Trent W. Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
In that context, I would argue that rather than teaching kids how to use winword -- or bash, for that matter -- you would teach them how to use google, how to RTFM, how to interact with either the FOSS support community or the proprietary vendor's equivalent support channels.
Yes, exactly. Of course, some background technical knowledge is required to be able to understand the manual, the howto guide or the responses from the community. I don't know what that knowledge consists in, precisely, beyond general literacy, reading comprehension and facility with reasoning and problem-solving. For example, the goal of the ideal Linux introductory course would be to take beginners who can reason, read and understand text relatively well and give them guidance up to the point at which they can read manual pages, books and other documentation, acquire new knowledge and solve problems on their own. I don't know whether anybody has seriously tried to determine what background needs to be put in place for this. There's also a role for broad overviews, though - knowing what types of tool are available makes it easier to recognize that one is having a problem that might be solved by looking for a certain kind of solution. For example, I want to find every seven-digit phone number in my document and add a country and area code (the same one, just for simplicity in the example). I might immediately think "regular expression", but someone who doesn't know such tools exist wouldn't.