Dreamcard Roadster in the future???

[Andre Garzia]

On Jun 5, 2005, at 12:49 PM, Marian Petrides wrote:

> All of this is likely true, but there are educational markets (higher 
> ed, adult distance learning, etc.) where the "panacea" of web based 
> course materials is still in vogue and where it might actually work.
>
> Mind you, like everyone on this list (I suspect), I'm well aware of 
> the limitations of web delivery.  But the people above me who make the 
> decisions--the folks who are, frankly, only marginally computer 
> literate--still see it as a panacea. Some of them are "educable,"  
> i.e. can be convinced of the reasons why truly interactive apps are 
> better developed as standalone apps, but many may never see the light.
>
> M

Marian

I used to study in a good high tech university which was a private and 
expensive one (called puc, the catholical university), they had no 
problem there with rich clients and were all for experimentation and 
research, time passed and I transfered to a federal one (public ones 
are better here and they are free). In my new university we have the 
same marinally computer literate folks that you have in there. Brazil 
is a huge country and we're now forced by the federal gov to create a 
distance learning tool for those in rural areas. If you could just see 
the monster they created, imagine this: HTML + Microsoft Word 
documents. I tried to talk to them, it was something along this lines:

	DIRECTOR: "So you think you have a better solution?"
	ME: "Yes, I do. In PUC we had a very high level tool which is far more 
advanced than this one and far easier to work out"
	DIRECTOR: "But it runs in a browser?"
	ME: "No, it runs on itself."
	DIRECTOR: "It needs to run in a browser!"
	ME: "You know, browsers are not operating systems, things should not 
need to run in a browser..."
	DIRECTOR: "Our current solution runs in a browser."
	ME: "Your current solution is an index of word documents and email 
chatting. That is not a solution and will be a problem soon."
	DIRECTOR: "If it does not runs in a browser, we're not interested."

So I guess the problem is true everywere, here they got the national 
motto of suporting linux and the OSS crowd, so they migrated my campus 
all to linux. Now think, how a film school student is able to edit 
videos in linux and how a jornalist student is able to format a 
magazine/jornal without pagemaker/inDesign/Quark!?

I don't have any solution for those cases...

andre


-- 
Andre Alves Garzia ð 2004
Soap Dog Studios - BRAZIL
http://studio.soapdog.org