[OT] debate about Free software for the ACT Government

[Martijn van Oosterhout]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2002 at 09:47:56AM +1000, Alex Satrapa wrote:
> Perhaps the reason high-school kids aren't writing structured documents 
> properly is because they haven't been trained properly.  Maybe they 
> aren't getting enough practice either.  Training people to use a word 
> processor should involve the minimal amount of character-formatting, and 
> focus more on how to put ideas into electronic form, rather than messing 
> about with pretty-ing up a dumb document.

And then there is always the problem of teachers needing to know the stuff
before they can teach the student. Since teachers arn't being taught this
sort of structure, what hope is there for the children?

> With the appropriate training, most people (who want to learn) could 
> learn the skills required to bring order from that Chaos.

Children learn extremely quickly. Adults can learn also, but it's not quite
as straight forward.

> (Re-)Training is going to be part of the costs of moving away from a 
> Microsoft dominated workplace, so it's useful to bring up the discussion 
> about whether old dogs can or can't learn new tricks.  Or more to the 
> point - what are the appropriate tricks to each the dog in the first 
> place.

I think this the same issue as training people in C or training them to
program. Someone who is only trained in C will have difficulty with Perl,
but someone trained to program can pickup new languages easily.

-- 
Martijn van Oosterhout   <kleptog at svana.org>   http://svana.org/kleptog/
> Canada, Mexico, and Australia form the Axis of Nations That
> Are Actually Quite Nice But Secretly Have Nasty Thoughts About America