> >> Hi Ian: > >> > >> Have you tested this on students/kids? I would be interested to hear of > >> the results if you had done this. > > > > Informally the feedback I get is that it's easy enough to teach young > > children how to make basic shapes and label diagrams etc in either Draw > > or Inkscape. Unfortunately many schools have already bought Fireworks, > > Corel, Xara, Serif Draw etc so it will take time to get them to migrate. > > A big problem is teacher thinking that Paint is a drawing program! That > > is more of a problem than any skills limitations in the children. We > > really should have higher expectations of children. They then live up to > > them rather than down to some low level limits artificially imposed by > > adults. > > > > Thanks. In my 18 years of experience at elementary level and being the > Teacher-Admin designate at school level for the same amount of time (my > volunteer position duties was to network with teachers and help them use > the right tools for the right jobs), 90% or even more of paint/draw work > was to print easy shapes for geometric work or to touch up photos. > Touching up photos has easily overpassed the geometric work on school > computers. We try to encourage kids to use vector programmes but their > needs are clearly those of photo-retouch and .jpg work.
All this begs the question of what learning we are trying to achieve. I have two key goals in ICT 1. Prepare them for change because that is one thing that is certain. 2. Develop the skills and good habits needed early so they don't have to unlearn stuff. For 1. they have to use a range of applications. One of the biggest problems with MSO in schools is that it becomes the only thing taught. Children are not educated, they are trained in using an office suite - that would also be true of OOo/LO if it was used in the same way. Touching up photos IMHO might have surpassed design work but is that really educationally desirable? Look at how often we need to communicate graphically. Draw diagrams in science, simple plans such as layout of a room or garden. I'd say the reason we teach bit map editing is because it is superficially easy, Windows only comes with such tools and teachers generally don't have the design skills themselves. Neither of these reasons is particularly sound educationally. > I am not sure if this makes a difference as to which tool should be > included in the suite. Back in the 80s when Acorn computers were in most UK schools, a good vector drawing program and its engine were built into the OS. This encouraged 3rd party developers to eg provide vector export to spreadsheet tables, graphics etc. You could export a graphic generated from any third party spreadsheet in a vector format, embed it in a text document, rotate it and scale it without loss of resolution. You could take such a graphic into a drawing program ungroup its components and edit it. All of this is possible if you have a standard vector format that is open and documented. This was back in 1988/9 over 20 years ago so this is one example of how Windows and commercial licensing has held back progress. We are so used to it now we just assume that is the way it has to be. If LibO had a standard and openly published svg engine (and Inkscape already has it) just think of the possibilities. You can already access many vector routines in Inkscape from scripted commands so a longer term goal would be to make a LibO UI that fit the svg engine and documented it so third parties could write applets that could access the routines for specific tasks. eg rendering charts and graphs as svg files to export from Calc. -- Ian Ofqual Accredited IT Qualifications A new approach to assessment for learning www.theINGOTs.org - 01827 305940 You have received this email from the following company: The Learning Machine Limited, Reg Office, 36 Ashby Road, Tamworth, Staffordshire, B79 8AQ. Reg No: 05560797, Registered in England and Wales. -- E-mail to [email protected] for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
