Plea to Educators: Don't Force a Format Down Students' Throats

Great article! Thanks Editor Tracy.

All the problems governments, enterprise, the Royal Navy, users in every country and probably in the offices at the HQ of the Rogues of Redmond, are rampant in academia. Every new semester brings students with unprotected machines. Every vacation gives the IT admins the willies. All that down loading, problems. All that carry- around media, problems.

And, the big AND, in the public schools, primary, secondary and post secondary, its the tax payers who are footing the bill. Paying for the extra IT help, the extra programs to protect the other programs, the students who are destroyed by a fail of their software. The cost to students is obscene. Anyone who wants to beat the system by doing on line courses, you are not going to run Linux, no sir, no madam.

Well said, Colonel Panik. Well said.

As I have read the postings on the website of the television station that reported on the student I noted three primary things: 1) The devolved Linux/Ubuntu users couldn't resist making uncivilized responses. 2) Some Linux/Ubuntu users responded with intelligent information and dialog. 3) After the report there was a positive response from the ISP, the school and from Dell.

I am thankful for #2 and #3. The folks in #1 are part of the problem, just as the "entrenched" ones are.

Indeed.

Give me an example of any situation where a large number of individuals participate and 100% of what is said is reasonable and friendly. It's a Web 2.0 problem having nothing to do with Linux.

> It's a Web 2.0 problem having nothing to do with Linux.

It's worse than that. It's a people problem, not a problem with any software implementation or framework. A certain percentage of people are jerks. Give a large enough number of people, one or more jerks will show up and make their presence known. This is as much a problem in the real world as it is online. It's just that the real world has had a lot longer to develop mechanisms for dealing with it.

@bigg @jdixon

I agree with both of you. However, in this instance my focus is narrowed to the incident reported and that does have a lot to do with Linux.

This was more than a few jerks-- it was half the freaking Internet. I guess it's a lot more fun to flame and jump on an already oversized pigpile of an extremely trivial issue, than to spend one-tenth as much time doing something useful. I have nothing but scorn for all the idiots who treated this as the Big Deal of the Century. Probably the same lot that thought jumping all over the "Karen" (the Austin teacher) story was a fun recreational thing to do too, and that includes most of the tech press. Make that scorn, disdain, and detestation. Hey, let's bring back the stocks. We'll only put people in them who commit trivial offenses, and treat them as capital crimes. Yay!

It's definitely worse in the tech world; you don't see this kind of massively psychotic behavior on gardening forums, or truck forums, or gun forums, or woodworking forums, or sewing forums, or any other place where normal people hang out.

Did I mention disgust? That too.

> Hey, let's bring back the stocks. We'll only put people in them who commit trivial offenses,

I thought the stocks were for trivial offenses. I'd have to check my history books to be sure.

> ...or gun forums,...

I don't know if I'd go that far or not. Gun folks can get rather zealous. And not all of them can be considered "normal" by most people's definitions of the term.

You might get flamed by gun aficionados for holding incorrect political views, but not for being ignorant of gun knowledge.

The tin foil hat wearing gnome that whispers secrets in my deaf ear says that Microsoft got a black eye with the Royal Navy and had to make sure that some bad Linux news came out to counter.

Quoting:It's worse than that. It's a people problem, not a problem with any software implementation or framework.

Yes. But the Internet has a funny tendency of lowering jerkiness threshold, for some individuals very significantly.

Quoting:This is as much a problem in the real world as it is online. It's just that the real world has had a lot longer to develop mechanisms for dealing with it.

Yeah, it's called "a punch in the face".

> Yeah, it's called "a punch in the face".

That's one of them, yes. :)

>> Yes. But the Internet has a funny tendency of lowering jerkiness threshold, for some individuals very significantly.

Yes, the Internet gives people a false sense of anonymity. They will say things online that they would never say in front of a camera.

> But the Internet has a funny tendency of lowering jerkiness threshold, for some individuals very significantly.

*A-choo*!!

Quoting:*A-choo*!!

Na zdrowie! :)