[KLUG Members] Technology 5:01

[Tony Gettig]

Hi folks,

I just have to drop a line to the list to say how impressed I was with
the Technology 5:01 last night at District 211 in downtown Kzoo.

KLUG was definitely well represented! In fact, after my first couple of
conversations where the topic of Linux naturally came up, I purposefully
started asking everyone I met what they thought about Linux. With the
exception of one person (a long time friend kind of stuck in his ways),
*every single person* was either already familiar with Linux (using it
or seen it deployed) or had a favorable impression of Linux and admitted
they needed to learn more about it. 

Probably one of the most amazing Linux related conversations I had was
with a gentleman from WMU. I can't remember exactly how many, but they
are converting 2 or 3 labs completely to Linux this summer. This is in
the CS program at WMU. That alone is exciting news to me. But it got me
thinking about what we are doing where I work. Now then, I have no say
or influence whatsoever in what we teach. But what are we feeding to the
colleges? Curriculum for things like OpenOffice needs to be developed so
that it can be taught in the schools. Right now, everything they teach
where I'm at is MS driven. It's easy for the teacher...buy the workbook,
specify the textbook, hand out the templates on the cdrom, teach. We
need something like that for OpenOffice and other end user technologies.
<rant>
Are we teaching MS Word or word processing? Are we teaching MS Excel or
spreadsheets? Are we teaching MS Publisher or desktop publishing? Are we
teaching MS VB or software development?
</rant>

All in all, a great time last night. The next one was announced to be
June 5. I didn't catch the location though.


-- 
Tony Gettig
http://www.penguindude.com
GBY!