Andy's comments and positioning...

[Judy Perry]

Dan,

I'm gonna snip stuff I'm not going to reply to.  I'll start off by saying
that I'm no programmer at all.  I'm an educator.  I just bought your book
(okay, so that part's off-topic).

> So to me, you build interest and market momentum for a new programming
> tool by tapping into two markets: education and hobbyists. Both have
> the potential to become professionals. And both are larger than the
> total market of professional programmers *who are willing to consider a
> new tool*. That audience, as many companies have found out the hard
> way, is much smaller than it appears.

--Amen!

> That said, I also tired quickly as I did that study for Intel of
> educational institutions and educators who (not universally but often
> enough to come to my attention): (a) demanded free or low-cost stuff
> even though they recommend textbooks that cost hundreds of dollars,
> some of which the recommending profs wrote; (b) garnered substantial
> government grants whose proceeds could have been put to use in buying
> stuff for students rather than paying assistants and buying travel &
> entertainment to attend conferences; (c) demanded extensive tech
> support; (d) in general, acted as if the world owed them a living. I
> saw a lot of that. A lot.

True enough in most circumstances, I suspect...  I told my students not to
buy the textbook and instead buy Rev.  I get no grants, attend no
conferences, have no student assistants and try not to bother people too
much.

But part of the reason why what you've said about educators (and
probably alot of them in higher ed) is likely true is that they don't know
diddly-squat about computers.  What's worse is that they don't want to
know. As I keep hearing, "it's just a tool, like any other tool.  I don't
need to know mechanics to drive my car so why should I know about hardware
and software to implement computers in education?"  The people saying
these things have Ph.D.'s in instructional design and technology.

I know this because I'm currently finishing up my master's in
instructional design and technology.  Let me  start by about telling you
about some of my instructors.  The first one is given to making grandiose
claims about how the real digeratii all know that VBA stands for "Visual
Basic Analogue" and that Hypercard was "a cheap rip-off of Visual Basic".
He doesn't know what metadata is.  He thinks that the California
department of motor vehicles page is an outstanding example of webpage
design (http://www.dmv.ca.gov/dmv.htm -- okay, so it doesn't quite merit
an award on 'webpages that suck', but I think it's simply hideous
looking).  And he thinks he's a techie.  And he's so glaringly not.

The program's coordinator thinks that Microsoft FrontPage is (a) a
professional web development tool and (b) that it's cross-platform, and,
finally, (c) when I tell her it's not, she all but calls me a liar.

Our web developer instructor last term apparently doesn't grasp the fact
that not all web browsers are equally javascript compliant, and so
javascripts that ran in IE and Netscape but not in Safari were
automatically dismissed.  He also neglected to tell the class that all
these little asp things he was teaching us to do in FrontPage won't work
on all servers.  But at least we know that the proper document extension
for an asp webpage is asp (actual final exam question).

That's about all we've learned about actually using technology itself.
Instead, we've spent countless hours talking about what it feels like to
be a tree that feels bias (actual textbook example) and so on..

We'd have a better chance if credential-granting institutions required
actual computer literacy and authoring classes instead of one more class
on why girls can't finish tasks and need more virtual makeover software to
turn them into computer scientists (another actual example).  Their new
big thing is Microsoft Producer.

This is the problem.  After going through the trial-by-death of making two
projects in Director and having received ZERO instruction on how to use
it, these students-cum-teachers hate hate HATE authoring programs and
revert back to the comfort zone of using PowerPoint and Producer.  And
they feel pretty good about this because, as two of our instructors
actually published in a book, it's certainly an improvement over the
morning PA system's daily announcements' implementation of multimedia in
the classroom...

Pass the tagamet... :(

Judy