Hmmmm... I was going to stay out of this but inasmuch as others have stepped up to the plate it seems it's my turn to become flamebait.
I, too, have a friend. She's an educator (boo, hiss!). She is lucky to have survived three or four rounds of layoffs at her university, part of a larger chain which has seen its funding decreased by 20% and more over the last couple of years even as enrollement has increased. Her department is less lucky. The discipline has been seeing record low enrollments nationwide, which has translated in her department's losing something like one full-time faculty position per year for several years. Her department's ftp server was cobbled together from parts of various broken-down old computers. Her computer lab is so old that, when she agreed to allow a university photographer to photograph her class for various promotional brochures, the photographer was sufficiently moved to shoot IN THE DARK without the lights on and focused on a student using the overhead because showing the lab machines themselves would have been an embarassment for the university. Up until a year ago those machines had only 128 MB RAM. And her department had to go begging to higher-ups for the money for it. Oh, and that old ftp server? It's corrupted several of the critical files and applications used for her class. Well, application isn't the right word, really. The proper word is "demo" because the department doesn't have the funds to buy applications such as image editors, animation software, 3D modeling software, and sound-editing software needed for a multimedia class. And, so my friend has had to spend many hours crawling the web looking for demo replacements. And, as she tells me, it's tough going inasmuch as her lab still runs OS 9. She doesn't get paid for this time. The scanner doesn't work. It takes 5 minutes to print a text file over the network. Students needing to edit video or convert from one video file format to another use the instructor's QT Pro license. Those wanting to use a midi keyboard or a Wacom drawing tablet use those belonging to the instructor. By now you have probably figured out that I am my own best friend. ;-) And while I am not sounding the call for a dozen weepy violins, I suspect that other educators on the list might well tell similar tales. Judy _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
