6 ms·

"This effectively leaves schools with few other options, unless Microsoft gets back to them with a satisfactory solution." While businesses are obviously reluc

• 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.