[KLUG Members] Technology 5:01

[Adam Williams]

>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. 

I had a very similair experience.  I only talked to about four people I'd 
never met before,  and three of those people brought up what they were 
doing with Linux.  The fourth guy sold phone gear.

>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. 

It would be *REALLY* nice if we could get this guy to come and talk at 
KLUG about this.  Anyone know his name?

>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>

As an admin I can answer that:  Nothing!  Even recent college grads are 
mostly hopelessy unquallified to use technology beyond the rudimentaty 
basics of word processing and spreadsheets.  Even databases snow them.  
They aren't even using a miniscual fraction of what functionality even a 
spreadsheet can provide,  because they haven't been taught to deconstruct 
a problem and integrate the solution into their work flow.  They (or 
almost all of them) brute-force/grind-out everything,  it is supremely 
frustrating.

Even developers/web-guys haven't been taught version management, 
documentation techniques, component techniques, etc... But man!  They sure 
know how to use this specific IDE!

Let us please issue 100 times more tech-worker visas!  Because America 
isn't producing, except with rare exception, anybody worth a train load of 
rotten lettuce!