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Comments: 7 +-   Old Software or Open Source? on Tuesday December 04 2007, @10:13PM Pakled

Submitted by Pakled on Tuesday December 04 2007, @10:13PM
education
Pakled writes "I teach a high school multimedia course. We were scheduled to get new software this year but due to several pointy haired bosses, no software was ordered. The software I have to teach is Flash 5, Dreamweaver 2000, Photoshop 7 and (god help me) Movie Maker. The question is: is it better to teach old commercial software or their open source counterparts (Komposer, Gimp, etc.)?

Is the steep learning curve and slightly less uniform design worth a little student frustration to teach them software written in the past 5 years?"
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Old Software or Open Source? 7 Comments More /

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  • If you can get the job done with free tools, your students can so you might as well use free tools. Your A students will make a good portfolio no matter what tools you give them. Schools and employers will judge them by that portfolio more than anything else. Your A students will also be able to quickly learn any other tool thrown at them by picky employers. Those same picky employers won't be interested in outdated tools. Everybody else wins too because they learn tools they don't have to buy again th

  • ...the loverly folks over at Adobe admitted [slashdot.org] that the Photoshop interface is getting cluttered and hard to use. I don't think there's necessarily that big a learning curve with OSS.

    Of course, there are other benefits, as well. In addition to the software being more current, it's also free. Why does this matter? Because all of a sudden, your students can install it on their home computers without paying for or pirating it.

    In a similar vein, it's cross-platform. You can run the Gimp on Windows, or Uni

  • Please teach kids how to use things that are completely free. If you feel so inclined, perhaps you would consider releasing your lesson plans under the GNU Free Documentation License, enabling other educators to do the same thing. If your willing to do that, I'm willing to bet that you would get help from the free/open software community to improve your plans, up to and including videos that you can use to give in depth examples and instruction.

    Your lesson plans and materials (released freely) would be near
  • First, let me say I am an open source kind of guy.

    I am assuming that you are teaching introductory to medium level classes. In which case I would recommend you choose which ever is easier to teach.

    The down rev nature of your commercial software or the differences between the commercial and open source user interfaces are not nearly as important as the basics. How draw a line, a box, a freehand line. How to pattern fill. How to use a paint brush, an air brush. How to save the file in different formats f
  • Here is a link to info on the experience of the Kamloops school district (British Columbia, Canada) in converting to Linux. That district has replaced most of its commercial software (including drafting programs, as I understand it) with open source: http://www.sd73.bc.ca/district-operations.php/page/linux-in-education/ [sd73.bc.ca]

    It CAN be done ...

  • As a former vocational instructor for LAUSD, I ran up against similar problems - the class was scheduled, but no software was available... for a month we ran the class on Adobe's Photoshop & Illustrator Demos... when those expired, I tried teaching the GIMP as a replacement. But the students wanted to learn software that they would actually find in a job environment - so attendance plummeted... It doesn't really matter whether the GIMP is almost as good as PhotoShop or not - as long as it's not commonly
  • If you're training students to use a particular piece of software, then I think you need to stick with the old stuff. Yet if you are teaching students to learn how to use a particular type of software, then I think open source would be better (obviously - free newer tech). Also, you may need to consider how your bureaucracy works at your school / district, since if people get wind that you are getting software for free, then you could get your budget cut and then you don't ever get new software. Seriousl
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