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Comment IT literacy for general audience - SCALC (Score 1) 462

Since the course is for a general student, I don't see a focus on programming or computer hardware as most appropriate.
As an alternate, I would suggest SCALC, the open office spreadsheet program, as a good platform for several activities:
1. Learning to compute numerically - calculate sales tax, etc.
2. Learning how algoritum work - sort, binary search can be visually illustrated beautifully within a spreadsheet
3. Real life program solving tool - Post a real life problem to the student; have them analyze it; rephrase it to put in a spreadsheet; check the answers.
4. Graphs and formulae - links direclty to analytic geometry classes
5. Macro - automation which starts to provide motivation into programming for those interested.
6. Statistics - for advanced students

This is much for useful for the avearge student than any narrowly focused programming course.

Comment Space for readability (Score 3, Interesting) 814

If you are doing type setting, by all means use 1 spaces. But as you cut and paste your texts into different programs, you may be pasting into different default type faces. Sometimes it's proportional and sometimes it's monospaced. So why not use 2 spaces to be on the safe side? It's simple to programmatically replace 2 spaces by 1 space any way, if necessary. Let's be considerate of our readers rather than swear allegiance to a rule learnt in our youth.

Software

Submission + - Review: OpenOffice.org 2 Guide

lisah writes: "While OpenOffice.org (OOo) continues to gain ground as a viable option to Microsoft Office, author Solveig Haugland has written a second thorough and comprehensive OOo user's manual aimed at both new and power users. Haugland's new OpenOffice.org 2 Guide offers tips, tricks, and pointers for all five of the suite's applications (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, and Base) using clear teaching techniques and plenty of screenshots. According to the reviewer, the Guide's biggest drawback lies in the inexplicably pared down scope of topics Haugland chose to address. Still, at over 500 pages, this Guide should answer all but the most obscure questions about OOo."
Enlightenment

Submission + - How our brain 'sees' the future

Roland Piquepaille writes: "No, I'm not talking about people who say they can predict the future, such as fortune-tellers. On the contrary, this post is about a process that our brain is using extensively and routinely. When you think about your next meal at a favorite restaurant, your brain 'creates' images for you. Now, researchers at the Washington University in St. Louis have found that we're using the same areas of our brain to remember the past and envision the future. Even if this doesn't lead to practical applications, it indicates that people who clearly remember stories from their past are better equipped to imagine their future than people suffering from amnesia for example. Read more for additional details and references."
Software

Submission + - Where the FSF is heading in 2007

lisah writes: "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has typically been considered a think tank whose members work on somewhat esoteric issues like licensing and the GNU Project. According to an article at Linux.com, however, 2006 saw the FSF reach out to the free software community at large for the first time. They have also become an 'openly activist organization' with informational campaigns like BadVista and the anti-DRM project DefectiveByDesign. Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF, says not only will those campaigns contiue in the new year but also predicts 2007 will be a 'huge' year for the organization."

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