8 ms·

German state of Hesse bans cloud services from schools due to privacy risks

198 points by fraqed 7y ago

curt15 7y ago
"This effectively leaves schools with few other options, unless Microsoft gets back to them with a satisfactory solution." While businesses are obviously reluctant to use Libreoffice because they need perfect compatibility with MS Office files, K-12 students have no such constraints. What prevents the schools from standardizing on an open-source suite like Libreoffice?
- pgeorgi 7y ago
  What prevents them is the inability to teach students beyond "click the button that looks _precisely_ like this to get the desired effect". That is, they consider knowledge gained in one of these applications to be non-transferable to other, similar applications. Never mind that nobody ever made a fuss about our driver's license system where you typically learn on a single car model, with the expectation that even the biggest idiot can cope with different placements of the lighting controls or a different number of gears on their manual transmission.
  - baud147258 7y ago
    Regarding driving license, at least where I live, if you've gotten your license on a car with automatic transmission, you can't (legally) drive a car with manual transmission. I get your point though.
    - baud147258 7y ago
      Correction: it may have changed since I heard about this when I got my driving license, but you've gotten your license on a car with automatic transmission, you can drive a car with manual transmission 6 months (soon to be reduced to 3 months) later with an additional training, which look like is 7 hours long.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Which is strange, because Microsoft hasn't kept the same icons all along, and will change things again. I first learned AtariWriter as a kid. Then at school something on the Apple II. In high school they were all proud to be teaching us WordPerfect 5 for DOS - the same as industry was using. By college everybody had switch to Microsoft word. Microsoft then did a major change to create the ribbon UI. I expect this trend to continue.
    - emeraldd 7y ago
      This is really how general computing should be taught. Go deep on a few things, but make sure to expose students to a wide enough variety of different paradigms a d systems that they can glean some of the commonalities. From there, they should be able to figure out most of the rest. It works pretty well in programming languages as well. So long as you don't go too far afield. Lisp fefeated me until I wrote a toy one and I'm still pretty stuck on Haskell, but I've had far fewer issues with some of the more traditional languages.
      - dmix 7y ago
        Sadly it’s far from this. My mom is terrible with any technology and took a computer course which taught stuff like Word. The entire instruction was basically follow fixed checklists of menus to do stuff followed by some test which is entirely about the checklist not about what you did. She basically forgot it all within a year and is still scared to do anything complicated. That sounds like a much better approach. Education is such a difficult thing to get right.
    - pgeorgi 7y ago
      Of course that trend continues, but it's their typical excuse ("we need to teach marketable skills") and once the kids are part of the workforce, any further training (e.g. to learn about that mythical Ribbon UI, I remember the concern of how the economy will tank due to that retraining effort in the news back then) is Somebody Else's Problem. Given that attitude in schools and the constant UI changes even within the MS ecosystem, I guess it should be okay to use LibreOffice for the earlier years and only use Microsoft "and that's what you might use at work" Office after year 8 ;-)
  - pssflops 7y ago
    What happened to all the instructors of my day that professed MS Access was the database manager of the future?
    - pgeorgi 7y ago
      Retired. As soon as the kids are in the work force, they're not the teacher's problem anymore.
    - raxxorrax 7y ago
      I know many businesses that still use it extensively. Even for modern applications that call web-APIs to check for addresses or analyzing business cards to extract text info. Really no fan of basics dim-witted syntax and properties, but I am regularly surprised what some people manage to put in one giant file of basic. Most use Access as a frontend with a normal DBMS, mostly MSSQL-Server of course. I think a general purpose DB frontend with scripting abilities would be really needed as a replacement. You could just use a browser, but that somehow doesn't fit the target group for these kind of applications.
  - linuxftw 7y ago
    > That is, they consider knowledge gained in one of these applications to be non-transferable to other, similar applications. This explains the transition of MS Office to its stupid ribbon interface. We used to have standard menus on all applications. In fact, these menus and how to use them were even taught in school! I think this generally speaks to modern computer illiteracy: Kids today know almost nothing about how a PC functions basically. Using a computer effectively today is as essential as knowing how to do basic arithmetic, if not more so. There's no reason kids can't be PC experts by grade 6 or 7 or so.
  - _Codemonkeyism 7y ago
    With the students I've worked (interns) with they had all "MS Office" at school but don't know the basics so I have to explain e.g. how format a document correctly and not use e.g. 'bold' to all of them when they start.
  - jmcqk6 7y ago
    >That is, they consider knowledge gained in one of these applications to be non-transferable to other, similar applications. What evidence do you have for this? Based on my experiences with k-12 tech education in the US, this sounds like complete BS.
    - pgeorgi 7y ago
      Good for you. The article is about schools in Germany, Hessen specifically, which is where for several decades I have more to do with schools than I'd like to.
  - ganzuul 7y ago
    I don't believe that is how schools are supposed to approach teaching. I'm actually fairly sure they don't, outside of exceptional cases. They certainly have no business making educational policy in contradiction to pedagogy. If German schools function basically like Finnish ones, then they use MS products because it's what the municipality bought, and schools are a municipal service.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  User experience? I use proprietary office suites (both Office 365 and Apple Pages) because they’re much more intuitive and pleasant to use than the free alternatives.
  - achow 7y ago
    Yes. Most of the time people don't get that behind these products there are very well paid and perhaps world's best designers and engineers - many of them. So these paid products more often than not would be much more superior in terms of experience.
  - smartmic 7y ago
    This might be the case, but commodity convenience and software pleasantness is probably the least important thing what should be taught and learned in school.
  - archy_ 7y ago
    Increased usage would likely lead to more UX improvements, but people don't want to use something not as slick as Word and Pages. Chicken and egg.
  - asark 7y ago
    Apple's suite of "office"-type apps is wonderfully lightweight, yet pretty full-featured. Reminds me of using some of the lighter Open/Libreoffice alternatives on Linux, like Gnumeric, except, you know, nicer looking, easier to use, more featureful, less buggy, and with much better templates and such. Apple's supporting apps generally are a big part of what keeps me on the platform. They're consistently more resource (including battery) friendly than any alternative with a comparable featureset, rarely or never crash[0], work seamlessly with my mobile devices, et c. Hell Preview alone would be hard to give up. What a gem of a program. [0] Excepting Xcode, obviously :-)
  - kitd 7y ago
    Until 5 years ago, I'd have agreed with you. LibreOffice is pretty straight-forward these days though. "Straight-forward" trumps "featureful" for me.
- kuschku 7y ago
  Many German schools already use Libreoffice — the Gymnasium Kronshagen, when I was there until 2014, already used OpenOffice at the time (although some computers also had MS office installed).
- analog31 7y ago
  Let them use a plain text editor like Notepad++. My kids are both in their late teens. When they were in elementary school, they had to use word processing apps for their written assignments, and there were specific formatting requirements. I observed: 1) This software will be obsolete by the time they need to use it for a job. 2) Formatting is extraneous to the process of learning to write, and the myriad of distractions in the word processing software (all of those settings and buttons to explore) actually made it worse. 3) They were given formatting requirements like "margins" and "pages" for documents that would never be printed. Adding to the irony, these archaic formatting requirements came from an organization calling itself "modern language association." Fast forward just a few years. Today, nobody uses word processing, except for documents that will never be read, such as HR pronouncements and dissertations. People just use the e-mail editor, and graphics are pasted in via screen shots. The kids are allowed to use any app that will capture their text, and they seem to prefer Google Docs. (Don't know how that would play out with German privacy laws of course). They actually use the collaboration tools. I suggest: Let's just get rid of word processing for students. Problem solved. The big problem is training the teachers. If they want to talk about job skills, they should find the average wages of people who use different tools, including both word processors and text editors. I'll bet that emacs tops the list. ;-)
  - asark 7y ago
    Instructors who wanted very specific formatting, then insisted on an editing format for submitted assignments, like .doc, instead of a presentation/print format like PDF, were tons of fun. > The kids are allowed to use any app that will capture their text, and they seem to prefer Google Docs. School kids around here prefer Google Docs mostly because they can chat in it. Agreed about ditching the word processing. Most of its use in business isn't even writing original documents, from what I've seen, but filling in the blanks in a template or editing an earlier document (a proposal, say) for a slightly different situation. Composing long form prose in a word processor is, as you note, far less common than doing the same in an email field or in some basic text editor which'll be copy-pasted to an email. Italics and such are still useful. Headers to some extent. Links, certainly. So... I say if we're gonna teach them formatting, teach them a little Markdown. Sure it may go out of style pretty soon, but so might anything. Meanwhile, it can be authored in any text editor, it mimics plain-text formatting styles that have been around for a while and seem to have some staying power, and some of the messaging apps the kids already use (Whatsapp, for instance) support a subset of it. It also introduces the idea of text as instructions to the computer, instantly making computer code less alien.
- megous 7y ago
  Nothing prevents them, people just don't like change. When I was in school (read in grandpa's accent), it was teaching Text602 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iCUfOPxTp4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iCUfOPxTp4) and Calc602, which was locally made text processor and spreadsheet tool for DOS. Was it impossible to teach/learn? No. People will just learn what they are thought. There are better/worse options, but that doesn't prevent anyone from teaching anything.
  - AdrianB1 7y ago
    Are those useful in real life for anyone? Why would you teach a skill that is meaningless the next day?
    - megous 7y ago
      Text602? Not these days. This was taught in 1994, in the DOS days. It was useful back then. Libreoffice, now? Yes.
- giardini 7y ago
  curt15 says> "While businesses are obviously reluctant to use Libreoffice because they need perfect compatibility with MS Office files, K-12 students have no such constraints." I recently set up a new home-office PC for a friend. I tried to use Laplink PC Mover Ultimate to migrate/MS Office applications to the new machine: hours of phone and remote-control support failed. So I migrated the data with a USB drive and downloaded LibreOffice as an MS Office replacement. My friend logged on to his new PC and quickly pronounced the migration a success. He's been very happy with LibreOffice ever since. Several other persons use the same machine with no problem. The move to LibreOffice has been surprisingly transparent.
mfritsche 7y ago
It's one of sixteen states. Office 365 (and Windows 10) have been identified as not being able to be used in accordance with data privacy laws in Germany time and time again. So far, nobody got fined for using either software yet.
- mkesper 7y ago
  Maybe it's a start.
- chopin 7y ago
  Do you know any authorities using Windows 10 who handle personal data? Last I looked the BSI (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik) hasn't blessed Windows 10 as appropriate over battles with MS on telemetry.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    I'd be very surprised to find any authorities using such a recent version of Windows.
  - hobofan 7y ago
    Munich is switching away from Limux towards Windows 10, which I assume also includes workstations that handle PII.
vgoh1 7y ago
The foundation of the MS empire is MS Office. People use office at work because it's the path of least resistance, due to fewer conversion errors (no conversion when you are using what everyone else does), and because that is what they used in school. Have the kids learn on LibreOffice, and MS Office only has one shaky leg to stand on.
- chopin 7y ago
  It's not that hard. I required my kids to grow up with Libreoffice (and Openoffice before that). There where hassles but they where manageable. I made sure to explain why this restriction was in place. I also was willing to fight any battle with school authorities over this issue should the need arise. Fortunately that was not necessary.
  - dhimes 7y ago
    I did the same. It turned out that teachers were perfectly fine using Open/LibreOffice.
dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
It gets interesting. Of the three OS vendors - MS, Google, and Apple - only the latter made the effort to choose the privacy path, whereas the other two basically have a contemptuous attitude towards privacy expectations of their users. Times change, though, and we're likely to witness some interesting changes.
adrianN 7y ago
IMO we should never teach proprietary software in any education system that runs on public money.
- close04 7y ago
  What happens on the off chance you do find yourself having no alternatives? Or worse, having a free alternative that is so much worse than the proprietary, paid one?
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Invest some taxpayer money into making a free alternative, I'd say. Or just not teach that software. If companies require the use of proprietary software without alternatives they can pay the money to train people to use it.
    - close04 7y ago
      I’m bot saying it’s not an option but I imagine the result is not necessarily a better one. The right tools for the job don’t necessarily have to be free or open source. That’s just the best case scenario.
- achow 7y ago
  Interesting. That way we have to dismantle everything - bridges, buildings, power plants,... All of these spent tax payers money for some 'proprietary' machines, 'proprietary' engineering knowledge, and others..
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Bridges, buildings and power plants are not schools. We don't allow companies to place ads in schools for good reasons. Why should we train people to use their products for free?
    - celticmusic 7y ago
philshem 7y ago
Interesting, I just tweeted about Microsoft’s parental controls this morning: > Windows 10 parental controls requires that both the parent and the kid have an email account and register with Microsoft. https://twitter.com/philshem/status/1150667995745869824?s=21 https://twitter.com/philshem/status/1150667995745869824?s=21
mpweiher 7y ago
Having heard M$ executives talk about Office, I was somewhere between shocked, horrified and appalled at the enthusiasm with which they talked about mining (Office) user data to offer "intelligent" features. Absolutely zero concern about possible privacy issues. Not even on the radar.
- archy_ 7y ago
  They don't let you disable their spying on Windows 10, why would they treat Office any differently? I remember when a weather app using your GPS to automatically change to your current location was controversial. Now we willingly subject ourselves to corporate spying at the OS level.
  - mfer 7y ago
    When you install or activate Windows 10 there is a step during the process where they ask you what of the telemetry to enable or disable. Everyone, outside corp environments where the corp decides, goes through this process. The settings are available to change later, oo. Why do you say they don't let you disable the telemetry for Windows 10? Honest question.
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      That setup process says things like "Send detailed information to Microsoft. Disabling this sends only basic data." There is no setting for not sending any data. They also add new settings using Windows Update which you're not prompted about and which default to on, which would presumably then send information between when the update installs and when you realize it's there, even assuming you're diligent enough to notice it at all as most people obviously aren't.
sgift 7y ago
Amusing. That's the data protection agency responsible for Schufa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa), which 15 of 16 German data protection agencies agree is breaking every relevant German data protection law. For some reason they disagree / are very lenient in their handling of Schufa. Maybe Microsoft should move their German HQ to Frankfurt or Wiesbaden. (To make this clear: I think this is a good decision, but they are still hypocrites)
tombert 7y ago
I'm not German, but in the US I always thought it was a bit strange and concerning that we use taxdollars to train kids to use a proprietary, for-profit system. I understand that MS Office is (sadly) the industry standard, but how much of this is self-fulfilling, as in "it's the standard because that's what they teach, and it's what they teach because it's the standard". You'll find similar things in school with software like Matlab; they give substantial discounts to universities for Matlab, these students because so used to it, and beg their employers to buy it, which they usually do. Schools shouldn't be advertising vehicles for children, and I feel there should be a stronger emphasis on open technologies. Thank goodness MS can't create a proper equation editor to save their life, so LaTeX is still the standard for higher-level academia.
- beefhash 7y ago
  > Thank goodness MS can't create a proper equation editor to save their life, so LaTeX is still the standard for higher-level academia. Higher-level academia in STEM. Other fields are likely quite much sold on Word. I can imagine that, say, law is chock-full of people using Word.
  - tombert 7y ago
    Yeah, I realized that about ten seconds after I submitted; my mom is a lawyer and due to older standards and newer ones, they use Word for about 80% of stuff, and Wordperfect for about 20% (due to it being the standard in the federal courts for a long time).
    - duxup 7y ago
      The legal world is the land of the Luddites. There are very capable people too of course, but generally I've found that the legal world to contain a higher than average percentage of Luddites.
      - tombert 7y ago
        I'm hesitant to call anyone a Luddite when I'm tacitly suggestion people use TeX, a piece of software made like 20 years before I was born :).
rb2k_ 7y ago
The title makes it sound like this is a Germany wide thing. It's 'only' the state of Hesse which is around 6 million people. The responsibility for the education system in Germany lies primarily with the states.
darkpuma 7y ago
I wish this sense of German/European sensibleness w.r.t. things digital could be transplanted into America. I'm really quite jealous of it.
- allendoerfer 7y ago
  I guess it already is being done. US citizens must also be benefitting from stuff like GDPR. It does not sound sensible for companies to implement it and then wilfully exclude US citizens. I think often times companies will just comply with all data protection rules globally for everyone.
  - droithomme 7y ago
    > US citizens must also be benefitting from stuff like GDPR. My benefit so far has been countless popups that either offer a "take it or leave it" Accept button with no other options, or a link to tens of thousands of pages of legal contracts detailing the service terms of hundreds of "partners". None of these sites really seem GDPR compliant to me at all, and I'm talking about EU based sites. US based sites are easier. Either do like here on HN and have no popup or notice or terms at all, just rightly ignoring the law which is in a foreign jurisdiction not controlled by treaty and which legally has absolutely no bearing. Or do ip block level shutdowns of access with a 451 code response, as well as adding to the TOS that those in EU jurisdiction are not permitted to use the site. A win for everyone.
    - darkpuma 7y ago
      You seem entirely too gleeful about users' privacy getting violated. Very far from "a win for everybody".
anticensor 7y ago
Turkey got few steps further: Almost all ready made software recently become practically illegal to obtain in government tenders in Turkey due to "usability guarantee" requirement. Exact article translated (from the presidential administrative decree): All software and hardware contractors working for Turkish government shall provide a guarantee stating said soft/hard-ware does not contain backdoors and/or features unfit for intended use, as far as possible. Servers for goverment services are also required to be in Turkey, even if it is not possible to set up one in situ in the respective institution. This goes so far to require all data processor to have their own or peered IXPs situated in Turkey.
- pkaye 7y ago
  So what do they use? Linux with LibreOffice?
  - chipperyman573 7y ago
    I think both of those explicitly denounce any expectation of a fitness for any particular purpose in their licence, so if anything they'll be going backwards (according to their metric)
    - anticensor 7y ago
      This applies going forward, not retroactively (Turkish constitution prohibits retroactive laws, except for pardoning or release of criminals). There is an "as far as possible" clause grandfathering former procurements and enabling the administration to make a case-by-case exemption.
    - majewsky 7y ago
      Sure, but that's just the license. If an ISV makes a support contract with them, they can include the necessary clauses in that contract.
      - anticensor 7y ago
jhunter1016 7y ago
It seems the simple solution for Microsoft is to just stand up a data center in Germany again. The simple solution for the rest of the software world is to let people choose where their data is stored. I wrote about this earlier today: https://blog.graphitedocs.com/the-simple-way-to-remain-gdpr-compliant/ https://blog.graphitedocs.com/the-simple-way-to-remain-gdpr-...
- AaronFriel 7y ago
  Again? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germany/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germ...
  - skrause 7y ago
    This has been discontinued: https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2018/08/31/microsoft-to-deliver-cloud-services-from-new-datacentres-in-germany-in-2019-to-meet-evolving-customer-needs/ https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2018/08/31/microsoft-to-de...
    - groovybits 7y ago
      As an outsider looking in (from the US), what is the difference between the current Azure Germany vs the new locations they're standing up in Berlin and Frankfurt? Frankly, I don't understand the point of the last 3 paragraphs of this announcment.
      - gmueckl 7y ago
        The difference is that the discontinued data center was run independently by a German company (T-Systems IIRC). MS engineered the contracts in such a way that they had no ability to access anything in this data center. That made it exclusive subject to German law. As I see it, the new data centers are run by MS directly and thus an entity that is subject to US laws and their far reaching clauses.
  - datapunk 7y ago
nacho2sweet 7y ago
I work at a university in Canada and it is the same unless they have cloud servers in Canada. I think we were on office 2010 till more recently. The patriot act allows US government access to any non americans data pretty easily, and it contradicts a lot of Canadian privacy law.
- dmortin 7y ago
  Microsoft is still an American company if the cloud servers are in Canada. Can't the US government tell Microsoft to hand over the data (which MS can fetch remotely) if it needs it for some terrorist investigation?
  - filoleg 7y ago
    I believe you are correct, and that's why Azure has a dedicated German cloud with all the data residing in Germany and managed by a German data trustee, which should prevent US government from being able to tell Microsoft to do anything with that data[0]. If Canada happens to have a dedicated cloud region with similar policies, they should be in the clear. 0. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germany/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germ...
    - robocat 7y ago
      From the article: "A year later, Microsoft closed its German cloud datacenter, and schools migrated their accounts to the European cloud. Now, the HBDI states that the European cloud may offer access to US authorities; with no way for the German government to monitor such access"
      - gmueckl 7y ago
        This is because the old data center was run independently of MS while they own the new ones directly. Thus, the old one was legally and technically isolated from MS and any wish they might have had to access that data.
  - 7y ago

198 points by fraqed 7y ago

"This effectively leaves schools with few other options, unless Microsoft gets back to them with a satisfactory solution." While businesses are obviously reluctant to use Libreoffice because they need perfect compatibility with MS Office files, K-12 students have no such constraints. What prevents the schools from standardizing on an open-source suite like Libreoffice?

pgeorgi 7y ago
What prevents them is the inability to teach students beyond "click the button that looks _precisely_ like this to get the desired effect". That is, they consider knowledge gained in one of these applications to be non-transferable to other, similar applications. Never mind that nobody ever made a fuss about our driver's license system where you typically learn on a single car model, with the expectation that even the biggest idiot can cope with different placements of the lighting controls or a different number of gears on their manual transmission.
- baud147258 7y ago
  Regarding driving license, at least where I live, if you've gotten your license on a car with automatic transmission, you can't (legally) drive a car with manual transmission. I get your point though.
  - baud147258 7y ago
    Correction: it may have changed since I heard about this when I got my driving license, but you've gotten your license on a car with automatic transmission, you can drive a car with manual transmission 6 months (soon to be reduced to 3 months) later with an additional training, which look like is 7 hours long.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Which is strange, because Microsoft hasn't kept the same icons all along, and will change things again. I first learned AtariWriter as a kid. Then at school something on the Apple II. In high school they were all proud to be teaching us WordPerfect 5 for DOS - the same as industry was using. By college everybody had switch to Microsoft word. Microsoft then did a major change to create the ribbon UI. I expect this trend to continue.
  - emeraldd 7y ago
    This is really how general computing should be taught. Go deep on a few things, but make sure to expose students to a wide enough variety of different paradigms a d systems that they can glean some of the commonalities. From there, they should be able to figure out most of the rest. It works pretty well in programming languages as well. So long as you don't go too far afield. Lisp fefeated me until I wrote a toy one and I'm still pretty stuck on Haskell, but I've had far fewer issues with some of the more traditional languages.
    - dmix 7y ago
      Sadly it’s far from this. My mom is terrible with any technology and took a computer course which taught stuff like Word. The entire instruction was basically follow fixed checklists of menus to do stuff followed by some test which is entirely about the checklist not about what you did. She basically forgot it all within a year and is still scared to do anything complicated. That sounds like a much better approach. Education is such a difficult thing to get right.
  - pgeorgi 7y ago
    Of course that trend continues, but it's their typical excuse ("we need to teach marketable skills") and once the kids are part of the workforce, any further training (e.g. to learn about that mythical Ribbon UI, I remember the concern of how the economy will tank due to that retraining effort in the news back then) is Somebody Else's Problem. Given that attitude in schools and the constant UI changes even within the MS ecosystem, I guess it should be okay to use LibreOffice for the earlier years and only use Microsoft "and that's what you might use at work" Office after year 8 ;-)
- pssflops 7y ago
  What happened to all the instructors of my day that professed MS Access was the database manager of the future?
  - pgeorgi 7y ago
    Retired. As soon as the kids are in the work force, they're not the teacher's problem anymore.
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    I know many businesses that still use it extensively. Even for modern applications that call web-APIs to check for addresses or analyzing business cards to extract text info. Really no fan of basics dim-witted syntax and properties, but I am regularly surprised what some people manage to put in one giant file of basic. Most use Access as a frontend with a normal DBMS, mostly MSSQL-Server of course. I think a general purpose DB frontend with scripting abilities would be really needed as a replacement. You could just use a browser, but that somehow doesn't fit the target group for these kind of applications.
- linuxftw 7y ago
  > That is, they consider knowledge gained in one of these applications to be non-transferable to other, similar applications. This explains the transition of MS Office to its stupid ribbon interface. We used to have standard menus on all applications. In fact, these menus and how to use them were even taught in school! I think this generally speaks to modern computer illiteracy: Kids today know almost nothing about how a PC functions basically. Using a computer effectively today is as essential as knowing how to do basic arithmetic, if not more so. There's no reason kids can't be PC experts by grade 6 or 7 or so.
- _Codemonkeyism 7y ago
  With the students I've worked (interns) with they had all "MS Office" at school but don't know the basics so I have to explain e.g. how format a document correctly and not use e.g. 'bold' to all of them when they start.
- jmcqk6 7y ago
  >That is, they consider knowledge gained in one of these applications to be non-transferable to other, similar applications. What evidence do you have for this? Based on my experiences with k-12 tech education in the US, this sounds like complete BS.
  - pgeorgi 7y ago
    Good for you. The article is about schools in Germany, Hessen specifically, which is where for several decades I have more to do with schools than I'd like to.
- ganzuul 7y ago
  I don't believe that is how schools are supposed to approach teaching. I'm actually fairly sure they don't, outside of exceptional cases. They certainly have no business making educational policy in contradiction to pedagogy. If German schools function basically like Finnish ones, then they use MS products because it's what the municipality bought, and schools are a municipal service.
Nextgrid 7y ago
User experience? I use proprietary office suites (both Office 365 and Apple Pages) because they’re much more intuitive and pleasant to use than the free alternatives.
- achow 7y ago
  Yes. Most of the time people don't get that behind these products there are very well paid and perhaps world's best designers and engineers - many of them. So these paid products more often than not would be much more superior in terms of experience.
- smartmic 7y ago
  This might be the case, but commodity convenience and software pleasantness is probably the least important thing what should be taught and learned in school.
- archy_ 7y ago
  Increased usage would likely lead to more UX improvements, but people don't want to use something not as slick as Word and Pages. Chicken and egg.
- asark 7y ago
  Apple's suite of "office"-type apps is wonderfully lightweight, yet pretty full-featured. Reminds me of using some of the lighter Open/Libreoffice alternatives on Linux, like Gnumeric, except, you know, nicer looking, easier to use, more featureful, less buggy, and with much better templates and such. Apple's supporting apps generally are a big part of what keeps me on the platform. They're consistently more resource (including battery) friendly than any alternative with a comparable featureset, rarely or never crash[0], work seamlessly with my mobile devices, et c. Hell Preview alone would be hard to give up. What a gem of a program. [0] Excepting Xcode, obviously :-)
- kitd 7y ago
  Until 5 years ago, I'd have agreed with you. LibreOffice is pretty straight-forward these days though. "Straight-forward" trumps "featureful" for me.
kuschku 7y ago
Many German schools already use Libreoffice — the Gymnasium Kronshagen, when I was there until 2014, already used OpenOffice at the time (although some computers also had MS office installed).
analog31 7y ago
Let them use a plain text editor like Notepad++. My kids are both in their late teens. When they were in elementary school, they had to use word processing apps for their written assignments, and there were specific formatting requirements. I observed: 1) This software will be obsolete by the time they need to use it for a job. 2) Formatting is extraneous to the process of learning to write, and the myriad of distractions in the word processing software (all of those settings and buttons to explore) actually made it worse. 3) They were given formatting requirements like "margins" and "pages" for documents that would never be printed. Adding to the irony, these archaic formatting requirements came from an organization calling itself "modern language association." Fast forward just a few years. Today, nobody uses word processing, except for documents that will never be read, such as HR pronouncements and dissertations. People just use the e-mail editor, and graphics are pasted in via screen shots. The kids are allowed to use any app that will capture their text, and they seem to prefer Google Docs. (Don't know how that would play out with German privacy laws of course). They actually use the collaboration tools. I suggest: Let's just get rid of word processing for students. Problem solved. The big problem is training the teachers. If they want to talk about job skills, they should find the average wages of people who use different tools, including both word processors and text editors. I'll bet that emacs tops the list. ;-)
- asark 7y ago
  Instructors who wanted very specific formatting, then insisted on an editing format for submitted assignments, like .doc, instead of a presentation/print format like PDF, were tons of fun. > The kids are allowed to use any app that will capture their text, and they seem to prefer Google Docs. School kids around here prefer Google Docs mostly because they can chat in it. Agreed about ditching the word processing. Most of its use in business isn't even writing original documents, from what I've seen, but filling in the blanks in a template or editing an earlier document (a proposal, say) for a slightly different situation. Composing long form prose in a word processor is, as you note, far less common than doing the same in an email field or in some basic text editor which'll be copy-pasted to an email. Italics and such are still useful. Headers to some extent. Links, certainly. So... I say if we're gonna teach them formatting, teach them a little Markdown. Sure it may go out of style pretty soon, but so might anything. Meanwhile, it can be authored in any text editor, it mimics plain-text formatting styles that have been around for a while and seem to have some staying power, and some of the messaging apps the kids already use (Whatsapp, for instance) support a subset of it. It also introduces the idea of text as instructions to the computer, instantly making computer code less alien.
megous 7y ago
Nothing prevents them, people just don't like change. When I was in school (read in grandpa's accent), it was teaching Text602 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iCUfOPxTp4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iCUfOPxTp4) and Calc602, which was locally made text processor and spreadsheet tool for DOS. Was it impossible to teach/learn? No. People will just learn what they are thought. There are better/worse options, but that doesn't prevent anyone from teaching anything.
- AdrianB1 7y ago
  Are those useful in real life for anyone? Why would you teach a skill that is meaningless the next day?
  - megous 7y ago
    Text602? Not these days. This was taught in 1994, in the DOS days. It was useful back then. Libreoffice, now? Yes.
giardini 7y ago
curt15 says> "While businesses are obviously reluctant to use Libreoffice because they need perfect compatibility with MS Office files, K-12 students have no such constraints." I recently set up a new home-office PC for a friend. I tried to use Laplink PC Mover Ultimate to migrate/MS Office applications to the new machine: hours of phone and remote-control support failed. So I migrated the data with a USB drive and downloaded LibreOffice as an MS Office replacement. My friend logged on to his new PC and quickly pronounced the migration a success. He's been very happy with LibreOffice ever since. Several other persons use the same machine with no problem. The move to LibreOffice has been surprisingly transparent.

mfritsche 7y ago

It's one of sixteen states. Office 365 (and Windows 10) have been identified as not being able to be used in accordance with data privacy laws in Germany time and time again. So far, nobody got fined for using either software yet.

mkesper 7y ago
Maybe it's a start.
chopin 7y ago
Do you know any authorities using Windows 10 who handle personal data? Last I looked the BSI (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik) hasn't blessed Windows 10 as appropriate over battles with MS on telemetry.
- adrianN 7y ago
  I'd be very surprised to find any authorities using such a recent version of Windows.
- hobofan 7y ago
  Munich is switching away from Limux towards Windows 10, which I assume also includes workstations that handle PII.

vgoh1 7y ago

The foundation of the MS empire is MS Office. People use office at work because it's the path of least resistance, due to fewer conversion errors (no conversion when you are using what everyone else does), and because that is what they used in school. Have the kids learn on LibreOffice, and MS Office only has one shaky leg to stand on.

chopin 7y ago
It's not that hard. I required my kids to grow up with Libreoffice (and Openoffice before that). There where hassles but they where manageable. I made sure to explain why this restriction was in place. I also was willing to fight any battle with school authorities over this issue should the need arise. Fortunately that was not necessary.
- dhimes 7y ago
  I did the same. It turned out that teachers were perfectly fine using Open/LibreOffice.

dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago

It gets interesting. Of the three OS vendors - MS, Google, and Apple - only the latter made the effort to choose the privacy path, whereas the other two basically have a contemptuous attitude towards privacy expectations of their users. Times change, though, and we're likely to witness some interesting changes.

adrianN 7y ago

IMO we should never teach proprietary software in any education system that runs on public money.

close04 7y ago
What happens on the off chance you do find yourself having no alternatives? Or worse, having a free alternative that is so much worse than the proprietary, paid one?
- adrianN 7y ago
  Invest some taxpayer money into making a free alternative, I'd say. Or just not teach that software. If companies require the use of proprietary software without alternatives they can pay the money to train people to use it.
  - close04 7y ago
    I’m bot saying it’s not an option but I imagine the result is not necessarily a better one. The right tools for the job don’t necessarily have to be free or open source. That’s just the best case scenario.
achow 7y ago
Interesting. That way we have to dismantle everything - bridges, buildings, power plants,... All of these spent tax payers money for some 'proprietary' machines, 'proprietary' engineering knowledge, and others..
- adrianN 7y ago
  Bridges, buildings and power plants are not schools. We don't allow companies to place ads in schools for good reasons. Why should we train people to use their products for free?
  - celticmusic 7y ago

philshem 7y ago

Interesting, I just tweeted about Microsoft’s parental controls this morning: > Windows 10 parental controls requires that both the parent and the kid have an email account and register with Microsoft. https://twitter.com/philshem/status/1150667995745869824?s=21 https://twitter.com/philshem/status/1150667995745869824?s=21

mpweiher 7y ago

Having heard M$ executives talk about Office, I was somewhere between shocked, horrified and appalled at the enthusiasm with which they talked about mining (Office) user data to offer "intelligent" features. Absolutely zero concern about possible privacy issues. Not even on the radar.

archy_ 7y ago
They don't let you disable their spying on Windows 10, why would they treat Office any differently? I remember when a weather app using your GPS to automatically change to your current location was controversial. Now we willingly subject ourselves to corporate spying at the OS level.
- mfer 7y ago
  When you install or activate Windows 10 there is a step during the process where they ask you what of the telemetry to enable or disable. Everyone, outside corp environments where the corp decides, goes through this process. The settings are available to change later, oo. Why do you say they don't let you disable the telemetry for Windows 10? Honest question.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    That setup process says things like "Send detailed information to Microsoft. Disabling this sends only basic data." There is no setting for not sending any data. They also add new settings using Windows Update which you're not prompted about and which default to on, which would presumably then send information between when the update installs and when you realize it's there, even assuming you're diligent enough to notice it at all as most people obviously aren't.

sgift 7y ago

Amusing. That's the data protection agency responsible for Schufa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa), which 15 of 16 German data protection agencies agree is breaking every relevant German data protection law. For some reason they disagree / are very lenient in their handling of Schufa. Maybe Microsoft should move their German HQ to Frankfurt or Wiesbaden. (To make this clear: I think this is a good decision, but they are still hypocrites)

tombert 7y ago

I'm not German, but in the US I always thought it was a bit strange and concerning that we use taxdollars to train kids to use a proprietary, for-profit system. I understand that MS Office is (sadly) the industry standard, but how much of this is self-fulfilling, as in "it's the standard because that's what they teach, and it's what they teach because it's the standard". You'll find similar things in school with software like Matlab; they give substantial discounts to universities for Matlab, these students because so used to it, and beg their employers to buy it, which they usually do. Schools shouldn't be advertising vehicles for children, and I feel there should be a stronger emphasis on open technologies. Thank goodness MS can't create a proper equation editor to save their life, so LaTeX is still the standard for higher-level academia.

beefhash 7y ago
> Thank goodness MS can't create a proper equation editor to save their life, so LaTeX is still the standard for higher-level academia. Higher-level academia in STEM. Other fields are likely quite much sold on Word. I can imagine that, say, law is chock-full of people using Word.
- tombert 7y ago
  Yeah, I realized that about ten seconds after I submitted; my mom is a lawyer and due to older standards and newer ones, they use Word for about 80% of stuff, and Wordperfect for about 20% (due to it being the standard in the federal courts for a long time).
  - duxup 7y ago
    The legal world is the land of the Luddites. There are very capable people too of course, but generally I've found that the legal world to contain a higher than average percentage of Luddites.
    - tombert 7y ago
      I'm hesitant to call anyone a Luddite when I'm tacitly suggestion people use TeX, a piece of software made like 20 years before I was born :).

rb2k_ 7y ago

The title makes it sound like this is a Germany wide thing. It's 'only' the state of Hesse which is around 6 million people. The responsibility for the education system in Germany lies primarily with the states.

darkpuma 7y ago

I wish this sense of German/European sensibleness w.r.t. things digital could be transplanted into America. I'm really quite jealous of it.

allendoerfer 7y ago
I guess it already is being done. US citizens must also be benefitting from stuff like GDPR. It does not sound sensible for companies to implement it and then wilfully exclude US citizens. I think often times companies will just comply with all data protection rules globally for everyone.
- droithomme 7y ago
  > US citizens must also be benefitting from stuff like GDPR. My benefit so far has been countless popups that either offer a "take it or leave it" Accept button with no other options, or a link to tens of thousands of pages of legal contracts detailing the service terms of hundreds of "partners". None of these sites really seem GDPR compliant to me at all, and I'm talking about EU based sites. US based sites are easier. Either do like here on HN and have no popup or notice or terms at all, just rightly ignoring the law which is in a foreign jurisdiction not controlled by treaty and which legally has absolutely no bearing. Or do ip block level shutdowns of access with a 451 code response, as well as adding to the TOS that those in EU jurisdiction are not permitted to use the site. A win for everyone.
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    You seem entirely too gleeful about users' privacy getting violated. Very far from "a win for everybody".

anticensor 7y ago

Turkey got few steps further: Almost all ready made software recently become practically illegal to obtain in government tenders in Turkey due to "usability guarantee" requirement. Exact article translated (from the presidential administrative decree): All software and hardware contractors working for Turkish government shall provide a guarantee stating said soft/hard-ware does not contain backdoors and/or features unfit for intended use, as far as possible. Servers for goverment services are also required to be in Turkey, even if it is not possible to set up one in situ in the respective institution. This goes so far to require all data processor to have their own or peered IXPs situated in Turkey.

pkaye 7y ago
So what do they use? Linux with LibreOffice?
- chipperyman573 7y ago
  I think both of those explicitly denounce any expectation of a fitness for any particular purpose in their licence, so if anything they'll be going backwards (according to their metric)
  - anticensor 7y ago
    This applies going forward, not retroactively (Turkish constitution prohibits retroactive laws, except for pardoning or release of criminals). There is an "as far as possible" clause grandfathering former procurements and enabling the administration to make a case-by-case exemption.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    Sure, but that's just the license. If an ISV makes a support contract with them, they can include the necessary clauses in that contract.
    - anticensor 7y ago

jhunter1016 7y ago

It seems the simple solution for Microsoft is to just stand up a data center in Germany again. The simple solution for the rest of the software world is to let people choose where their data is stored. I wrote about this earlier today: https://blog.graphitedocs.com/the-simple-way-to-remain-gdpr-compliant/ https://blog.graphitedocs.com/the-simple-way-to-remain-gdpr-...

AaronFriel 7y ago
Again? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germany/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germ...
- skrause 7y ago
  This has been discontinued: https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2018/08/31/microsoft-to-deliver-cloud-services-from-new-datacentres-in-germany-in-2019-to-meet-evolving-customer-needs/ https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2018/08/31/microsoft-to-de...
  - groovybits 7y ago
    As an outsider looking in (from the US), what is the difference between the current Azure Germany vs the new locations they're standing up in Berlin and Frankfurt? Frankly, I don't understand the point of the last 3 paragraphs of this announcment.
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      The difference is that the discontinued data center was run independently by a German company (T-Systems IIRC). MS engineered the contracts in such a way that they had no ability to access anything in this data center. That made it exclusive subject to German law. As I see it, the new data centers are run by MS directly and thus an entity that is subject to US laws and their far reaching clauses.
- datapunk 7y ago

nacho2sweet 7y ago

I work at a university in Canada and it is the same unless they have cloud servers in Canada. I think we were on office 2010 till more recently. The patriot act allows US government access to any non americans data pretty easily, and it contradicts a lot of Canadian privacy law.

dmortin 7y ago
Microsoft is still an American company if the cloud servers are in Canada. Can't the US government tell Microsoft to hand over the data (which MS can fetch remotely) if it needs it for some terrorist investigation?
- filoleg 7y ago
  I believe you are correct, and that's why Azure has a dedicated German cloud with all the data residing in Germany and managed by a German data trustee, which should prevent US government from being able to tell Microsoft to do anything with that data[0]. If Canada happens to have a dedicated cloud region with similar policies, they should be in the clear. 0. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germany/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germ...
  - robocat 7y ago
    From the article: "A year later, Microsoft closed its German cloud datacenter, and schools migrated their accounts to the European cloud. Now, the HBDI states that the European cloud may offer access to US authorities; with no way for the German government to monitor such access"
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      This is because the old data center was run independently of MS while they own the new ones directly. Thus, the old one was legally and technically isolated from MS and any wish they might have had to access that data.
- 7y ago