[Year 12 Its] OT-Design and IT

[Con Zymaris]

On Wed, May 10, 2006 at 06:05:38PM +1000, Frank Merlino wrote:
> 
> Hello All,
> I have a dilemma...we are reviewing our unit offering for 2007, we 
> being the Technology Faculty. Currently there is a cross KLA (Arts/Tech) 
> unit that is largely based on using PhotoShop to design a chocolate box 
> and then the students make it. Along the way they learn how to use 
> PhotoShop and they learn about design, the unit being largely designed 
> by a graphics teacher.
> 
> With VELS, we have decided that the Technology faculty will become the 
> provider of IT units with a technical flavour, eg. rather than 
> cconcentrating on the product, we would design units that teach stdents

...

Might I add one more aspect for consideration.

If your aim is to teach Photoshop, by all means, teach Photoshop. 

But if your aim is to truly teach graphics or design through software,
then you must also offer the students an alternative as well - and an
orthogonal alternative at that. By this I mean another graphic application
which can achieve the same results, but does so in a manner different to
Photoshop.

This will provide your students with an essentially Platonic 'forms' view
of what a graphics program is. They can then distil (for themselves) 
the essence of what is graphics image manipulation as opposed to what is 
merely Photoshop.

Here are three free such programs which run on Mac, Windows and Linux:

 http://www.gimp.org/
 http://www.xaraxtreme.org/
 http://www.inkscape.org/

Cheers,

Con Zymaris

- CEO, Cybersource Pty. Ltd.
- Director, Open Source Industry Australia, Limited.
- Convenor, Open Source Victoria (A Government-funded industry cluster.)

-- 
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Con Zymaris <conz at cyber.com.au> Level 4, 10 Queen St, Melbourne, Australia 
Cybersource: Australia's Leading Linux and Open Source Solutions Company 
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