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Plain text is a very powerful tool in education [1]. I use org-mode. It's essential to have universal tools that all students have access to at almost zero cos

Plain text is a very powerful tool in education [1]. I use org-mode. It's essential to have universal tools that all students have access to at almost zero cost, work across platforms, are light enough to work remotely over poor connections, don't go out of date, quick to learn. Unfortunately Microsoft keep bribing our admins to push Office365 cruft on the poor souls. I have to do a lot of work to repair the damage that does and get them back to a stage where they can think about ideas, not battling with buggy, over-complex, insecure application suite. [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/joy-text-world-tech-zealotry https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/joy-text-world-t...

quickthrower2 4y ago
The nice thing about office is at least the file format is an open standard and can be opened in myriad programs as is or converted to html, rtf, markdown etc.
- Asraelite 4y ago
  In theory. In practice I have yet to see free software that fully supports it. Both Google and LibreOffice mangle docx and pptx documents. This isn't Microsoft's fault though. I'm really glad it's an open standard.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    Open in the sense that the standard literally states "will handle XYZ case as the case is handled in MS Office 2000. So to implement the standard one needs a copy of Office 2000 to see how it handles specific cases. That's black box testing, as Office source code is not available.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > the file format is an open standard and can be opened in myriad programs as is or converted to html, rtf, markdown etc. Have you seen that work well in practice? I haven't - if you want to reliably open Microsoft Office docs, the only answer is Microsoft Office. Just because it's open doesn't mean it's coherent, consistent, or possible to implement.
hinkley 4y ago
The biggest issue with structured data is that our most powerful tools for tracking change over time only understand plain text, and even that they do fairly poorly. Any attempts to represent our programs as anything more than marked up text end up crashing against the rocks of Change Over Time concerns. I don't know if there's a mathematical proof out there that says it's intractable, but most of us behave as if it is. But my suspicions lie elsewhere. I think the kind of intelligence that is comfortable working in this space is simply not attracted to the field in sufficient numbers, and so the Venn Diagram of people possessing the right skills and sufficient motivation is just too small. In the late days of UML I realized that I was spending most of my time fixing path finding problems. I had a running joke with a coworker about hiring a bunch of game designers to fix this stuff. I don't know how much money you have to pay game AI designers to work enthusiastically on diagrams but I am sure I'd get sticker shock.
posharma 4y ago
How do you represent figures and math equations in plain text?
- auggierose 4y ago
  figures: This very post. Did you read it? math equations: LaTeX. Obviously you can represent anything you want with text.
  - cestith 4y ago
    eqn still exists for folks wanting the old-school troff-style tools.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  https://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v3.1.pdf https://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v3.1....
Gigachad 4y ago
Why is it essential? I was in school a little over 5 years ago and no one received special training on Office. You were just expected to work it out since it is obvious. Many students used Google Docs instead, I saw some use Libre Office, I used Latex. None of this was a problem. You just converted the file to pdf and sent it away. Even conversions to docx work fine since your documents are simple. None of this seemed very consequential to me. Your choice of document editor meant little more than your choice of shoes. It doesn’t impact you in any way going forward and is trivial to swap later.
- boondaburrah 4y ago
  I got mandatory training in Microsoft Office as part of the state curriculum for highschoolers. I don't think basic training really promotes lock-in with Office suites. (well, except for Excel, but that's a programming environment) It's surprising how non-obvious office suites are, because I regularly see people in a professional setting who don't know how to use them well enough. However, I don't really think training in any particular office suite isn't transferable, since the major skill is knowing what the ruler, styles, and various line/page breaks are actually there for apparently. I had no trouble using LibreOffice or whatever, but people definitely don't seem to know the concepts of word processing well at all. This isn't their fault, as it does /kinda/ work even if you just keep slamming shit into the page until it's right. Forcing people to work it out on their own is just training people to put up with "I don't know, I got it to look right but if I put a space between these words my entire layout breaks 4 pages later." when they don't have to live like this.
- analog31 4y ago
  My kids are in college now, so they went to high school recently. The school subscribed to Google Classroom, and students used Google Docs to work on assignments, often collaboratively. There was no systematic training, and no use of features beyond basic text editing. Nobody uses Google Classroom after they finish school, and most people can quickly adapt to any text editor. They already use multiple text editors if they interact with any online software. There's no use for fancy page formatting of documents that will be read once and never printed. If anything, Google and Microsoft tools have the advantage of being general purpose, even if they are closed source. This liberates students from "educational" software that is almost universally abysmal. Subjects like math were still being taught in relatively traditional ways, e.g., by pencil and paper. My main gripe was that you couldn't put Python on the school issued Chromebooks.

quickthrower2 4y ago

The nice thing about office is at least the file format is an open standard and can be opened in myriad programs as is or converted to html, rtf, markdown etc.

Asraelite 4y ago
In theory. In practice I have yet to see free software that fully supports it. Both Google and LibreOffice mangle docx and pptx documents. This isn't Microsoft's fault though. I'm really glad it's an open standard.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  Open in the sense that the standard literally states "will handle XYZ case as the case is handled in MS Office 2000. So to implement the standard one needs a copy of Office 2000 to see how it handles specific cases. That's black box testing, as Office source code is not available.
wolverine876 4y ago
> the file format is an open standard and can be opened in myriad programs as is or converted to html, rtf, markdown etc. Have you seen that work well in practice? I haven't - if you want to reliably open Microsoft Office docs, the only answer is Microsoft Office. Just because it's open doesn't mean it's coherent, consistent, or possible to implement.

hinkley 4y ago

The biggest issue with structured data is that our most powerful tools for tracking change over time only understand plain text, and even that they do fairly poorly. Any attempts to represent our programs as anything more than marked up text end up crashing against the rocks of Change Over Time concerns. I don't know if there's a mathematical proof out there that says it's intractable, but most of us behave as if it is. But my suspicions lie elsewhere. I think the kind of intelligence that is comfortable working in this space is simply not attracted to the field in sufficient numbers, and so the Venn Diagram of people possessing the right skills and sufficient motivation is just too small. In the late days of UML I realized that I was spending most of my time fixing path finding problems. I had a running joke with a coworker about hiring a bunch of game designers to fix this stuff. I don't know how much money you have to pay game AI designers to work enthusiastically on diagrams but I am sure I'd get sticker shock.

posharma 4y ago

How do you represent figures and math equations in plain text?

auggierose 4y ago
figures: This very post. Did you read it? math equations: LaTeX. Obviously you can represent anything you want with text.
- cestith 4y ago
  eqn still exists for folks wanting the old-school troff-style tools.
dragonwriter 4y ago
https://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v3.1.pdf https://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v3.1....

Gigachad 4y ago

Why is it essential? I was in school a little over 5 years ago and no one received special training on Office. You were just expected to work it out since it is obvious. Many students used Google Docs instead, I saw some use Libre Office, I used Latex. None of this was a problem. You just converted the file to pdf and sent it away. Even conversions to docx work fine since your documents are simple. None of this seemed very consequential to me. Your choice of document editor meant little more than your choice of shoes. It doesn’t impact you in any way going forward and is trivial to swap later.

boondaburrah 4y ago
I got mandatory training in Microsoft Office as part of the state curriculum for highschoolers. I don't think basic training really promotes lock-in with Office suites. (well, except for Excel, but that's a programming environment) It's surprising how non-obvious office suites are, because I regularly see people in a professional setting who don't know how to use them well enough. However, I don't really think training in any particular office suite isn't transferable, since the major skill is knowing what the ruler, styles, and various line/page breaks are actually there for apparently. I had no trouble using LibreOffice or whatever, but people definitely don't seem to know the concepts of word processing well at all. This isn't their fault, as it does /kinda/ work even if you just keep slamming shit into the page until it's right. Forcing people to work it out on their own is just training people to put up with "I don't know, I got it to look right but if I put a space between these words my entire layout breaks 4 pages later." when they don't have to live like this.
analog31 4y ago
My kids are in college now, so they went to high school recently. The school subscribed to Google Classroom, and students used Google Docs to work on assignments, often collaboratively. There was no systematic training, and no use of features beyond basic text editing. Nobody uses Google Classroom after they finish school, and most people can quickly adapt to any text editor. They already use multiple text editors if they interact with any online software. There's no use for fancy page formatting of documents that will be read once and never printed. If anything, Google and Microsoft tools have the advantage of being general purpose, even if they are closed source. This liberates students from "educational" software that is almost universally abysmal. Subjects like math were still being taught in relatively traditional ways, e.g., by pencil and paper. My main gripe was that you couldn't put Python on the school issued Chromebooks.