternatives have to be seriously considered. Enter stage left, open source and internationally accepted standards such as OpenDocument. Give me someone who has trained up on Microsoft Office 2000 or (perish the thought!) Microsoft Works 2000 or whatever that era's release was called, and someone who has trained up on OpenOffice 2.x. I'll give you precisely one guess as to who'd get hired.
That aside and back to topic, I discovered during the six days I took getting my CLAIT on Office 2000 (which I've since never had to call upon to prove I actually knew it backward), that bleeding edge vocational qualifications on commercial software SUCK and do absolutely nothing to further anyone's career. If you want to learn how to type, get a fucking typewriter, if you want to learn how to use an office package, use one with useful features such as OpenOffice, where those features are written by users for users and not by some snotnose in a darkened room in a basement in Redmond.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I'm teaching a computer class for adults just now. The level of knowledge and skill is extremely low among adults who are not specialists in computing. I expect no more than 5% of the students in your class will become computing specialists. If so, the class's first goal should be to make sure every student goes through the process of editing movies, photos and creating websites so they have some idea what can be done. After that, it would be nice if they all could be left with the ability to do this for future classes, personal use and in whatever job they find themselves. The sophistication of such websites is not important (better simple, fast and clear rather than fancy, slow and glittery). I know they have to have fun, too, and perhaps they would have as much fun with something like GIF Construction Set as with Flash. I hope, for goodness sake, you are not leaving your students with the impression they must have the most expensive tools available (however much they may be subsidized for school use in order to entice you). Remember, they take to heart what you do, not what you say.
You can say "teach a man to fish", but that only gets you so far in
Remember, this isn't college or university where the terms of entrance and student motivation are vastly different. At the very least you need to know your audience.
That said, I'm strongly in favour of teaching them the commercial products you already have. These are frankly the kinds of products they are most likely to encounter in future courses and the working world. You already have the infrastructure for them. You already have support staff that knows how to use them. There won't be any ramping-up time or unforeseen issues with their usability.
I can't speak for all of the products listed, but I use Photoshop 7 on a Mac at home, and CS2 on Windows at work. The UI differences are so negligible that I don't even notice going from one to the other. I would consider Photoshop 7 to be perfectly serviceable for teaching graphic design skills to high-schoolers. Hell, Photoshop 5 would still get the job done adequately.
On the other hand, it's been a couple years since I've used GIMP, but I recall its interface was clunky and un-Windows-like. I don't know if that's changed, but I would expect I would be wasting a lot of time teaching people who've only ever used Windows how to navigate that program, rather than the skills that should be common to both programs. You're going to be spending a lot more time troubleshooting stuff, the students will be a lot less able to help each other out, and even if you have the necessary expertise with GIMP to do all of it, who will when you're taking a sick day?
Forgive the generalization, but most of the open-source proponents I've read on this thread seem to be more interested in evangelizing open source than they are assessing what will actually work.
Dan.
If I had my druthers, you'd probably find most of your student body is already aware of Linux and would be happy to "play" with it. On the other hand, there is no commercial activity going on right now in major business and enterprise except under Windows and on Mac format equipment. And; the Mac stuff is spendy! Windows software is at times pointless because of the frequent crashing and one-up's-manship compatibility issues going on with Microsoft vs. the rest of the world.
You have a hefty decision on your hands!
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
I dunno, I think it looks quite nice
For the record: I've never met the man, just looked at the addy on account of you pointed it out. Now you've gone and done him a favor, and you were trying to beat on him a little.
I think this backfired, you might look for a different approach in the future
2^3 * 31 * 647
If you do not expose your students to tools they are likely to be using in the workplace, you are likely to do them a disservice,
The school is doing the community a disservice if they use taxpayer funds to teach proprietary software products.
This is an illicit company subsidy. Bad enough for any company but even worse if tax payer funds are being used to subsidize one dominant market player.
No problem teaching general principles that apply to any company's products but there should not be even a hint of favoring any one company. This is bad for the community (not thinking long term), bad for the company's competitors (why aren't they being subsidized?) and bad for the student's education (which should be about general principles).
An entirely private school has more choices. If the students/faculty choose to go with a particular company that's just a regular transaction. Their money, their choice. A bad long term choice in my opinion but if that's what they want to do so be it.
The above argument does not apply to open source because open source benefits the entire community, not just the one company. You could make an argument about open source disadvantaging individual companies but that's a bogus argument because it applies to any company in a particular field and so that playing field is level. Individual companies may not like the community being favored over them but that's their problem, not ours.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
Let's assume that Photoshop has been taught in your school for years. That it is being used in your district's adult education ptograms. That course materials, textbooks, and other resources are all oriented around Photoshop.
In which case you had better be dann sure you have mastered the GIMP before you introduce it in the classroom. That you have the backing of your supervisors.
That there is someone around to take your place when you call in sick with the flu.
The Geek assumes that because the professional version of Photoshop costs $600 retail boxed the amateur version must also cost $600 retail boxed.
You might usefully ask for a show of hands:
Who owns or uses a digital camera at home? What photo editing software came bundled with the camera? There is a good chance the answers will be "pretty much everyone" and Photoshop Elements.
I am a media producer, sysadmin and believe or not java coder (my oracle skills are basic but usable). I actually recently went ahead and bought the Adobe CS3 premium design suite and standard web suite plus MSOffice Professional. The Adobe tools are actually that good. I use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat Pro, Fireworks and Dreamweaver daily, and I need Office because one of the things we offer is customised Office templates.
BUT, as many people have said here, it depends on what your goals are: If you want to teach the kids design principles, you can use Inkscape and the GIMP and Scribus. They certainly are good enough for that. Those principles can be applied just as well to PS, AI and ID. Introducing them to OpenOffice would certainly be a useful bonus as well, because MS Office sucks giant balls, even though it can be very powerful in knowledgeable hands.
HOWEVER, since, if they ever are going to work in the industry, or go to college where they will have easier access to better tools and not have to play catch up, I would recommend the following:
Teach them Pixel editing with PS7. Although the CS3 suite has changed the UI greatly, the basic key combinations are still the same (ctrl-alt-I - reverse the selection, q - quick mask toggle, ctrl-u -HSL control, ctrl-m - graduation curves etc etc etc), layers, masks, vectors and filter effects are still the same mostly. Time is money in the design business so knowing at least the basics of the tools will give them a leg up (I had my first PS lessons in PS 1.0.7 and AI lessons in 3.0).
For vector animations, you can easily use Flash5 for making the animations. That part of Flash has hardly changed. I would NOT, however, teach them any Actionscript in Flash5. Actionscript 3.0, the current iteration, has more in common with Java or C# than Javascript in some ways (strongly typed, OO based, namespaces etc). Here I would teach them basic coding using Flex2 in combination with Actionscript 3.0 and the free Flex2 compiler. The bonus here is that any of them learning to code Flash will learn better coding practices than is standard in Flash (code on multiple symbols and timelines all over the place makes maintaining Flash apps very difficult).
For vector art, use Inkscape. It is very good and the curve to move to AI is not as great as some would make it to be.
For Website design and coding, I would teach them the basics of coding in one of the hundreds of free editors (Eclipse for example, or CoffeCup). Dreamweaver has changed rapidly and the older versions are not much better than free editors.
For Video editing, I would use a free editor like ZS4. They offer some of the same tools that higher end editors do (chroma keying etc). Windows Movie Maker is simply too limited to really explore things like multi track editing etc.
Why not try to get the newest versions? Adobe offers great student discounts. Also contact your local graphic design associations and ask for software donations. Your local branch of AIGA is a good place to start.
You're teaching multimedia, not some vendor-specific seminar. Whatever pgoram you teach them, do you think it's going to be current by the time they graduate? Pick whichever program supports current standards and best practices and then target those standards and practices. If you do your job well, they will be able to learn any program they need to later on.
As someone who has at one time made a living writing Photoshop plugins, and has worked on other applications similar to Photoshop at other companies, I think you would be doing your students a *huge* disservice to allow them anywhere near the GIMP. It is a horrible application that will cripple their ability to use photo retouching software in the future. The user interface is not just lame compared to other applications, it's actively bad. If you teach with Photoshop 7 (or any of its competitors), your students will learn the concepts just fine. If you teach them the GIMP, they probably won't learn the concepts because they'll be so confused by the user interface that they'll be struggling just to get it to do anything useful.
Furthermore, I've seen one large corporation which makes films and could save tens of thousands of dollars or more per year go with paid copies of Photoshop over the GIMP because they determined that the savings in license fees didn't outweigh the problems of using the GIMP.
I think you're missing the point a bit here.
This is a high school class.
Pretty much every new feature you just touted is completely irrelevant in the context of what a high school student needs or is going to find useful.
I think the point being made is that except for a few high-end features and tweaks like you mention and the horrible, horrible, "integration" of the CS suite, Photoshop is virtually identical today to the product it was then.
IMO experience for users who are not professional photographers and not stuck in a production house CS suite integration and things like the "Bridge" are worse than useless. They actually cause severe problems in using the software and slow down your computer to a crawl.
Adobe CS 2 installed about 250 Megs of "support" files in my Library folder comprising about a quarter million separate files. At home I have CS 3 and it installed something like 1.8 Gigabytes of "support files." Almost all of these files are there for things like Bridge and VersionCue and Adobe's online picture marketing service that the average PhotoShop user (even the average *professional* user) has no use for at all.
I'm a professional user and I don't need help taking pictures or finding clipart for my projects. I also don't need help managing my file versions to the point that I need memory eating "helper" apps running in the background all the time or trying to connect me to the Adobe "marketplace."
CS suite is the kind of crass, overpriced bloatware of the kind that only a monopolist could get away with.
"I teach a high school multimedia course. We were scheduled to get new software this year but due to several pointy haired bosses, no software was ordered. The software I have to teach is Flash 5, Dreamweaver 2000, Photoshop 7 and (god help me) Movie Maker. The question is: is it better to teach old commercial software or their open source counterparts (Komposer, Gimp, etc.)? Is the steep learning curve and slightly less uniform design worth a little student frustration to teach them software written in the past 5 years?" Let me disect your list. Flash: There is no alternative. Teach it. Be sure and focus on Actionscripting, that's about the most useful aspect of the whole package. Dreamweaver: Stop right there. Point your students toward w3schools and give them Aptana on all those systems. Then they get the great editor and the IDE, without the program doing the important work for them. Learning to use an IDE is way more important than anything you could possibly glean from Dreamweaver, which ain't much. I would also point out Adobe AIR, which is available for Aptana, which integrates the knowledge they gleaned from Flash (Actionscripting, I told you it was important!) Photoshop: Nope. Gimp. If you were teaching college level multimedia, then Photoshop would be the right choice. If not, they don't need anything the Gimp can't give them, in my humble professional graphic artist opinion. MovieMaker: Are you kidding me? Just say No. Any alternative is better. Having said that, while there are linux alternatives, there are not very good windows alternatives. Jahshaka is very capable, if arcane. One option here would be 3D Blender. Yes, it's 3D software, but it also does video editing. I'm not familiar enough with editing video using Blender to actually recommend it, though. My personal favored video editing solution is Sony Vegas. Last time I weighed options, it was the champ. Anything it cannot accomplish is best left to pros, plus it's very quick to render output compared to the alternatives. Speaking of 3D Blender, it's not as scary as it seems. It's probably the only other open source application I'd recommend over the commercial alternatives(see below). It's extremely powerful, versatile, amazing. The learning curve is steeper than Max or Maya, but just barely. Honestly, that's only true initially. Once you get the interface down, the rest is more intuitive than either Max or Maya. Learning 3D is like learning a spoken language, though, in terms of time commitment. Do not forget to completely ignore that piece of dung named Illustrator, and go on to what anyone with half a brain will be using: either Inkscape or Xara Extreme. Take that to the bank. Illustrator doesn't even get an "also ran." You will be doing them a favor picking one of the two and teaching vector.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
No! No! No!
You should not be teaching tools, you should be teaching technique!
Is there anybody here using the same tools they used 4 years ago? I'd wager not! The tools will continue to evolve and change.
Ahhh, but the techniques, they remain the same.
As one who had to learn the Photoshop interface from scratch; I spit upon it! I can and do use it but intuitive? NOT! I also learned the GIMP interface. It's definitely not like Photoshop's interface, about the same learning curve and, once through some of the learning curve, it is slightly more intuitive - the tools work more similarly. But here's the point: the techniques that I used in both (primarily simple graphics creation for websites and digital photo touch-up and editing) were pretty much the same.
Whatever the choice, presentation and delivery or either as an opportunity to work within limitations will get results. You want to help people learn, whether it is to learn to gracefully accept the limitations of equipment, budgets, ability, software, or persons, or that perhaps not everyone can use software effectively. At high school age many people are years away from making their first mistake. Let natural curiosity and investigation take over. It will surely not be the first time any of the kids has seen non-cutting-edge hardware or software. Things are not always a brand new car, nor are they a rusty old basket case.
well I think (that it has been stated a million times before) GIMP is great, but it's window management is a pain... that said, it's free, so you can't complain right?
Photoshop is weird and complex at times, but once you understand a few key concepts, it's not too hard. I started on Photoshop 5, and have used 5.5, 6 (yuck buggy as), 7, CS2 etc
I found 5.5 ok, but irritating to use text etc, 6 was similar but very buggy, 7 was very polished, works quite well... CS and higher, not much different, a little, but once you know 7 you can adapt.
The GIMP: I came at it from a Photoshop perspective, so found it strange at first, finally figured out how to do a few things, and am almost used to it... the one thing that really bugs me is the window management: a separate window for all the little toolbars... who's idiot idea was that?? so I try to alt-tab to another program, and there are like 4 or 5 little gimp windows!! arrgh, very irritating, it should be optional!!!
Dreamweaver: cool, but over-bloated rubbish, I always only used it for the code view.. and even that was overrated.. it's check-in/check-out was buggy, in fact the whole thing was SOO buggy, I wouldn't recommend it.. and this was 2004/2004MX... don't use it's "WYSIWYG" view!!
oh well, that's my 2 cents.
Our educational system exists to elucidate our understanding of reality, not brands -- so yes, 95% of PS' capabilities should be taught in terms of Gimp. Should Brand-X stumble upon a genuinely new idea, sure it can be taught under fair-use, but not in absentia of the patent system, should that idea be genuinely beneficial.
Unfortunately, this is why projects like GIMP rarely (if ever) become as good UI-wise as commercial products like Photoshop. Instead of responding to critics intelligently with reasons why they are wrong or giving critics due consideration and implementing their suggestions, the egos of open source developers get in the way, and they write their critics off for daring to disagree with their narrow, developer-centric view.
The gimp's no good because someone modded you down on slashdot?
You're an idiot.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Why not teach the older software along side the FOSS counterpart?
Sure, the context of school forces one into a low-common-denominator approach, but the really good teachers hit the mean while throwing out some tidbits for the inquisitive.
As for the left tail, well, sometimes you have to default to sheer love.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
ummm... the tools are in a menu in that very window... true that they are "ALSO" in the window titled "gimp" which is the toolbox...
If you look at the "tools menu" in "the window of the image your editing", there is a menu item called "toolbox".. this pops up the toolbox if your having such a hard time finding it.
Now, since you brought up the color pallete, it is true that the selector for foreground and background colors is not in the tools menu of "the window of the image your editing" so getting to the toolbox is necessary.. but it's not that hard and there is even a keystroke shortcut "CTRL-B" that will pop it up (even easier than using the tools menu)... it's not rocket science.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
That looks like a sound and defensible approach to teach kids how to work in CODE.
Actually the criteria for GCSE art projects when I did it (circa 1988) was a lot like the software engineering methodology of the day. Perhaps without the testing aspect.
Concept (preliminary sketches).
High level design (more detailed sketches).
Implementation (work in the final medium, lose credit if you deviate from your HLD).
Everyone knew it was BS, but that's how you turn art into something you can assign schoolkids marks for, I guess.
To learning techniques and methodologies that can be applied to an activity regardless the tool you use? The thought that if you know how to use a product you are somehow valuable in the product's field is crazy. There's a big difference in knowing how to apply a filter in a photo program and knowing which filter is the correct one for a given situation. I'm sorry, but I think the education systems in this country have gone way too far with the "learn a product" not a skill mentality. I don't know when it happened, but whoever decided learning how to use photoshop (or another product) is more important than learning the artistic theory behind why you would use it in the first place really needs to be slapped with a dead fish. The tool is a means to an end. Tools, like artistic mediums are interchangeable. To say that an artist won't be successful because he didn't use oil paint and everyone else does is just as stupid as the argument that if you don't learn product X you will face problems.
Hi, here are a few (I hope) relevant comments.
.jpg file and saving it again as a .jpg, why the quality degrades, what is lossy compression, ie: the science and computer science that relates to what they are learning in graphic design.
/., I'll include a few links to videos on YouTube that show what a skilled person can do with MS Paint. For more, just search "MS Paint" on YouTube, you'll be very surprised by the results that can be achieved with only MS Paint if you haven't seen any of these.
As to the science, I'd suggest teaching the science of light, color, and the related computer sciences, what is color space, models, rbg, cmyk. Teach the bits and file formats, what does a 8 bit or 24 bit per pixel color depth mean, what are the implications of opening a compressed
As far as what software to use goes, I know this is potential flame bait, but just use MS Paint, or the Gimp, or whatever you have that the kids also have access to at home (a must as another reader pointed out).
Don't undervalue the point that this is a design class, not a class in how to use Photo Shop, CS3, The Gimp, or any other software package.
Just because you are asking this question on
MS paint- apple ipod
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ksvaig8Fr5E
How to paint the MONA LISA with MS PAINT
http://youtube.com/watch?v=uk2sPl_Z7ZU
MS Paint Car - Pixelgod II
http://youtube.com/watch?v=vUWqRhReaZk
And a final thought, "The tools don't make the artist, the artist commands the tools"
Many software packages have the ability to achieve needed results for your class, you should focus on the principles which can be applied in various software packages, not the specific software used.
Hope this helps!
Z
By teaching them point-and-click software, you're creating the next generation of computer-inept people who *think* they can "develop" by dumbly clicking the buttons.
Teach from the basics. Notepad is free last I checked. Code in HTML. Look at "good" and "bad" interfaces. Without a solid concept of the basics, your money is wasted on the software anyways.
Concepts will stick with the students no matter where they go. The web design or graphical concepts that they learn is far more valuable than any amount of "drag from X to Y" instruction that you try to force into them.
When I was a uni student, I learnt Java, C++, MIPS Assembly and MATLAB. Our scope was pretty much on Scientific number crunching. Hardly anything to do with software industry, even if there anything, they are on Linux plaform based on some kernel developed by some guy. Pretty much all the other software (like layout designing, optical network designing) are wither freeware or something not mainstream.
Now here I am in industry. Only now I realize the disaster. IMHO if they based their assignments and stuff more realted to industry software, it would be more beneficial for me to find a job and even to do a marvellous job to impress my bosses. Since I know only the concepts, I have to learn from scratch pretty much everything what I find in my job. And it takes time to perfect, which is something my bosses don't have as it is competition out there.
So.. in my conclusion, it is better to tech them something useful in future and delivering the concepts through that, rather going with software which are not common in the outside world.
(just an opinion, don't mod me down)
Dad: So, what did you do at school today little Timmy?
Timmy: Well I had a bit of a play around with The GIMP in Mr Alexander's class
then more power to you.
Everyone who already pointed out that we're talking about high school level is right on target. Really what's important at this stage is to learn the principles of what design is, how to see with a critical eye, how to see with an artistic eye, and how to render what you see in a way that resonates with viewers. All of this can be done with a pencil. In my high school design class, that's all we had -- pencils and graph paper.
So now I own a web development company, and we use both Gimp & Photoshop pretty interchangeably. Not so very different from high school, the majority of the work we do with photos and design elements is really basic and hasn't changed much since the first version of the Gimp I used almost 10 years ago. Ok, I like the non-free extensions, and there are certainly features of CS3 that make our work prettier (and easier) but the truth is, we would never succeed as a design firm without talent. And you can't get that from software.
To answer the question directly, I'd make both PS7 and the Gimp available and show the commonalities between them. That way the kids will learn how to use the tools, but more importantly they'll learn how to learn a new tool, so whatever version of whichever program they get handed when they get their first design gig they will be able to use it to apply the solid foundation in design theory that should be the core of what you teach them.
Be Bold! BoldEverything Interactive
Are you an idiot? How many of your ex-classmates ARE professional designers WITHOUT specialized training?
I am a developer, I have no idea why we were graded in school at art... I haven't drawn ANYTHING except diagrams SINCE I left school. But art classes are good for developing motor skills and eye to hand coordination.
By "steep", you mean "hard to learn", but if you plot "mastery" on the y axis and "time" on the x axis (as is normal) a steep curve means you are learning really quickly.
In any case, the curve is not really any different for most apps. Teach open source when you can.
In other words, does your local education board subscribe to the idea that you are supposed to be churning out a surplus of candidates ( surplus = lower wages) who can jump into the work-a-day world right out of high school with no training (= lower wages) and minimal real job experience ( = company can bend them to it's will)? If so, then you will be expected to train them in the routine use of the modern industry tools; ie PhotoShop, etc.
... after all you can get PhotoShop at any store and there is quite frankly too much help available on how to use the application, not the least of which is the very tutorials that come with the application that no-one who knows a previous version ever uses, but everyone who "knows it like the back of their hand" could learn from. On the other hand, new tools in the creative fields often encourage new ways to see and use those tools. A true artist can draw on the sidewalk with a chunk of broken drywall. I would suggest you are supposed to be looking for that student; slick applications can sometimes make slick results in untalented hands, but the untalented will never touch a creative app outside of class again. Give 'em a tolerably decent grade that represents the attendance record and how they listen, and give the A's to the ones who really apply themselves.
... maybe they want to be cartoonists, or game designers, or design can openers or tapered roller bearings. There is only one way to do that, since neither you or I know what that programs will look like. Teach them the concepts, the differences between the napkin and the drawing board versus the mouse and the graphics tablet. In every case, there has to be a visualization; a transfer from the human mind to the intellectual property.
Note that, as anyone who has been out of computing for a period will readily attest, everything you know about applications has a shelf life of perhaps three years. Someone who knows this year's version well but is weak on job experience (read: high school grads) has the more marketable job skills in entry level positions compared to someone who may have been running PhotoShop since dad had a copy of version 3 but has never run CS or better (as a totally random example). But, the latter will pick up the concepts as soon as that latest version is installed on his system and have the more satisfying career.
This window is very much more evident and for lack of a better term, compressed (or maybe better: "accelerated"), with commercial software than Open Source and UNIX/Linux. No one ever forgets what cd and ls means, but if you know OSX 10.3 like the back of your hand, well, most of those applications don't even run on later versions of Mac OSX (some significant changes in the underlying architecture happened with 10.4x). (Creative shops are still largely Mac shops, although it's not really an issue either way). PhotoShop is the kind of application that needs significant compatibility tweaks to work with the various OS flavors, on Windows as well.
On the other hand (and I won't make any attempt to hide that this is own personal preference if you are teaching my kids) if you are supposed to be turning out well-rounded citizens who can adapt and grow rather than perform by rote, then by all means use whatever tools you see fit to use and have on hand; they actually matter little to what you are trying to convey and hopefully, teach.
If you are trying to get students in a creative field to express, and learn to express without fear, their own creativity, one might even be able to make a very good argument that you should not use the conventional tools
I say go with whatever and teach them to use the concepts they're going to be using five years from now, or the day after graduation in a creative field that doesn't involve making logos at the newspaper
Like all skills, creative skills can be nurtured, and creative skills can atrophy. Focusing on the tools themselves tends to encourage the latter, as they surely wil
Hmm, where have you seen Photoshop 7 in any professional office in the past 3 years? -- by that logic you may as well use gimp.
Kids need to learn the concepts. It doesn't have to be with the latest and greatest tools. While The Gimp may not compare to PS, it still teaches you layering, masks, etc. and it is something every kid can get in their home computer. Availability of the tool for a student is more important than a demonstration of something that is beyond their reach except at school. I recommend using software the kids can play with at home and after they complete your course.
How old is the Gimp? I downloaded a copy of it about 6 months ago and it didn't look like it had changed these last 7 years. Photoshop 7's got to be newer than that. Also, how are you going to teach them Flash without a commercial software?
I still use a copy of Photoshop 6 that I got a long time ago. It's not as feature bloated as Photoshop CS2 and 3, which is what I use at work. Did you know that Photoshop CS3 installation takes 1.1 GB of HD space? In all likelihood, you'll need about 1GB of RAM to drive the thing too. In my opinion, your school administrators were correct not to upgrade to bloatware. Stay with teaching Photoshop 7. Gimp is even older than that and in my opinion, not as usable... at least until they implement some of the work that's happening with it now. You don't want students to struggle with the software that much.
Inkscape, on the other hand is not a bad piece of software. I don't know about Dreamweaver.
If you want to bring up a generation of idiot button-pushers who do what they are told and panic if no-one tells them what to do, use the old versions of the popular commercial software exclusively. Note that you may be liable for secondary infringement, if they go on to infringe copyright by illegally downloading software as a result of something they were taught in your class (unless you snitch first).
If you want to bring them up to understand the underlying concepts, use both the old Caged software and modern Free software in parallel (extra bonus points for bringing in an old Amiga with Deluxe Paint III -- the last version before it started getting crap). Explain the similarities and the differences. You can even give out CDs (include the Source Code, always the simplest way to abide by GPL) with the Free software on. (It will even count as Due Diligence, if anyone snitches on you for secondary copyright infringement.)
Obligatory Car Analogy: Think about where to find reverse gear on different makes of car. On a Ford, it's right and towards you; whereas on a Vauxhall (Opel, for our other-side-driving Continental cousins), it's left and away from you. Does that mean that if you learned to drive in a Ford, you have to relearn absolutely everything before you can get in a Vauxhall? Or is it enough just to know that reverse gear, wherever it is, makes the car go backwards -- and what special considerations apply when reversing?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I thought school was about learning the principles about how to do things like build, count, draw, read. I feel you are missing the point if you start training them on specific tools. Would a craft teacher agonise over using a particular make of lathe?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But I am going to disagree with using the open source software (with the exception, maybe, of the GIMP). These old versions are not so old that they are unusable. You can still make animations and websites in Flash 5 and Dreamweaver 2000, and you can still do graphic editing in your old version of Photoshop. Teach them the industry standard. While I am a big fan of open source, substituting Open Souce software when you are trying to prepare students for the real world is, well, stupid. While you will be teaching them the concepts with the open source software, when they go off to art school or try to get a job somewhere and someone wants to know if they know Photoshop, and they say, no but I know the Gimp, they are going to be laughed out of the door. However, if you teach them the older versions of the software, its not going to be too difficult for them to transition to new versions later in life.
Now my answer would be quite different if you were building computer labs across 12 schools and all the students needed to do was to internet research and write papers - yes, by all means, give them Linux and Open Office and save a hundred thousand dollars. But please, don't try giving your students Komposer and try to claim that its an industry standard alternative to Dreamweaver - they are not in the same league. Gimp is a great program, and I use it quite often, and in fact I would encourage that you teach it along side Photoshop, but please do not deprive your kids of learning Photoshop. And Movie Maker is not THAT bad for probably what your students will be doing. No, it is not Final Cut, it is not Premiere, but it will teach them the basics. In fact, if you know that your school district is going to buy Premiere next year, toward the end of the class, may want to consider downloading the 30 day trial version and use that. But, IMHO, the students will learn more by using Windows Movie Maker that they will have on their home computers as opposed to some open source alternative that they will probably never use again.
I'm with you in most of this, but this bit about spacing after periods has me quite confounded. The convention of double-spacing after end punctuation makes for improved (human) readability and is quite old, traceable back to the Carolingian Reforms instituted under Charlemagne to improve literacy rates. If you've ever seen an ancient text from, say, the 7th century, you have some idea of how things were written all higgledy-piggledy, with letters practically on top of each other and one word running into the next. The Reforms standardized writing conventions to call for:
Then came markup, most pervasively HTML, and what with the way text parsers seem to function by stripping any double-spacing, we've now apparently got one space after ending punctuation as the default standard. I must admit I really don't like this artificial convention, as it makes it much harder to skim a text and see at a glance where sentences end, as now we cannot easily distinguish between a period after an abbreviation, and a period to mark the end of a sentence.
So can anyone explain the aversion to double-spacing after final punctuation? Is there any argument based on document readability (for humans)? Or does it all come down to text parser programming?
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
You have nothing to complain about. I am installing Photoshop 5.5 on students computers now, this is the most updated version we have...
Fair enough. But there's "ought to", and then there's "does". Thus the question then becomes, do word processors and page layout programs properly distinguish between punctuation after abbreviations, and sentence-final punctuation? I suspect current products do not (Word 2003 doesn't) -- which leaves it up to the document author to manually make the distinction, if so desired.
Okay. :) Just wandering around the living room, I find the following:
- 1898 edition of Die Heilige Schrift (the Bible in German, but published in Milwaukee WI), double spaces after ending punctuation
- 1908 edition of Landholding in England by Mary A. M. Marks, double spaces
- Unknown (but old) edition of Tom Brown at Oxford by Thomas Hughes, double spaces
- 1966 editions of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, both the older, leather-bound Green Book and Red Book versions, double spaces
- 1969 edition of Perrault's Fairy Tales by Gustave Doré and Charles Perrault, double spaces
- 1972 edition of Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings by Edward S. Morse, double spaces
- 1976 edition of The Value of Kindness: The Story of Elizabeth Fry by Spencer Johnson, 1.5 spaces
- 1983 edition of The Saga of Erik the Viking by Terry Jones, 1.5 spaces
- 1995 edition of Maxfield Parrish: A Restrospective, edited by Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art Brain Trust, double spaces
It's interesting to note that the bulk of our home library (newer, post-internet books) uses single spacing, while older printings tend to use 1.5 spaces, and the oldest use double spacing.Nope, you win. A quick look through Der Spiegel, Time, and Real Simple shows that all use single spaces, as do the numerous catalogs lying about. That said, I have a hunch that magazines might show a similar trend to books, with old issues of Natl Geo, for instance, possibly using double spaces.
I don't subscribe to any dead-tree newspapers, so I have none lying about to check.
Glancing over a few business letters sent to me, I find that some use double spacing, and some use single, regardless of whether the font is proportional or monospace.
Though older books tended to use double spacing more, the trend was not entirely consistent. Older works using single spacing include a 1946 edition of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict, a 1934 edition of The Road Leads On by Knut Hamsun, and a 1962 edition of Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. I have to wonder if the economics of paper-based texts might have dictated that some books were more likely to use single spacing, thereby using less paper? It appears that once the web kicked in, though, all paper texts adopted the HTML standard of single spacing. I've yet to find any post-internet books using double spaces, at any rate.
Yet for all that, I personally find that the older, double-spaced texts are much easier on the eyes... :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Thanks for the info. Thank you for taking the time to inform me. (But I still really prefer to find all the tools in one specific place. YMMV.)
This concept of "gazintas and the gazoutas" confuses and infuriates me. Please explain.
Open source bias aside, the teacher has limited parameters to work within.
Each state has a complex and convoluted set of curriculum guidelines. Each school & school district has more. Forget about federal mandates. Follow that up with the current trending towards crafting an education not merely in terms of single classes but as a progressive journey where each step builds on the previous and you find that the question of switching out software programs is actually a serious one.
My Harvard Graphics expertise is quite useless now. My Aldus Pagemaker expertise increased through each product cycle. Sure, they moved around features and added new ones, but in the end I still can use the latest product.
I'm all for open source like the rest, but until the community college and university these kids will be going to eliminate their product specific classes - a poor kid with no computer will have to use only the programs those places provide.
So either change over the whole world to open source overnight, or realize this is a serious issue for the teacher and his students. Their future is after all going to be defined not by sarcasm, but by what particular program their dream job uses. Read the help wanteds and see what I mean.
First let me preface this by saying that I'm by no means a professional, but I too find myself coming up against GIMP's shortcomings when compared to the competition.
I guess I'm best described as an enthusiastic amateur photographer, who likes to mingle in digital photo editing. I shoot with a DSLR in RAW mode, and for a number of my requirements, GIMP just doesn't cut it. Examples of deficiencies that I've come across (in approximate order of importance to me) are:
I don't want to downplay the amount of work that the GIMP guys have done - it's a great tool - amazing even - but it's fair to say it has some pretty amazing competition, and it has a fair way to go before it becomes the tool of choice for professionals (even given the fact that the competition is infinitely more expensive).
Of course, all that aside, I'm sure that it's more than adequate for teaching students the basics!