-=> Quoting Ron Mcdermott to Rick Pedley <=-
 RM> I take your point, Rick, and I agree that there are places
 RM> to go with programming (although I suspect there will be a
 RM> lot more of the programs-writing-programs software around
 RM> in years to come)... My concern here stems from the way that
 RM> things went in high school - Computer courses became just
 RM> programming courses under the aegis of the math department.
Programming should be a separate course then, like it is in some
schools. I think what tends to happen is a guy who taught Bookkeeping
(gotta love that word, three double letters in a row) for 20 years
suddenly has to teach a computer course because it has been lumped
in with Data Processing, part of which involves programming. It
isn't hard to see that something the _teacher_ finds difficult to
learn and teach might fall into the "who's gonna need this stuff?"
category. I've seen the same happen in any other course: if it isn't
a teacher's pet topic, or he doesn't happen to know much about it,
subconsciously it is less important, it gets de-emphasized, and more
time than usual is spent somewhere else. If it were desktop publishing
(which has been successfuly taught to squirrels) instead of programming,
there'd be no forests left, so I guess we should be thankful :)
 RM> The choice of champions!  You're aware, of course, that the
 RM> new release (late summer or early fall) will be the first
 RM> OS to incorporate speech-to-text and voice navigation?!
 RM> Maybe this should be required in schools!?      ;-)
Software was bundled with the very first SoundBlaster card to give
voice commands in Windoze, but I've never heard of anyone interested
in even trying it out. Besides, it's an open invitation for a
disgruntled employee to walk through a busy office shouting:
"echo y | del c:\ *.*" ;-)
You have to admire IBM for their doggedness, despite their complete
lack of marketing skills. It'll be interesting to see whether the
new release increases OS/2's market share, though I suspect it is
already far too late, as it is for the Mac.
coffeerp@adan.kingston.net  Û] COFFEE MUG SOFTWARE Û]
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