Again a comment from a student. Once upon a time one could submit a hand written essay. As recent as 2000 all written work in a GIS course had to be printed on a computer or a type writer. One course called Law in the Information Society in 2003 required students to use blogs for their work. In another course students were graded on their quality of posts to a course newsgroup. This was a sociology of science and technology course. Ok these are simply editing of English software's. We are now at this level required by students. Thus we can assume the professors of these course also had these skills. As a student I can do a class room presentation with an Open Office ( aka power point) presentation and know I will impress, even though up against a professional private sector power pointer my presentation will be very bad. I can play real audio files in a presentation and score high. Technology will help a student score higher at this moment in history the point is. Perhaps technical skills should be looked at with some suspicion as they may hide weak research. Personally I am coming from the sciences and just completed a coding course in data mining within my legal studies BA and have found a scientist studying information security who may need my skills in data mining to support a study into computer crime. I should also mention that searching the library is aided by knowing code and the idea of unforgiving coding. Peter Timusk B.Math Just trying to stay linear www.crystalcomputing.net >blog> http://logbook.crystalcomputing.net www.webpagex.org >blog> http://notebook.webpagex.org