[Haifux] Student complaints.

[Ohad Lutzky]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 11:34 PM, Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda
<ladypine at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Yossi,
>
> Regarding the portable document editing, I suggest introducing the students
> to latex at an early stage. In addition to being portable, it is also a
> handy (and sometimes mandatory) tool for writing papers.

With Beamer it also becomes a very powerful tool for slideshows. Using
LyX will reduce students' complaints :)

> From the other angle, I believe CS staff should be a model regarding open
> standards, by publishing documents (either slides or exercises) in
> open,portable formats such as pdf or simple text.

Part of the problem is that students like (or at least used to like)
using the lab for all of their Technion work, and unfortunately many
courses still distribute MS Word files. Also, many students
collaborate on exercises with people not in the lab, and receive MS
Word files from them.

> Ii suggest also to make the students aware of decent distributed version
> control tools (I'm aiming at a talk about hg in Haifux, somewhere down the
> queue).

I can reprise my git talk as well, if it helps.

> Another tool with appeal on Linux is valgrind, which can make the students
> prefer working on Linux, because of the time saving they get.

I'm not sure how relevant this is, as (IIRC) the projects in this lab
are in Java.

-- 
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only
animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and
what they ought to be.
 - William Hazlitt

Ohad Lutzky