Dan, I'm gonna snip stuff I'm not going to reply to. I'll start off by saying that I'm no programmer at all. I'm an educator. I just bought your book (okay, so that part's off-topic).
> So to me, you build interest and market momentum for a new programming > tool by tapping into two markets: education and hobbyists. Both have > the potential to become professionals. And both are larger than the > total market of professional programmers *who are willing to consider a > new tool*. That audience, as many companies have found out the hard > way, is much smaller than it appears. --Amen! > That said, I also tired quickly as I did that study for Intel of > educational institutions and educators who (not universally but often > enough to come to my attention): (a) demanded free or low-cost stuff > even though they recommend textbooks that cost hundreds of dollars, > some of which the recommending profs wrote; (b) garnered substantial > government grants whose proceeds could have been put to use in buying > stuff for students rather than paying assistants and buying travel & > entertainment to attend conferences; (c) demanded extensive tech > support; (d) in general, acted as if the world owed them a living. I > saw a lot of that. A lot. True enough in most circumstances, I suspect... I told my students not to buy the textbook and instead buy Rev. I get no grants, attend no conferences, have no student assistants and try not to bother people too much. But part of the reason why what you've said about educators (and probably alot of them in higher ed) is likely true is that they don't know diddly-squat about computers. What's worse is that they don't want to know. As I keep hearing, "it's just a tool, like any other tool. I don't need to know mechanics to drive my car so why should I know about hardware and software to implement computers in education?" The people saying these things have Ph.D.'s in instructional design and technology. I know this because I'm currently finishing up my master's in instructional design and technology. Let me start by about telling you about some of my instructors. The first one is given to making grandiose claims about how the real digeratii all know that VBA stands for "Visual Basic Analogue" and that Hypercard was "a cheap rip-off of Visual Basic". He doesn't know what metadata is. He thinks that the California department of motor vehicles page is an outstanding example of webpage design (http://www.dmv.ca.gov/dmv.htm -- okay, so it doesn't quite merit an award on 'webpages that suck', but I think it's simply hideous looking). And he thinks he's a techie. And he's so glaringly not. The program's coordinator thinks that Microsoft FrontPage is (a) a professional web development tool and (b) that it's cross-platform, and, finally, (c) when I tell her it's not, she all but calls me a liar. Our web developer instructor last term apparently doesn't grasp the fact that not all web browsers are equally javascript compliant, and so javascripts that ran in IE and Netscape but not in Safari were automatically dismissed. He also neglected to tell the class that all these little asp things he was teaching us to do in FrontPage won't work on all servers. But at least we know that the proper document extension for an asp webpage is asp (actual final exam question). That's about all we've learned about actually using technology itself. Instead, we've spent countless hours talking about what it feels like to be a tree that feels bias (actual textbook example) and so on.. We'd have a better chance if credential-granting institutions required actual computer literacy and authoring classes instead of one more class on why girls can't finish tasks and need more virtual makeover software to turn them into computer scientists (another actual example). Their new big thing is Microsoft Producer. This is the problem. After going through the trial-by-death of making two projects in Director and having received ZERO instruction on how to use it, these students-cum-teachers hate hate HATE authoring programs and revert back to the comfort zone of using PowerPoint and Producer. And they feel pretty good about this because, as two of our instructors actually published in a book, it's certainly an improvement over the morning PA system's daily announcements' implementation of multimedia in the classroom... Pass the tagamet... :( Judy _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
