Christopher Sawtell wrote:

On Wed, 29 Jan 2003 18:33, Yuri de Groot wrote:

(p.s I just found out that in a web design course at school that i HAVE to
use Dreamweaver. Damm Winblows lovers stupid #$%#$^_*(&0 <ramble ramble
Ramble>

Dude, that sucks.
I'd expect a web design course to teach the principles rather than one
specific tool.

Your school needs to be told that the word 'Education' is derived from the Latin phrase 'e duco' which means 'to draw out', i.e. Education (note big E) is supposed to be the process of drawing out the best from the pupils. imho most schools world wide fail abjectly.

Many schools conveniently forget this and muddle-up the meaning of education (small e) with schooling and vocational training.

Rubbish. I have three main objections to this sort of argument, which I see trotted out far too often.

1: Education cannot take place outside of a context. In this case, a web design course cannot happen without using a tool to generate HTML.

This tool better not be notepad or vi. In that case, the pernickity syntax of HTML would get in the way of learning web design - the course would (probably) degenerate into a course on vi, or on HTML syntax, completely ignoring the important stuff - for example, that frames are evil :-)

2: Teachers cannot be expected to cater for arbitrary tools. Think about it - some teacher has had to learn to design web pages him/herself. She has not been paid anything extra for this increased skill, nor given any significant amount of time or resources to assist. You cannot expect her to do it all again with another toolset just because someone doesn't want to use Dreamweaver. It is not her job to cater for everyine's favourite tools.

IMO, Dreamweaver is pretty horrible at many things: some of its manipulations of tables are downright bizarre. But at most elementary tasks it is at least as good as Frontpage. I wonder why the school isn't sing Frontpage: after all, that's free and they had to pay for DW.

3: Arguing the meaning of a word from its derivation is meaningless, and a cheap shot. Meanings change. Are you aware that the word "bimbo", by derivation, refers to males?

Apologies to the list - let's nip this discussion in the bud right now; it has little to do with the LUG




Reply via email to