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Subject:Re: What do you think? From:"Huber, Mike" <mrhuber -at- SOFTWARE -dot- ROCKWELL -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 18 Jul 1997 13:21:00 -0500
I studied computer science at the University of Illinois
Champaign/Urbana. You might recall that school from HAL's lobotomy scene
in 2001. Great computer school.
They taught computer science without teaching about computers or how to
use them. The program was about theory, and we were expected to handle
the implimentation details on our own time.
That made the program much more valuable to me than some "real world"
focus that would have spent time on the technology of the time, most of
which has been obsolete for a long time now. There is education that is
universal and permanent. Plato gathered information from SMEs and
presented it in an organized and logical fashion while keeping his
target audience in mind, a couple of millenia ago. There is other
education that is conditional and ephemeral. A college that (for
example) teaches Freshmen how to use Word 97 as anything but a tool for
coursework and an example of a class of tools is cheating it's students
- the software will only be used in a subset of work environments and
will be obsolete before the students graduate.
That being said - a student planning on a career in tech anything had
best be using a computer regularly.
Mike Huber
mike -dot- huber -at- software -dot- rockwell -dot- com
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Theresa Marchwinski [SMTP:theresma -at- ATTACHMATE -dot- COM]
>...
>My general impression is that the author(s) is trying to defend an
>approach to teaching technical communication that does not include
>teaching about computers or about how to use them. The author(s) could
>perhaps make a case for ignoring computers in a writing *course*, but
>could not make a very successful case for ignoring computers (at least
>as tools for writing, editing, indexing, formatting...) in a technical
>communication *program*.
>
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