quote:Originally posted by Olaf:
But to return to the Teachers Associations demand: Aren't teachers expected to be somehow intelligent? This demand looks to me like they were sitting on a road demanding a bakery in the next village should give them free bread because they are hungry - while there are fruits on all trees on both sides of the road...
I’d really like to use a /.-like name for the Teacher’s Association here but …
Did anyone notice that they do not demand to use (Free) Linux (or other) software, but free Microsoft software!
Obviously neither of you posters has ever been a teacher. I mean a “real” teacher, not a privileged foreigner teaching in a language school.
Most public school teachers in most countries spend A LOT of their money on stuff for their classrooms or for doing their job – things that you would expect to be provided by your office if you had an office job. The pay isn’t usually up to par with what the same person could command in the business world, either. I’ve personally supplied my own computer, monitor, tape recorder/CD player, countless bits of paper, markers, props, toys, etc., and used my own computer and my own (legally purchased) software to produce teaching materials for my classes (this was in the US at the high-school level, in a PUBLIC school, too!)
In the US M$ offers an “academic discount”, which they offer here too. The problem is that here it isn’t enforced very well, and I doubt that most people know about it.
With the Internet what it is today, why couldn’t M$ place a copy of their products on the Web and restrict access to, say, teachers with a password? The teachers would then be required to save their stuff to that server, so that theoretically M$ could “monitor” what they were using the software to do. School-related content, fine; personal stuff, and your password gets cut off. A bit paternalistic for my taste, but if the teachers really want the software for school, that might be one solution.
Or, for heaven’s sake, provide “outdated” versions of the software for free? Who needs every microscopic M$ update and upgrade to their products? I got along fine with the version of MS Word that was out in 1986, the one that fit on a single 5.25" floppy. Sure, it’s nice to have sophisticated tables and insert movies in a document, but for 99% of the stuff people do it’s excess.
Sorry Terry, but I have to (at least partially) disagree. You may be right saying that teachers in some locations spend a certain amount of their own money to support their classes, but that has almost nothing to do with the topic of this thread. Almost, because you will probably imply that teachers have to spend their own money to buy certain software.
Actually, this was not the point of most posters in this thread. The point is that there is a lot of software freely available, one just needs to open his/her eyes to see. You can get a whole operating system for free, including lots of application software. If you don’t like it (because the differences between Unix-like systems and Windows seem just too many to you), there is plenty of free software for Windows too. The only problem is, there will be only few free software in Chinese. No matter how free or “unfree” software is, someone has to write it. And if there is no Taiwanese willing to write such a software, then there will be no such chinese software. Though actually, many times I can’t understand why people really need chinese versions.
A good example is ACDSee: What is it used for? To view image files. Yes, it has a few more features, but who is really using those? So what people are doing in most cases is double-clicking on an image file to call it and the viewer software up. So where is Chinese (except in the image file name perhaps) involved in this process?
You asked for “outdated” MS software - very interesting. Why must it be MS? Apple is very active in the US school market and they provide older versions of their OS for free on the web. MS does not - why? Because people might stick to that old software instead of permanently updating. But I’m afraid “old” or “outdated” software was not what the Teachers Association had in mind. They will surely ask for Office XP, although most of their layout needs could be satisfied with Word 5.0 - I mean the DOS version, not the camouflaged 2.0 taiwanese Windows version.
In my opinion, the whole thing is a knowledge problem. MS has made most people here (not only here, but in Taiwan MS’ power is extreme) think they will by all means need the newest version of Word and only of Word - to manually and individually format each paragraph of their document. A template? What is that?
Back in Germany, I had been helping taiwanese friends with their Ph.D. thesis. Guess how one of them made the content directory: He went through the whole document and noted each page number where he found a heading on a sheet of paper. Of course, editing the document once meant he would have to do the whole procedure again. It took me two days to get his thesis somehow properly formatted - on Staroffice, not on Word…
It has been noted in a number of countries that teachers (in average) have less knowledge about computers than their students. While this can be understood, in some countries people with a certain educational degree are expected to be able to gather knowledge they will need for a certain task by themselves. If those people are only able to wait for someone (maybe a salesperson in this case) to come and tell them how and what to do, then they are not any smarter than a betel nut lady, they just memorised more. That is even more dangerous in a place like Taiwan, where the old confucian teaching style is still kept alive and students usually will not doubt their teacher.
So again: The demand of that association is nonsense. There is freely available software, but the teachers will probably have to get out of their chair and grab it themselves, because the kind of software that gets laid right into their hands will usually not be free of costs. If they think that free software is not enough, they are welcomed to contribute in the creation of new software. Of course, not everyone is a programming wizard, but many projects are translated into several languages and may just lack a person to translate into Chinese. Such a task should not be too hard for a highly educated person a teacher is supposed to be…
PS: Terry, I know you are somehow familiar with computing devices, with most of the above I did not mean you…
quote:Originally posted by ironlady:
Most public school teachers in most countries spend A LOT of their money on stuff for their classrooms or for doing their job -- things that you would expect to be provided by your office if you had an office job. The pay isn't usually up to par with what the same person could command in the business world, either.
Terry
I personally know several local teachers here in Taipei who pull in $200,000NT+ per month (this is not their school salary) by extorting money from their students’ parents. “Your son needs to study extra to pass his exams…he can join my study group at night for only $10,000NT per month”. In addition, gifts of expensive watches and paid vacations are common. Also, did they ever change the tax laws here so that teachers actually PAY tax? Do they still have special supermarkets reserved for government employees? Regardless, I’d have to say that financially, Taiwanese teachers have it pretty smooth.
I don’t know about Taiwan teachers, but teachers in other countries (i.e., the US) haven’t got time after dealing with paperwork and “professional development” requirements to then figure out a whole new operating system. I think that’s why most people only think about Microsoft products.
Maybe we know different teachers…the high school teachers I know in Taiwan don’t make anything like that amount of money, nor do they extort money from their students’ families. I’m not saying there are not teachers like that, but I doubt very much they represent the majority of teachers.
Ironlady has it bang to rights, as far as I’m concerned. Linux and all those other things are fine for geeks that care about computers. The rest of us have no more interest in computers than we do in paper notepads.
I’d no more think of working on my computer than I would of working on my car – if its broke, I pay someone to fix it. So Microsoft is expensive. It works. At least it does for me. I sit in the office and do work. My colleague sits in the office and configures his damn notebook. What a geek! If he was living in UK I swear he’d be wearing an anorak.
If my mechanic, for example, told me of a product he could install so that I’d no longer have to pay Nissan for parts, but I’d have to spend ages learning how to use it and essentially become a mechanic myself, I’d laugh all the way out of the shop.
Anyway, this thread has got nothing to do with the various merits of Linux over Microsoft – its about idiot teachers who want something for nothing. And they’re not the only ones – what about the legislator who complained so loudly when the justice minister said he’d crack down on government agencies using pirated software: “But waa waa waa! Legit software is so expensive it would cost too much to buy. Why can’t we just go on using stolen stuff? Surely there must be someone we can bribe or intimidate?”
Well, he said most of that, anyway.
There is a version of Unix that is easy to use, runs MS Office (perhaps the best version ever) and doesn’t crash – it’s called Mac OS X. Before you dismiss this suggestion out of hand, you might want to give it a try.
I’ve been running for two weeks without a system crash on X. Granted IE still yacks at least once a day, but all I have to do is restart the program.
quote:Originally posted by roc:
I've been running for two weeks without a system crash on X. Granted IE still yacks at least once a day, but all I have to do is restart the program.
I just don’t get it – what are you DOING with your computers? Hitting them with hammers? I’ve been using “normal” stuff – Word, ppt – some music stuff – Cubase, Cakewalk, Acid, Soundforge, etc. – for years, and while I of course get crashes like everybody else, its like maybe a few times a YEAR, certainly nothing to warrant a change of OS, especially if I can look forward to once-a-day crashes.
Sounds like you got ripped off on your computer to me.
quote:Originally posted by ironlady:
I don't know about Taiwan teachers, but teachers in other countries (i.e., the US) haven't got time after dealing with paperwork and "professional development" requirements to then figure out a whole new operating system. I think that's why most people only think about Microsoft products.
Terry, as I wrote before, it is not necessary to be a computer wizard if you don’t want to spend too much money on software. Even Linux is easily installed these days and there is a lot of free software for Windows too. I don’t ask every teacher to become a sysadmin, some (PE?) will not have to do with computers at all. But if a teacher HAS to do with computers and NEEDS to use them ON HIS/HER FIELD for the classes (or maybe even IN the classes), then he/she should at least understand the situation ON THAT FIELD.
Let me give an example: Someone teaching art wants to give a course in computer art. Part of that course are 3D rendered pictures. Now the teacher could go to a computer shop and ask for relevant software. In Taiwan, the sales people will probably suggest 3DMax, Lightwave and Bryce (probably even in this order…). If the teacher does not do any further investigation into this subject, he will tell his students to get one of those three programs - probably from the guys on the street outside Nova, because none of those programs is mainstream and so they aren’t really “cheap”. If he had searched for material himself, he would have found POVRay, Blender and others. POVRay is a great piece of software (check www.irtc.org for results), but the shop clerk can’t make money with it and so probably has not even ever heard of it.
It is like people asking in newsgroups for informations they could have easily found if they only had read the FAQ of that newsgroup or gone through the “pain” using a search engine.
Terry, basically the only thing I’m asking for is that teachers (after all, they are said to be “intelligent”) will try to understand things related TO THEIR FIELD OF WORK. Someone teaching languages does not need to know MathCAD, but he should know there is more than Word and especially that there are other text file formats than “.doc”…
quote:Originally posted by ironlady:
I don't know about Taiwan teachers, but teachers in other countries (i.e., the US) haven't got time after dealing with paperwork and "professional development" requirements to then figure out a whole new operating system. I think that's why most people only think about Microsoft products.
Terry
Again…it’s a free download. If my wife, who majored in Spanish at Ming Chuan and now works as an art agent can figure out how to use Linux in an evening, I’m sure a university educated teacher here on “Silicon Island” can manage to grasp it.
just don’t get it – what are you DOING with your computers? Hitting them with hammers? I’ve been using “normal” stuff – Word, ppt – some music stuff – Cubase, Cakewalk, Acid, Soundforge, etc. – for years, and while I of course get crashes like everybody else, its like maybe a few times a YEAR, certainly nothing to warrant a change of OS, especially if I can look forward to once-a-day crashes.
I consider myself just a user, perhaps power-user if you like - mainly MS Office applications like Word, Excel, Power Point and Outlook - at the same time (after all, it’s supposed to be multi-tasking). I worked 7 years for a big telco which supplied me with different PCs over the years (of different brands, namely IBM and Compaq) and all hat problems no matter which version of the OS. A crash a day was normal but more than that wasn’t unusual, and the (in)famous blue screen was just a question of when, not if.
Neither the suppliers nor our IT experts managed to solve this. Needless to say I wasn’t the only one “suffering”.
BTW: MS Outlook is the biggest slow-downer there is …
But the worst thing is when an application crashes and the OS can’t cope and crashes, too, including all other applications and open documents, sometimes not even allowing a reset and surely no shutdown, so power-off-on is the only way to restart.
I learned to value the auto-save function by that.
Now I am running XP and it seems to be much better but IMHO it just took too long and too much money (of the private users) to get there.
Sun Microsystems has just announced a deal with the PRC’s Ministry of Education to provide StarOffice 6.0 free of charge to schools and universities throughout China.
quote:Originally posted by Dan Jacobson:
> All that Blue Screen of Death stuff never occurred to me on
GNU/Linux, year or no year. You seem so accepting.
Accepting? Whatever – I just don’t really give a toss as its so unimportant to me. I also don’t give a toss why the computer crashed, cos it always starts again.
If ever it doesn’t, I’ll simply pay some geek to fix it, just as I’d pay some grease monkey to fix the car if it was broke. Problem solved. Easy. And the ice in my gin & tonic didn’t even have a chance to melt.
Of course I know many people who enjoy working on their cars/computers/stamp collections, etc., but me? I’d far rather be doing someting else – anything else!
Oh, and check it out – you with your fancy unilever program or whatever, you can’t even post quotes properly. Great program, Dan!
Oh, and check it out – you with your fancy
unilever program or whatever, you can’t even
post quotes properly. Great program, Dan!
I am just using the minimum effort I can in
interfacing with this proprietary software
interface (UBB), so I wrote some flimsy scripts
so I could read and post offline. On netnews I
use supercite, black belt of citers. e.g.,
LSD> I just want to mark the tone with a letter, not to change the
LSD> spellings of the finals. So, if we use letters for the 4
there even was a gnus interface to UBB, but that
involves gnus authors keeping up with UBB
version changes… time would better be invested
supporting free software.
By the way, you will agree that the effect of [
QUOTE ] seem to eat up a lot more screen real
estate than "> ".
You said my quoting is bad.
I say I use the blackbelt of quoting software, supercite
John> John originally wrote this
John> and this as well
Jane> Jane said that John didn't know
Jane> what he was talking about
And that's what I think too.
The vice minister of economic affairs here has just discovered that MICROSOFT IS DOMINATING THE MARKET in Taiwan. He is forming a task force to study ways for local manufacturers to make that software stuff so that people will have more choices…
Are only morons eligible to run for office?
quote:Originally posted by Mai Longdong:
Sun Microsystems has just announced a deal with the PRC's Ministry of Education to provide StarOffice 6.0 free of charge to schools and universities throughout China.
So - all the National Teachers’ Association has to do is ask Sun for the same deal on the grounds that Taiwan is a province of China. It worked for me on the mainland when I asked for cheap tickets and presented my Taiwanese student ID card. =