From: Randy Edwards 
John Hopkins  wrote:
 > I think it's important for students to be given the latest technology to
 > learn from.
   For public high school students, I generally disagree -- there's no need
of it in many cases.  Given the realities of school funding, there's many,
many other higher priorities than buying the latest version of Microsoft's
operating system and the god-awful hardware resources to support it.
   At the high school level students are far better off learning concepts of
computing and those can be taught on most any 386 or 486 just as well as they 
can on a P200.
 > After all, many businesses do use Win95 (for example) even
 > though they could probably get by with Win31.  If students weren't
 > taught how to use '95, then where would they be expected to learn it?
   This depends on who you're teaching, what you're teaching, and what your
objective is.  If you're running a course entitled "Word Processing with
Microsoft Word" then yes, you should be teaching a very late version of Word 
under Win95 or NT.
   However, if you're teaching a basic word processing course you're far
better off to have a variety of word processors -- ranging from an old
text-mode DOS word processor to *any* type of modern GUI WYSIWYG word
processor (and, BTW, Corel's WordPerfect suite is a much better bargain at
educational prices).  If you teach concepts of word processing students 
can learn the evolution of word processing and won't be totally lost when 
they walk into an office which uses, for example, Lotus Ami Pro instead of 
Microsoft Word.
   The same thing goes for teaching about a GUI.  If you're teaching GUI
concepts a user can switch between the Unix X window system, or OS/2's
Workplace Shell, the Mac OS GUI, or any version of Windows without too many
problems.  They just have to understand the concepts of a GUI and poke
around to find out how to accomplish what they want.
   But too many tech ed teachers instead teach *only* Windows or *only* a
Mac and get into the mindset of telling students "Well, right click here,
select that, and then it'll do what you want."  Once the student moves to
even a slightly different GUI they're lost because they don't understand any
concepts and their rote-memorized "right-click, select this" sequence is
broken.
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