Mark wrote:
On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 02:40:22 +0000, John Rumm
wrote:

On 05/03/2012 19:30, Rod Speed wrote:
John Rumm wrote
Rod Speed wrote
And if you want them to be able to do more than just trivial documents at work, they certainly need more than you
propose with Word too.
A bit more than a couple of weeks, perhaps - but certainly not years of it.
We dont do years even with the trade schools.
Your not in the UK I take it? The so called "ICT" (a name which means
nothing to anyone outside of education), literally can get taught for years!

All the way through primary and secondary education (Ages 5-14).
And there a GCSE equivalent in ICT so kids can take this up to age 16.

After all, what sense does it make that kids leave school after doing the full time at school, without being able to
use something as common as Word for the sort of thing Word gets used for at work by so many ?
You mean writing one page letters, three page memos, and documents
that might use high tech capabilities like auto numbering! ;-)
Plenty of them do rather more than just that.
Has everyone had a sense of humour bypass tonight? ;-)

Yes plenty do more, however a sizeable majority don't. As IT hack Guy
Kewney used to say something like "people are in the habit of demanding
tomorrow's technology today, when in reality many would be incapable of
using yesterday's technology next week!"

True.

Plenty of times I have worked in high tech engineering companies, where
the engineers were slogging over 2000 page cross referenced design and
test specs or similar documents or crappy geriatric PCs, while all the
new decent ones were on the desks of the secretaries or middle managers
punting out memos etc.

Yep.

Bit rash to claim that no one takes years full time to teach
say Word, but if anyone is that stupid they should be shut down.
Depends on what you mean by learn word (or any other word processor.
People can use it for years and never get past the basics, because they
lose any enthusiasm for learning once they know "enough to get by".

People can write documents using a word processor without knowing how
to use it properly. For example I regularly receive documents where
the author has used spaces and tabs to do indents. :-(

Indeed. I was once asked if there "was anything simpler I can use than
word?"

I showed him how to set up an icon on for the text editor.

He was delighted.

"PEREFCT! that's all I wanted! An Electric Typewriter that prints out as
many copies as I need"



My youngest seems enthused by the RP where an "ordinary" PC does not
so he will be getting one. If he uses it then I would deem it worth
the money.


great. Its probably the cheapest way to get a linux machine to play with.

OTOH when I grew up schools didn't have computers at all and I was
entirely self taught. Hasn't done me any harm ;-)

Ditto. Oh, I did do a FORTRAN course in 1867..


--
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.