[ale] Uruguay beats us. Laptop for every child

[Jim Kinney]

Kind of like teaching "Drivers Ed" at school. Do you want the kids to
learn to _drive_ or learn to drive Ford Escorts.

While I'm a HUGE advocate of seeing other OS's that are not open for
inspection purged from the face of mainstream global computers, I
really want to see Linux systems as the dominate system in schools
with Microsoft and Apple taking a distant backseat.

Word processing is word processing. Conceptually it's all the same.
Ditto for spreadsheets and presentation tools - the mainstay's of
modern computer uses in adult life. So let's teach how to use a
computer and various computing tasks and let the kids pick their
favorite platform to use.

We all know what that will turn out to be for general purpose stuff. :-)

Apple systems for video (Linux is catching up!) is a must for a while.
I would argue in favor of a pure microsoft system (no firefox, no
third party apps at all) just for the experience.

It's nice to hear about another school and the same process being
fought and won.

Total World Domination one school at a time!

On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 10:04 AM, William Fragakis <william at fragakis.com> wrote:
> Running Sugar.
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8309583.stm
>
> '"We have a lady who's been teaching for 30 years and when they gave us
> the computers and the training, she asked for leave because she didn't
> want to have anything to do with the programme. Later she changed her
> mind and now computers have changed the way she teaches."'
>
> 'The laptops have an open source Linux operating system with a user
> interface called Sugar. It has attracted some criticism from detractors
> for not being mainstream.
>
> 'However Mr Brechner believes that children should learn computer skills
> regardless of the software available. Blind children were being taught
> on a Microsoft Windows operating system, he said. '
>
> Exactly what Daniel Howard and I saw when we introduced K12LTSP at
> Brandon Elementary.
>
> wf
>
>
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness