Slashdot | Teachers Need an Open Source Education.
A rather good set of readings showed up on Slashdot today; I was especially interested in this one concerning Apathy, Lies and Fear.
In the articles listed above, the issues arise when teachers do not have the knowledge of what something does. It’s a situation of brand loyalty taken much too far.
Sometimes, there’s a story that causes people to stand up and say something. This is one of those moments. I caught this article when I was looking at my news stories in the morning on Slashdot (http:/slashdot.org):
Woman Claims Ubuntu Kept Her From Online Classes
stonedcat writes “A Wisconsin woman has claimed that Dell computers and Ubuntu have kept her from going back to school via online classes. She says she has called Dell to request Windows instead however was talked out of it. Her current claim is that she was unaware that she couldn’t install her Verizon online disk to access the Internet, nor could she use Microsoft Word to type up her papers.”
(pulled from http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/15/158216)
So here we have a prototypical case where a computer user who is unfamiliar with a new operating system has trouble with her computer because it’s not what she’s used to. I can accept that. Then, I proceed to read the article (Something rarely heard of on Slashdot…)