May 21 2007
bashingEd
Explanation:
chris-judsons-emac:~ cjudson$ man bash
NAME
bash - GNU Bourne-Again SHell
SYNOPSIS
bash [options] [file]
COPYRIGHT
Bash is Copyright (C) 1989-2004 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc.
DESCRIPTION
Bash is an sh-compatible command language interpreter that executes commands read from the standard input or from a file. Bash also incor- porates useful features from the Korn and C shells (ksh and csh).
chris-judsons-emac:~ cjudson$ wnb bash
noun: A vigorous blow; “the sudden knock floored him”; “he took a bash right in his face”; “he got a bang on the head”
chris-judsons-emac:~ cjudson$ wnb prompt
noun: (computer science) a symbol that appears on the computer screen to indicate that the computer is ready to receive a command
noun: A cue given to a performer (usually the beginning of the next line to be spoken); “the audience could hear his prompting”
verb: Serve as the inciting cause of; “She prompted me to call my relatives”
bashing education is more metaphor than literal and is a call for thinking within education and its use of technology. As a metaphor, bash is a reference to the shell in many *nix systems. Instead of relying on the GUI-eye-candy of the point-and-click way of computing, returning to the command line is way of thinking, a way of returning to complete control and with that control, more power.
As it applies to education–and especially technology–we really need to return to the main focus of any tool: how to use that tool for learning. In short, let’s uncover the rhetoric, the slick slideware presentations, the spiffy 4-color mailers that promise and promise, and return to the days of the command line. Enter a command, and things happen. Once we’re comfortable with entering in a command, we can string a couple of commands together and then perhaps do some scripting within education.
This is not a site to bash education for fun; education has been (as some have said) the whipping boy of politics for over a generation. The intent of the site is to round out the conversation of using technology for learning and trying to sift through all the GUI to get back to the CLI of control…because when the interface of Windows or OSX (well, maybe not that) or X-windowing, the command line and a shell such as bash can make the computing experience clear.
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