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SIIA complains schools don't buy enough software
John writes "CNN is reporting on study by a software trade group which seems to claim that schools aren't spending enough on software. This begs a few questions. One of them is, what sorts of software is useful for schools? (Other than Oregon Trail, of course!) " *sigh* How do you explain that money doesn't enumerate all value?
What kind of gullible individuals would trust a report from a Trade Association claiming that we don't buy enough of their product?
Geez...what's next.."NRA says : Americans not buying enough guns"
or...
"McDonald's research finds : people not getting enough Filet-O-Fishes"
This whole thing sounds like an Onion story.
Dj wrote:
It's like complaining that no one does car mechanics but they all do driving lessons.
A perfect analogy. It's a device that most people will use, and it's a complicated device that we need to teach some people the inner workings. That's why most schools in my state (NYS) do offer both car mechanics and driving lessons. Granted most schools don't have the facilities for car mechanics, but they make collective arrangements so that someone with interest can learn.
With computers, most schools seem to have washed their hands of the whole programming aspect. They don't want to deal with teaching kids how to control the computers, just use them. Anyone who wants to learn to program has to teach themselves or wait until college in most parts of the state.
Another important thing about programming courses needs a little background. In case you haven't figured it out (don't worry, most people I've talked to haven't), the reason high schools make such a big deal about Math class has nothing to do with learning math. They know full well that few people require Euclid or Triginometry in the real world. It's there to teach you analytic problem solving, which is an important skill for everyone.
Programming teaches you algorithmic problem solving, which is another important skill for everyone. I think that at least Programming 101 should be a requirement, not a discarded option.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
We have a mailing list, seul-edu, and a website, http://www.seul.org/edu/ that are dedicated to fostering educational applications for Linux. We have a number of programs both pedagogical and administrative and documents (HOWTOs, on-line texts) under development which I think you might find interesting. We can always use help and feedback. Please take a look at what we're doing and then join us!
Doug Loss
Brings back fond memories of the old apple IIe at my grade school. That game will always have a soft spot in my heart. I was the only one in my class that could make it to Oregon in one class period. (The dumbasses went at a grueling pace on bare bones rations.)
There's an idea for a great linux port.
Giving these kids subsidized net access is BAD. First, many can't read or write, let alone construct a thought or express an idea. Second, they're being dumped onto the net without the faintest idea of how things work. Third, not only is every last tax-serf forced to pay for their education that isn't educating, we're forced to pay for their net access (boy, I wish *I* could afford a T1!), AND we are forced to pay for bullshit "censorware" like NetNanny or Cybersitter, AND pay a bunch of librarians to sit around and read students' email. (If a student received or sent encrypted mail, they'd likely be banned from the computers, possibly viewed as a bomb threat in the post-Littleton climate.) But the worst part is that when they're done, they've learned nothing despite all the money that was thrown at them.
In one school, so I was told, no students were allowed to use the net for fear they might access evil information. They bought the connections and computers, but were too cheap to buy forty feet of cable to hook it up. And of course, the idiots bought multi-kilobuck PowerMacs, as if you needed that kind of power for web browsing. In the meantime, just about every place is running Windows, and any student who actually exhibits a clue is labeled a "hacker" and sent to the principal's office. Their "security" consists of having a network password that is the name of the school's mascot, and disabling the "Run" command on the Start menu. ACTUALLY KNOWING HOW THINGS WORK IS DISCOURAGED. We covered all this in the Littleton discussions, remember? Heaven forbid if a student telnets into a legitimate shell account not controlled by the school, or knows how to program in something other than BASIC.
The end effect of subsidizing free net access in the government slave camps known as "schools" will be to do an end run around any freedoms people still enjoy. The politicians who cry for a chicken in every pot and a T1 in every home would just love to have everyone in America given free net access, because then they could claim the net is a "public resource" and therefore needs to be regulated.
We are already paying too damn much, in money and tears, to lock children up and brainwash them. But of course, the Enlightened will lead the crowd with cries for MO' MONEY, MO' MONEY, MO' MONEY. Get rid of the compulsory attendance laws and give people a true CHOICE, and watch a thousand flowers bloom. Continue, and enjoy the spectacle of a boot smashing into a human face forever. Brother, you asked for it!
Fuck Slashdot
This just goes to show the inefficacy of computers in the classroom. Schools are given the computers because of course we have to have computers in the classroom, the president says so. Then the schools have to figure out what to do with them.
They could install all the latest whizzbang software at $500 a seat, or spend nothing and get the same end result. Guess what happens?
Computers don't teach kids. Teachers do. I am not convinced that a computer as a teaching tool is any more effective than a good teacher showing a videotape. The computer is a media tool, just like TV/VCR or an antiquated 'film-strip'.
I had a teacher once who did not know how to teach so he would sit us all down with a film strip, ignore us, and grade papers. We learned nothing. The same thing can happen with a bad teacher and classroom full of pentiums with an 'Explore the rain forests' CD-ROM - its just a hell of a lot more expensive.
Stop wasting money on computers/Internet in the school. Spend the money on paying teachers a respectable salary instead.
-josh
How do you explain that money doesn't enumerate all value?
:)
oh, but there is correlation! if people buy something, that means it has value to them!
but that's not the main point. the problem is not just schools not spending much, but also the industry not providing much of interest.
case in point, i recently talked with an old high school teacher of mine, and at one point he started telling me about the college-level calculus courses they're planning, and the difficulties they have finding the right software. his experience was that the market is pretty much split into silly puzzle-style programs on one end, and mathematica on the other - nothing in between. college freshmen trying to find good tutoring software to help them with calc can relate, i'm sure. no wonder people don't buy programs, if there's little available.
and secondly, regarding the poor quality of school software - i've worked for a while in one of the big public school systems, and educational software costs a lot. depending on software, it can get into upper double- and triple-digits per machine for a specialized program (times several dozen machines per lab). on one hand it's understandable, because a limited-market title is naturally going to be more expensive to offset production costs - but if you're an educator faced with a choice of spending your entire yearly software budget on one or two specialized titles, or several types of general productivity and math/statistics software, which one will you choose? considering present pricing and selection, no wonder we have curricula based around m$ office and mathcad.
which is not to say educators are not to blame. all too often they mistake typing and ms office classes for 'computer science education' - a distinction which i'm afraid is also often lost on college freshmen trying pick a major. labs are often run by people without much it training, who learn as they go. but that is more excusable. teachers are primarily educators, and shouldn't be expected to be necessarily computer savvy. somewhere higher up in the administration there should be people who keep up with technology, evaluate educational software, and advise the teachers, but we've still a way to go until then.
which brings us right back to not having good software to begin with.
My other car is a cons.
As the technology coordinator of an elementary school, I don't buy much software because most of it is pretty bad. I have found that usually software that has good content is usually coded *really* bad (crashes regularly), and when I find software that runs decent (relative term) the content is pointless. It's pretty frustrating.
So, the kids learn how to actually use the computers most of the time rather than having them play useless games all the time. In the computer lab we take machines apart, they learn how to navigate through the file system I created, learn word processing skills, and they make extensive use of the Internet down to 2nd grade. I guess this is most useful for them to learn anyway.
I wish the software we have would run on Linux. Even more I wish the software companies would sell Linux versions of their software... but I realize this is a long way off if it ever happens. I am actually getting some Linux boxes together this weekend to deploy in a classroom or two in the next week or so (primarily for word processing and Internet access).
--SONET
Our School Technology Site
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. --Benjamin Franklin
It's a software TRADE GROUP. They're representatives of the companies that make and sell computer software. Companies like Microso~1, Borland, Adobe, etc. These companies make money by selling software.
This "report" was constructed solely for the purpose of generating revenue for the companies that sponsor the trade group. It's ridiculous. Most intelligent people will completely ignore it. However, some idiotic school board administrators will likely see the report and say, "We should spend a chunk of our budget on new computer software."
And you know what sucks about this? It's OUR money. We pay property taxes that go to the school districts. Even if you're renting, part of your rent goes to the property taxes for the building you live in. Arghh.
They say schools aren't buying enough.
I would actually say that these businesses aren't giving enough software away to schools. Things like OS's, Virus Protection, Development Tools, and Office applications should be offered free to by anyone to any public educational organization.
(Hmmm. Perhaps that statement should earn a "Well, DUH!")
Oh well, it's thinking like that which explains why I'm not a billionaire (or millionaire, or thousandaire).
In my junior year of high school (1985-86), my school offered two computer courses: a one-hour-per-day course in Pascal (taught on original IBM PCs), and a two-hour-per-day course in BASIC (taught on a mix of Apple ][+'s and ][e's). I chose BASIC, because I'd been using it for years already and, frankly, I wanted to have an easy double A to balance out the low grade I always got in PE (due to having many 'non-suit' days since I hated sports). Boy, was I mistaken in thinking that it would be simple!
/do/ with what they have. Teach people the general skills and they'll be OK. But, of course, that gets into the whole problem of educational institutions teaching their students how to memorize useless facts instead of teaching them how to /learn/.
That course turned out to be one of the best I've ever taken. Yeah, it was on already-ancient Apple ]['s. Yeah, it was in BASIC. But the instructor actually knew what the heck he was doing, and he taught us Structured BASIC. GOTO's were not allowed. We had to learn to use WHILE loops. We had to put colons in as whitespace to make the stuff prettyprint. And he was a pretty darned good software tester, and wouldn't let you move on until your program was bulletproof.
All of that came in very handy when I later moved on to C. I would have been lost, otherwise. So I'm still benefitting from the things I learned in that course, even though I took it 13 years ago, even though we were using Apple ]['s, and even though we were using a form of BASIC.
Contrast that with the university I attended, which had modern (for the time) 386's. I took the required introduction to computers course, and learned such 'useful' things as what a CPU is, what the difference between RAM, ROM, and disk space is, and how to flowchart a program (although we never actually typed in a program in that class). The bulk of the time was spent on learning how to use Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS, WordPerfect for DOS, and DBase for DOS.
Of course, I already knew all that stuff, so I was bored out of my mind. Yet the course was required, even though the information was fairly useless.
The point of my stories is that the equipment and software doesn't matter as much as what the instructors
So, yes, it would be nice if every school, college, and university had a computer with a full range of programs and a fast connection to the internet on every desk. But the likelihood of that is miniscule, so it'd be nice if more attention was paid to what is taught than what sort of equipment is used.
-Joe
Well, I think it is obvious to the free sofware crowd that the money spent by schools on software is a lousy measure of of their dedication to computer education. I think a better measure is to check the class sizes of real computer courses and the number of machines available per student in such classes. Also, to note the fall of computer science type classes (read: programming) and the rise of application classes. I think, seriously, that your average computer class these days is an overglorified version of typing 101.
When I was a kid we learned BASIC in junior high and assembler and PASCAL in high school. I was in a high school recently that had no programming classes at all. However, they did have 90+ PC's in their Business Ed department, all running Word and Excel.
Obviously something is wrong here.
Basically do not trust the public schools to educate you or your children. all of my kids (5 of them!) have a 386,486or pentium in their room to play with (Only linux on them except for the 7 and 8 year old girls.. they need to run barbie software, but it dual boots) and I require Linux/programming work to be done by them. My 17 year old admins my business (ISP) and programs in perl/C/python/bourne-shell and has written a device driver for linux (for a hardware card I designed) my 14 year old is learning C now after PERL and sysadmin stuff. and my 11 year old is learning the sysadmin end and Perl. why?? so they will kick the butts of every other person they come up agains in the world, they will knw what computers are all about (my 17 year old died laughing when he was told by a MS tech that NT is harder to learn than Unix and will take alot of learning to master... he mastered NT server in 2 weeks and then asked me to delete that crap from his hard drive)
:-) everything we need is FREE online :-)
There is a lesson here.... School sucks, live with that fact, but you dont have to live with it, you can self educate/ educate your children. I spend $3K per year on my childrens computer education for hardware and some years I double that. software?? we buy nothing except games
BTW: my kids still cant kick my butt in quake, but they do whine because I play on the Qake server....
I'm a 15 year old Sophmore at a school that is considered "rich" in Amarillo, TX. Your tax dollars and the computers that it buys are being wasted. We have about one Macintosh computer per classroom, and the teachers are the ONLY one's who ever use them. The only times I have ever used a computer at school is in the library, and for Keyboarding IA. I'll be taking Computer Science next year, on 486 Wintel machines. The one's for keyboarding class are I think 386's, possibly 286's running Windows 3.1. All the burcratic crap about a computer in every classroom is a lot of bull. Almost all of the teachers just use them to compile our grades, that's it. And most of them have no clue how to use them. A few do need/know how to use computers, but it's a small minority. We have, I think, 4 computer labs, two of them are for just any classroom that wants them, the other two are for computer specific courses. Everyone of those computers suck, and run outdated software. For example, we have semester tests coming up, so my Spanish teacher decided to go to the computer lab to run some Spanish programs so it would help us study. Needless to say, the programs are incredibly uninteresting, and do not help in the least bit. I would learn much more if the teacher just reviewed us. As for internet connections, I've only been on once during school. Our whole class went to the library (the only place where you can get on the net) to look up housing prices in Houston for a project. I guess it was useful, but geez, I'm a sophmore and only used the internet once at school? I thought that I would get on a lot more than that listening to Congress. The computer situations in schools suck right now. They rather give their extra money to the athelets than the computer nerds.
I manage a computer tech department at a fairly large college (which anyone with half a brain can figure out with one click! :). I have a few comments on the story and on the followup comments:
Regardless, if the SPA ever did audit us or any other school, they should be shot. That story is a big crock and it almost seems like they are trying to set up a justification to starting campaigns to audit schools for software piracy just because low expendiatures on software just must indicate software piracy internally.