Another side benefit of good old ASCII - text to speech! Or braille displays! Heck, you can read it on any device, changing it to any resolution you want quickly and easily.
Regarding liberal arts courses requiring only "regurgitating facts." If you are studying the books and then going to lecture to listen to the professor spew forth the same material you just read, then you have encountered a shitty university. I went to one of these crap colleges for a few years before I transferred to a college closer to home, a smaller state school in California. The political science department at the smaller and cheaper California State school was ten times better. (Caveat: Not all of the departments are on par with the Political Science department).
For example, a class at CSU entitled "The State and the Family" surveyed the political ideology of classics such as Plato's Republic and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland. Class time consisted of a 15 minute lecture followed by an hour and a half of instructor-led discussion. I still remember contrasting Plato's guardians with the mother culture presented in Herland. I can't recall one specific thing I learned from the mega-lectures at the other colleges, besides what I learned on my own.
I took another course on state politics by a professor running a campaign to get elected to the state legislature. Real-time, real world, hands-on learning.
The advantage afforded by attending class v. studying on your own lies in the discussion - honing your arguments and bouncing ideas off of the professor in an engaging environment. You won't get that just anywhere.
I installed Red Hat 7.3, with my mom's permission, on her machine. She had installed Red Hat 5.2 a few years ago, which she amusingly refers to as the "Giant Penguin" because she couldn't get XWindows configured correctly and so she had a 320x200 desktop with a giant penguin the only thing visible.
She likes her KDE desktop right now. That said, I asked her what she didn't like. Too MUCH choice was one of the first things she mentioned. She has 4 CD-Burning programs, none of which work correctly for everything she wants to do - so I spent this weekend uninstalling and leaving her with what I thought of as best-of-class apps for their particular job. And of course KSokoban which she is addicted to. She doesn't WANT 45 programs that all purport to do the same thing, it's too confusing when she's trying to learn just the basics.
The other big problem was learning to install software. She gets confused and downloads source tarballs..or gets an RPM but then doesn't know what to do with it. Double-click installs that could apt-get all their dependencies would be GREAT.
And thirdly, lack of apps...I'm talking end-user apps. Landscaping software because she wants to redesign the yard - had to boot into Windows to do that.
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Another side benefit of good old ASCII - text to speech! Or braille displays! Heck, you can read it on any device, changing it to any resolution you want quickly and easily.
Regarding liberal arts courses requiring only "regurgitating facts." If you are studying the books and then going to lecture to listen to the professor spew forth the same material you just read, then you have encountered a shitty university. I went to one of these crap colleges for a few years before I transferred to a college closer to home, a smaller state school in California. The political science department at the smaller and cheaper California State school was ten times better. (Caveat: Not all of the departments are on par with the Political Science department).
For example, a class at CSU entitled "The State and the Family" surveyed the political ideology of classics such as Plato's Republic and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland. Class time consisted of a 15 minute lecture followed by an hour and a half of instructor-led discussion. I still remember contrasting Plato's guardians with the mother culture presented in Herland. I can't recall one specific thing I learned from the mega-lectures at the other colleges, besides what I learned on my own.
I took another course on state politics by a professor running a campaign to get elected to the state legislature. Real-time, real world, hands-on learning.
The advantage afforded by attending class v. studying on your own lies in the discussion - honing your arguments and bouncing ideas off of the professor in an engaging environment. You won't get that just anywhere.
I installed Red Hat 7.3, with my mom's permission, on her machine. She had installed Red Hat 5.2 a few years ago, which she amusingly refers to as the "Giant Penguin" because she couldn't get XWindows configured correctly and so she had a 320x200 desktop with a giant penguin the only thing visible.
She likes her KDE desktop right now. That said, I asked her what she didn't like. Too MUCH choice was one of the first things she mentioned. She has 4 CD-Burning programs, none of which work correctly for everything she wants to do - so I spent this weekend uninstalling and leaving her with what I thought of as best-of-class apps for their particular job. And of course KSokoban which she is addicted to. She doesn't WANT 45 programs that all purport to do the same thing, it's too confusing when she's trying to learn just the basics.
The other big problem was learning to install software. She gets confused and downloads source tarballs..or gets an RPM but then doesn't know what to do with it. Double-click installs that could apt-get all their dependencies would be GREAT.
And thirdly, lack of apps...I'm talking end-user apps. Landscaping software because she wants to redesign the yard - had to boot into Windows to do that.