Richard Pearman writes: >I was recently reading a prospectus for a local colledge. They had courses on thing like Photoshop, Vista and Flash. I got the distinct feeling that they were charging several hudred dollars to teach stuff I could probably figure out for myself but taking one of these course may help get a job. It also occured to me that there were no courses on GIMP, Lynux, SVG etc..
Hi Richard, Well, perhaps they're worried that if they don't use things like Photoshop, VIsta and Flash, they couldn't charge as much for tuition and students wouldn't value their education as much :) Seriously though, often times, colleges offer courses like "data structures and algorithms" and we teach the course using some operating system and some programming language. The students often then say that the course is a course in UNIX or in Java, while the faculty members think of those details as just vehicles through which one can approach the "loftier" concepts. It has always been such an unfortunate accident that so much of computing actually requires computers. Turing, Von Neumann, Ulam, Tarski and Goedel were not so constrained, as they invented the mathematics that later became the theory of computing! >If you want to touch up holiday snaps, then GIMP is a lot cheaper than even Photoshop Elements. Alternatively, if you work for a high powered computer company, or are an unemployed geek, you can modify GIMP or Blender or something and do very complicated things with it. I generally use something like GIMP or Photoshop to introduce image processing issues: dots per inch, bits per pixel, compression, convolution, layering, anti-aliasing etc. -- stuff relevant to other parts of the Computing curriculum. Employers tend to sometimes focus on "practical" skills and a perpetual argument goes on within departments that teach computer science: how relevant to the "real world" of employment should our courses be? Some argue for more independence from employer's concerns and argue that higher education is the place where we are free to teach "best practices"; others argue that too much ivory tower and theory makes our graduates unsuitable for the marketplace. (Generally the suitability for the marketplace seems to be driven more by economic than curricular concerns, with our graduates currently in very high demand, which they were not a few years ago.) Generally, we in higher education are more likely, than those in the marketplace I think, to teach GIMP, linux, and SVG, in part because we are not strapped to "enterprise" solutions, and in part because we have the freedom to tinker. You'll find a very high level of Linux adoption in higher education I think -- and in the US, I would speculate, that this adoption is very much higher than our practical-minded friends in the business sector. I would suggest the UK and continental Europe may be even more open-minded in this regard. >I suspect that part of the problem with getting acceptance for fee software and non-propriatory formats is that you can't get certified for them (or can you). Is anything being done about this? I'm thinking about taking this issue to a lefty group and see if they're interested in setting up courses on using fee computer software. Curricular certification in the US is called "accreditation." Most prestigious schools have generally ignored it in the past, but as the bean-counter mentality percolates downward and outward from the politicians, even the prestigious schools are getting more caught up in the business of <soapbox> "no rubric left behind" : tallying every possible educational outcome (whether measurable or not) so that mounds of paperwork may be amassed to justify deforestation and continued job satisfaction of edubabble bureaucrats. </soapbox> In truth, the accreditation groups look more kindly on programs that diversify students' exposure. A bachelor's degree program in the US that exposes its students only to Windows/Vista is quite unlikely to gain accreditation, I would suggest. Most employers that we've worked with display less interest in certification in platforms A B or C than in students having well-rounded skills with problem solving. That is what the university experience (in contrast with the training school) is supposed to provide. The notion is that technology Q will likely be gone shortly after the four year student graduates, so let us focus more on learning how to learn. The larger employers generally seem to agree, though Mom and Pop web sites tend to need very specific skill sets owing to the idiosyncracies of their computational context, and do not have time for their one or two IT employees to do much OTJ custom-training. For years, I've used SVG as a vehicle for teaching a fourth-year course in web interface design. From my perspective, the learning curve is a bit steep since the student has to be fairly well-grounded in graphics, in programming, in DOM methods, in HTML and CSS, and in event handling via script, before they are able to handle such a course. On the other hand it frees their thinking from the standard out-of-the box widgets that come pre-built in HTML and that is a good thing for the objective of thinking about interface design. I'd be willing to guess that there are lots of places in your educational neighborhood that would already share your convictions here. cheers David [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ----Yahoo! 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