Hello all Today I'll deal with the effectiveness of computer education. This would also touch on the suggestion of Subramani, of using, the old screen readers. During the good DOS days, there was a huge demand for programmers and those who were savy in it. So, the emphasis was on software development. Computer was not percieved as an assistant and a tool. unthinkable in any form of entertainment except the computer games. Computer was seen as an end rather as a means to an end. This was the big bottleneck for effective teaching in computers.
All said and done not all could get to thinking like a computer and hence most were really not suited for computer training at that point of time. I had done all my computer education in the meanstream courses and even there one could get only 1 to 3 % good programmers. During the days when I was teaching mostly the blind and some able bodied, I found similar results. I must confess, the results of teaching computer training was not generating very good results. The level of involvement was not very good either. DOS was totally command driven and hence one need to know each and every commands. It was text based and generally there were not much of UI problems. The screen readers were pretty efficient in providing all the information one needed to know. Some were even smart to trigger different action when values changed in certain location on the screen. The screen reader had an easier way to seek information. There were reading the content from the video RAM which had a fixed address.DOS was a single user system and only one task could be performed at a time. However the OS allowed for application to be memory resident, therefore, this was used for the screen readers to eves drop on the video memory. The cenerio changed in mid 90's with the Windows also comming in. The 32 bit processing totally changed, in the range and variety, the computers were used. soon it was turning to be a tool capable of doing multiple things almost simultaneously. It was this time the effectiveness of imparting computer education proved very benificial andeffective. We got good results all over the country during these days. I'll call it a day now and touch on the time using computer networks. Bye until then. Harish. To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
