🚀 go-pugleaf

In <hadgraft.305.728276115@eng2.eng.monash.edu.au>
hadgraft@eng2.eng.monash.edu.au (Roger Hadgraft, Civil staff, ext 4983) writes:

| Besides, the user gives up what is quite possibly a GUI 
| environment on the PC for a dull, command line environment on Unix or VMS. 

Not necessarily, macs and pc's can run X servers, just create a
suitable X client on your unix or VMS host and they'll barely be
able to tell the difference.

Also, whether this matters depends on what they're wanting to do, if
the aim was to telnet somewhere anyway, then a command line env is
what they're going to get at the other end, having it briefly at the
intermediate step doesn't sound like too much of a problem.

If what you want is some other service, then the authentication need
is not so great, you could easily create proxy-servers on your local
hosts that allow certain known-harmless protocols (or connections to
harmless ports) through from the un-authenticated labs, then the
existance of the hop in the middle would be barely noticeable.  Its
really telnet (and rlogin, and friends) that enable essentially
uncontrolled access to anything that needs to be authenticated.

| We have 
| to ask ourselves whether we are trying to pass computer literacy to as many 
| students as we can, or are we trying to maintain the mystique?

If you're putting students near a pc, and expecting computer literacy
to result, you have even more questions to ask yourself.

This would be analagous to sticking your students in front of
sumperman comics and expecting (regular) literacy to result.   It
just won't happen.

As with literary literacy, where you need exposure to a wide and varied
selection of literature to become truly literate (even including some
minor exposure to superman comics no doubt), so with computer literacy
you need wide and varied exposure to a number of environments, not
just one.   And the exposure should start early, before the "I know how
it works now, this is good, everything else is bad" attitide sets in
(ie: don't start in just one environment and then expect to be able to
introduce others later - that's too late, variety must commence early).

kre