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Source: (consider it) Thread: Can you type?
Lamb Chopped
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But then the problem is, what do you do with the little buggers until they turn 15? [Snigger]

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la vie en rouge
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I respectfully disagree. Children have much more flexible hands than adolescents/adults and there are some major advantages to starting to learn an instrument younger. For strings, the ideal age is between 5 and 10. A tiny percentage of people who start later end up becoming professional musicians but it is a tiny minority.

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jedijudy

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I agree with la vie en rouge. I also think this is a fascinating tangent which is probably worthy of its own thread!

And, back to our home keys!

jedijudy
Heaven Host giving a gentle steer to the thread.


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GCabot
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quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
Given that, introducing the children to what could be done with a computer in terms of art, research, editing text, presentations, making animations, photo processing, desk top publishing, use of spreadsheets, & manipulating simulations, seemed much more appropriate than just learning touch typing, especially when many primary children lack the coordination to do it successfully.

I do not see the point in introducing children to things like making animations, spreadsheets, etc. As you implied earlier, whatever programs they use will be completely obsolete by the time those skills are useful. Furthermore, many of these are niche skills.

Touch typing will always have a place. Typing on a touch screen is vastly inferior in terms of efficiency, and there are many places where voice dictation is impossible: the classroom, the office, the library, etc.

I also do not understand your coordination argument. We were taught the recorder at seven and I started piano lessons around the same time. Children of that age are easily coordinated enough to learn to type.

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Firenze

Ordinary decent pagan
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quote:
Originally posted by GCabot:

Touch typing will always have a place.

Well you say that, but just because virtual keyboards are 'less efficient' does not mean they will not win out. Have they hindered the rise of texting? What happens is that people have adapted language to facilitate the technology - txtspk lol!

I can touch type - but because the iPad offers me such much more in terms of convenience and portability, the 'place' of TT in my life will only be for composing serious amounts of text eg writing a book (which doesn't happen that often).

Horses for courses.

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GCabot
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quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:
quote:
Originally posted by GCabot:

Touch typing will always have a place.

Well you say that, but just because virtual keyboards are 'less efficient' does not mean they will not win out. Have they hindered the rise of texting? What happens is that people have adapted language to facilitate the technology - txtspk lol!

I can touch type - but because the iPad offers me such much more in terms of convenience and portability, the 'place' of TT in my life will only be for composing serious amounts of text eg writing a book (which doesn't happen that often).

Horses for courses.

Sure, for casual use, you may be correct, but not in the business world, where worker efficiency is paramount.

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Penny S
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You learned recorder successfully young. There are children who do. But in my experience, there are many who cannot, and subsequently resist trying when their coordination has caught up. I was initially pleased when our feeder school started introducing recorder to whole classes, as I thought that would make it easier for our children to progress. What happened was that the children with less physical ability were dropped, and then believed that they couldn't learn the instrument. We had fewer children taking it up. I wouldn't want that to happen with typing.

To base what is taught to primary age children on what they might need on entering the workplace at 18 is to follow the pattern of Gradgrind.

Two examples. When I was 10 or 11, I had to learn to do long division of Imperial measures. I suppose that if I had married a man with an estate, I just might have needed the ability to calculate in bushels and pecks, but it was extremely unlikely. For any who did, by the time they were old enough, they would have been calculating in decimal measures and using calculators.

My sister taught maths near to a car plant. She was told that certain aspects of trigonometry were essential for pupils who would go on to work there in working out the shapes of bodywork sections. (Not, of course, all the pupils.) So she went down to the factory to see the process in action. What actually happened was that the workers used angle templates, and they knew their stuff so well that they could reach for the right combination almost without looking. Firstly, they did not do trig. And secondly, they had learned their advanced skills on the job.

Touch typing is obviously an important skill for people doing typing in their employment. That is a subset of people in employment. For those who are going to need it, it is perfectly possible to learn it at secondary school age to a high standard. That was what was done in the past when many more people were employed in typing pools. It has not become appropriate for primary schools simply because of the availability of keyboards for that age group.

Children of primary school age need a lot of diverse activities in their lives in order to learn. There isn't the time to spend on repetitive boring tasks that can equally well be learned later.

Also, the activities I listed earlier would be used to deliver other parts of the curriculum, not as stand alone "niche" activities. History, maths, geography (the Powerpoint presentations I referred to were showing what had been learned about rivers), literacy (the newspaper module was particular well suited to DTP), science (we made interactive keys for sorting creatures found in the garden). There was a lot of productive learning going on, and there simply would not have been the time available to do it if we had had to spend it doing typing practice, with the half class for whom we had keyboards. (I suppose we could have had half the class practising handwriting while the others accessed the machines.)

[ 15. June 2014, 08:54: Message edited by: Penny S ]

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Curiosity killed ...

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Typing is a fairly boring skill that just needs practice to master. Fortunately I don't think Gove will prize it enough to want that skill included in his very pared down, very academic new curriculum. It's probably worth offering as an alternative activity, like a lunchtime club, in schools, but unfortunately it is another sitting down and being good exercise, so unhelpful in other ways.

Genuinely, spreadsheets, programming and graphics manipulation are skills that teach far more abstract concepts and ideas, which is why the IT curriculum is changing/has almost completely changed to include them, rather than the current version which is basically training youngsters to be office drones and use Micro$oft products - we can't use OpenSource or other alternatives as they won't pass the qualifications.

xp with Penny S - saying pretty much the same thing

[ 15. June 2014, 08:59: Message edited by: Curiosity killed ... ]

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Penny S
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Indeed. I hadn't mentioned the difference of opinion between us and the nearby City Technology College about the source of software. They wanted us to use office standard. I wanted us to use (once away from Word and Excel) the products of a company based in the UK with a name derived from a typeface feature. I pointed out that what the office standard was when the children were 7 would not be standard when they entered the office and indicated recent changes in the Seattle products. As they would have to unlearn stuff as they grew, why not use different programs anyway. They had no hold on us at the time, and I went my own way.

They've won, though. As the local academy hub, they now own the school.

[ 15. June 2014, 09:15: Message edited by: Penny S ]

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GCabot
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Penny S - Pretty much any office job is going to require the ability to type effectively, and this is the direction that Western first world economies have been moving in for decades now. Furthermore, it is an essential skill for secondary and university education. Without a competent ability to type, children are at a serious disadvantage compared to those who have that ability, which in turn negatively affects their future prospects.

Unlike with musical instruments, typing is not a skill one can do without moving forward. As for boredem, as lily pad pointed out previously, there are many games and other ways available to make learning to type interesting and fun. That is exactly how I was taught to type.

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Firenze

Ordinary decent pagan
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quote:
Originally posted by GCabot:
Pretty much any office job is going to require the ability to type effectively

Mebbe. Mebbe no. At the age you suggest learning to type, I was being taught cursive script (with a dip pen) because good handwriting was the essential skill....

And perhaps the future will be the ability to interact successfully with voice recognition software.

Educate to develop creativity, logic, problem solving - repetitive manual skills you can pick up any time (I acquired typing when I was 27).

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Ariel
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quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:
And perhaps the future will be the ability to interact successfully with voice recognition software.

Unlikely to catch on in the modern office environment, I fancy, where contact with the outside world has moved away from the phone to email. Some offices are mostly silent these days, except for the clattering of keyboards and hum of air conditioning.

But I agree, it'll be interesting to see how it shapes up.

[ 15. June 2014, 12:20: Message edited by: Ariel ]

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Sir Kevin
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quote:
Originally posted by la vie en rouge:
I respectfully disagree. Children have much more flexible hands than adolescents/adults and there are some major advantages to starting to learn (driving go-karts) younger. For (racing) the ideal age is... 5

If your father hasn't bought you a kart by the time you are 5, you'll never be a Formula One or Le Mans driver. If you didn't get your first pair of football boots at age 7, you'll probably never get into any form of professional football especially the Premier League or national sides!

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Penny S
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I am not against learning touch typing skills. I am against pushing the learning of them down into the primary school. Beyond the essential of using both hands, and suggesting that they try to use more than one finger, that is.
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Kelly Alves

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And I am, as usual, for loads of unfettered exploration of a keyboard before formal expectations of product.

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Pure Sunshine
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I was at secondary school in the UK in the mid-90s and we learned touch-typing via a computer program at some point - I suppose I would have been about 12 or 13? I'm fairly quick and fairly accurate, not on the level of a professional typist, but good enough to convince older male colleagues that I have some kind of amazing capabilities. I think this is pretty typical of people my age, of either gender. I don't think I'd do well with a typewriter, though - not only are the keys too heavy, but I do need to delete my mistakes sometimes!

Despite being right-handed, I generally type better with my left hand - I suspect this has a lot to do with learning the violin before I learned to type, and therefore being more nimble-fingered with my left hand than right. I therefore don't really use the fourth and fifth fingers on the right hand, the ones that are supposed to type the L, O and P keys, and tend to mess up punctuation marks a lot more as a result. Generally, though, I can type more or less without looking.

As for children struggling to type on a full-size adult keyboard: I got a new laptop last year and not only are the keys more flat, I think they are also more spaced apart. I've had to get used to that a bit; it's not ideal.

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marzipan
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I can't touch type - we spent some time in school being taught it but didn't spend much time on it and I didn't see the point at the time.
I am reasonably good at typing with four fingers but I do make quite a lot of typos if I am not careful (lucky I never had to use a typewriter)
At work I don't do too much typing as mostly use CAD programs - I use the keyboard commands but they are normally only one or two letters. I'm best at typing on the numeric keypad as most of the quick typing I do is numbers.
If I had to do a lot of typing words rather than numbers, I'd probably get better at typing but it's unlikely I'd need to type very quickly in this kind of job so I'd only bother trying to touch type if I had to retrain for a different job.
Not all office jobs require typing!

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Squirrel
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My mom was a secretary of the old school (very professional and used Pitman Shorthand). She taught me to type at age 12 on an IBM Selectric typewriter (the model that had the characters on small plastic "balls" you would replace in order to change the font).

It was one of the greatest things she did for me. Unlike most of the guys in college, I had no girlfriend to type my papers for me, and as a social science major I was expected to produce volumes of verbiage.

45 years later, I can type in Word faster than all the computer geeks at the office.

In case you've never seen the Selectic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter

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Lamb Chopped
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I've got four of those balls i hang on my cubicle wall as a kind of idiot trap--fun to warch people's eyes bug out as fhey try to figure out what the hell those are, without asking.

[ 17. June 2014, 03:24: Message edited by: Lamb Chopped ]

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Jane R
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GCabot:
quote:
I do not see the point in introducing children to things like making animations, spreadsheets, etc.
Well, I do.

Spreadsheets are widely used in businesses to keep accounts, and are also used by researchers when collating and analysing data. Any child who wants to work in business or do research - or even just study for a degree - needs to know how to use them.

Children who learn how to create animations may go on to work in film or TV; their chances of getting a job as a computer animation artist are far greater than their chances of being the next Sharon Stone or Harrison Ford. Never mind Hollywood; the British film industry makes a significant contribution to the UK economy and a large slice of that is from animation. And it's fun; children who squirm their way through handwriting lessons will happily sit working on an animation for the whole lesson.

Plus the more you learn about computers, the more confident you are about your ability to use them and the more likely you are to put the effort into learning how to use new programs and hardware.

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Penny S
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I must admit I started off with that idea about spreadsheets, which my late brother-in-law, in computing from when computing was something to be in, described as a means of multiplying an error - I can't remember how far, but it was around all the way over the sheet. (Been there, done that.)

However, one activity that went on was working out the costs of things for the disco, or school trips, and the use of spreadsheets for that was essential. Probably making cakes for the cake stall and so on, as well. I missed out on the turning them into data entry forms and so on myself, though I went on the course.

I particularly like your last paragraph, BTW.

And my handwriting lessons were fun.

[ 17. June 2014, 16:35: Message edited by: Penny S ]

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Jane R
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Penny S:
quote:
And my handwriting lessons were fun.
I am impressed. Seriously. [Overused]

I suppose whether or not the lesson is fun does depend on what the little darlings are learning to write. [Devil]

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Penny S
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Scott Joplin music (Rifkin's version) because I reckoned the poorer writers had no rhythm. (Nicked that idea from the typing classes I overheard at school. And had spotted in my teens that writing homework to music fell into the rhythm of whatever it was.*) Marching round the classroom between session of writing patterns. Pretend playing the piano to loosen up the fingers. Exercises to help the thumb meeting the fingers to get the grip position right. Making the letter shapes in the air with the whole arm. (It has been found that if you get people to write their signature with their foot, it is recognisable as theirs.) So there was a mix of fighting the pencil and loosening up with larger movements. Ofsted seemed to like it.

*Two pieces I couldn't work with. The cancan in the overture to Orpheus. Too fast. And Bolero. My mind just went round and round and round over the same sentence.

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Jane R
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Sounds great. I felt very sorry for my daughter and her fellow Year 6s last month when they were doing their SATs. The first week after half term they were finally allowed to do fun things again - including one lesson working on computer animations that she enjoyed so much she insisted on telling me about it at great length as soon as she came home.
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GCabot
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quote:
Originally posted by Jane R:
GCabot:
quote:
I do not see the point in introducing children to things like making animations, spreadsheets, etc.
Well, I do.

Spreadsheets are widely used in businesses to keep accounts, and are also used by researchers when collating and analysing data. Any child who wants to work in business or do research - or even just study for a degree - needs to know how to use them.

Children who learn how to create animations may go on to work in film or TV; their chances of getting a job as a computer animation artist are far greater than their chances of being the next Sharon Stone or Harrison Ford. Never mind Hollywood; the British film industry makes a significant contribution to the UK economy and a large slice of that is from animation. And it's fun; children who squirm their way through handwriting lessons will happily sit working on an animation for the whole lesson.

Plus the more you learn about computers, the more confident you are about your ability to use them and the more likely you are to put the effort into learning how to use new programs and hardware.

Certainly these are important, useful skills. They do not have, however, anywhere near the level of general applicability that touch typing does. Furthermore, spreadsheet and animation software can quickly become outdated. These are areas, ironically, where I would take Penny S's approach and introduce them later in the curriculum. I think that primary school children have more fundamental subjects to tackle than learning spreadsheets or animations.

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Curiosity killed ...

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But spreadsheets and animations teach more abstract thinking, which when the rest of the curriculum is overloaded with basic skills and rote learning (times tables, names of parts of speech, spellings, handwriting skills), also needs teaching.

We can, of course, completely revert to the Victorian classroom of rote learning and basic skill teaching, but that would result in adults equipped for the Victorian workplace. Unfortunately, that's not what we currently have, many of the more repetitive roles having been outsourced to the developing world, which would leave us with a bit of a problem.

It would also reprise all those stories of the horrors of being schooled in Victorian times. We have enough of that thinking in the UK currently with the Govian reforms without adding to it unnecessarily.

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Ariel
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Victorian schoolchildren were required to perform to a higher standard altogether in arithmetic, and from an early age were expected to master number systems based on other than the decimal system and be able to calculate fluently in them. They were expected to memorize a lot of things, as there would be fewer books and no e-resources to save them the bother of having to remember anything for themselves.

They were taught how to handwrite properly and neatly, a skill that is in decline these days. Spelling was considered essential, and these days if anything it ought to be more so because if you can't spell properly you'll struggle to do an accurate keyword search.

They were given an overview of history in chronological order - none of this experimentation with the syllabus that means that you might start the first three years of secondary school studying the period from the Romans to the Tudors, then discontinue the subject altogether unless you opted in to studying it for GSCE/O level, when you might find yourself doing something like 1919 to the present day, with no very clear idea of what happened in between, and then maybe at the next level, Charlemagne and his contemporaries.

Geography involved, amongst other things, learning where the other countries of the world were and identifying them on a map. There are children today who cannot do this and wouldn't be able to instantly locate Africa on a map.

Art and drawing were taught in a way that involved you looking closely and carefully at the subject you wanted to draw or paint, with the result that many could and did actually produce sketches and drawings that looked like the real thing. Many of today's children have never been taught how to do this and couldn't do a pencil sketch of even a simple, single object.

Technology is a useful thing but when it robs people of developing their own skills, of learning to rely on their own memories, makes them lazy and ignorant about the world they live in, it is not a good thing.

[ 22. June 2014, 12:31: Message edited by: Ariel ]

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Curiosity killed ...

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I'm going to take this tangent to Purgatory

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GCabot
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quote:
Originally posted by Curiosity killed ...:
But spreadsheets and animations teach more abstract thinking, which when the rest of the curriculum is overloaded with basic skills and rote learning (times tables, names of parts of speech, spellings, handwriting skills), also needs teaching.

We can, of course, completely revert to the Victorian classroom of rote learning and basic skill teaching, but that would result in adults equipped for the Victorian workplace. Unfortunately, that's not what we currently have, many of the more repetitive roles having been outsourced to the developing world, which would leave us with a bit of a problem.

It would also reprise all those stories of the horrors of being schooled in Victorian times. We have enough of that thinking in the UK currently with the Govian reforms without adding to it unnecessarily.

I am all for teaching abstract thinking; I am merely unsure whether those would be the most effective mediums.

Also, rote learning is underappreciated in this era wherein so many young people lack basic proficiency in fundamental skills.

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Karl: Liberal Backslider
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quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
Victorian schoolchildren were required to perform to a higher standard altogether in arithmetic, and from an early age were expected to master number systems based on other than the decimal system and be able to calculate fluently in them. They were expected to memorize a lot of things, as there would be fewer books and no e-resources to save them the bother of having to remember anything for themselves.

They were taught how to handwrite properly and neatly, a skill that is in decline these days. Spelling was considered essential, and these days if anything it ought to be more so because if you can't spell properly you'll struggle to do an accurate keyword search.

They were given an overview of history in chronological order - none of this experimentation with the syllabus that means that you might start the first three years of secondary school studying the period from the Romans to the Tudors, then discontinue the subject altogether unless you opted in to studying it for GSCE/O level, when you might find yourself doing something like 1919 to the present day, with no very clear idea of what happened in between, and then maybe at the next level, Charlemagne and his contemporaries.

Geography involved, amongst other things, learning where the other countries of the world were and identifying them on a map. There are children today who cannot do this and wouldn't be able to instantly locate Africa on a map.

Art and drawing were taught in a way that involved you looking closely and carefully at the subject you wanted to draw or paint, with the result that many could and did actually produce sketches and drawings that looked like the real thing. Many of today's children have never been taught how to do this and couldn't do a pencil sketch of even a simple, single object.


You make Victorian Education sound as awful as I understand it was. I wouldn't want what you describe for my children. It sounds stifling. For example, being expected to write "neatly", something I could not do as a child and cannot do as an adult, unless I'm willing to spend a minute on a couple of words, is something I've managed perfectly well without, and will be increasingly irrelevant in the modern world.

[ 23. June 2014, 11:21: Message edited by: Karl: Liberal Backslider ]

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Might as well ask the bloody cat.

Posts: 17938 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
The Kat in the Hat
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Because I was one of the early users of computers in the workplace, and I had a really enquiring mind,I was head hunted to teach other office staff what this new machine could do. We always asked for the attendees to fill in an evaluation form (tell me how great I was). I've never forgotten the beautiful, copper-plate one that no-one could actually read.

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