Monthly Archives: August 2006

However modest your life, odds are that at some point you’ll need to do some basic design or page layout. Whether for a business card, a brochure, a newsletter or a “lost dog” poster it helps to understand basic concepts … Continue reading →

In a previous life I was an elementary-school teacher and one of the first people I knew of to try and bring Internet into the classroom, yet today I usually encourage parents NOT to get their children computers. Here I explain why and a very little bit about where I think computers fit into pedagogy and children’s lives.
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There are a lot of words and TLA’s (three-letter acronyms) that computer people throw around and use all the time, frequently using the same word (such as “airport” or “wifi” or “802.11”) to refer to the same thing without explanation. … Continue reading →

If the word processor is an electronic replacement for the typewriter, spreadsheet programs are electronic ledger paper, allowing people to neatly arrange data and make calculations of all kinds. A spreadsheet allows you to arrange data into tidy rows and columns, then do amazingly consistent (or bewildering) things with that data. Following up on on our previous word processing basics article, this is a third in a series on basic program types.
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