3 ms·

Schools have no place supporting or teaching proprietary software in the first place. They should teach concepts using publicly available software and sponsor s

by lrvick 4y ago

Schools have no place supporting or teaching proprietary software in the first place. They should teach concepts using publicly available software and sponsor students who wish to patch bugs that impact school operations.

bluGill 4y ago
Should need to teach how to think. Part of that means the ability to adopt to whatever tool. Thus schools should require students to use each of 4 different office system. O365 is only one of them, and LibreOffice is an obvious section choice (I'm have no idea what the others might be). tools come and go, but the concepts you are using the tools for stick around. I wasted a lot of time learning WordPerfect F-keys back as a kid a useless skill. Microsoft introduced the Ribbon and changed the way you use their office 20 years ago. I haven't even used a word processor in the last few years, but by focusing on good writing (well as good as I can do) I can figure out how to make tools submit, and that is what is important.
- hkpack 4y ago
  > Should need to teach how to think. Do you know if there is any sort of consensus on this topic on how to do it? It looks like a very popular belief, but do anyone actually knows how to think, and even more, how to teach how to think without making it just a different kind of propaganda?
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Here I'm focused on the skills of making an easy to read/nice too look at paper, and not the much more broad skill of critical thinking in any situation. (though that is the real goal of school, I have no idea how to teach it - see the other reply) As such what we need to teach is when to change font size, when bold/italic is good, when column layouts are good, how to format table of contents, and many other things that you would do. Any word processor can do all of the above. Then a similar list of things for the other tools in an office suite. That is how to think about office documents. Once you know what you want to do any tool can do that.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Teaching is always propaganda. What matters is what you are propagandizing. Robert Fulghum figured it out decades ago. The teacher should were two message buttons on their shirt: "Trust me; I'm the teacher" "Question Authority"
  - Loughla 4y ago
    So not really. There are broad strokes ways to teach critical thinking skills, but (believe it or not) critical thinking is a very higher order skill that is difficult to transfer across domain areas. It follows a few steps: teach the scientific process, analyze analogies to whatever it is you're approaching, identify appropriate and relevant sources for information and how to assess their reliability/trustworthiness, identify biases including self-biases, and fostering open-mindedness and an ability to evaluate points from multiple perspectives. When you are critically thinking about things, these are the steps you take - quickly, and not in any order that you can identify. But you are doing that. That being said, because these are higher order, abstract skills for the most part, they are very hard to apply across disciplines. You need a level of base knowledge of the area to be able to sort through these steps appropriately. For example, it is easy for me to analyze statements and assess articles related to farming, education, and depression, because I have massive experience with these things. Whereas, I absolutely could not even get through evaluating appropriate sources when it comes to programming languages; I have no experience with them. In other words, it is possible, but it takes a concerted effort in nearly every aspect of the child's life. This is not something we can do JUST in the classroom, especially when parents, often, do not want true critical reasoning in their children; my experience is that if a child can do this effectively s/he is very difficult to keep 'under control'.
- yunohn 4y ago
  > Should need to teach how to think. The goal of school is not to derail kids’ education by making them wrestle with self hosted sys admin nuances and failures.
scrollaway 4y ago
ca. 2000, my elementary school put me and my class in front of some PCs running windows 98 (proprietary), and connected to the internet, made us open internet explorer (proprietary), made us type "google.com" (proprietary) and showed us how to find things on the internet. This was actually extremely unique - in france at the time, finding schools teaching any sort of computer skills, especially to young children, let alone *online*, was basically impossible. But I remember it very vividly. I don't know if the skills "learned" at that time had any influence on me, or ended up being useful (I probably would have figured them out eventually), but… I can't be sure, and the point is, it was I think a great thing. I am an open source activist whenever I can. But saying schools have "no place supporting or teaching proprietary software" is extremely off-base, simply because the world is made of proprietary software and schools should be able to teach the reality of the world to children, teenagers and young adults.
JTbane 4y ago
Honestly it would be amazing if schools started using Ubuntu or some other flavor of Linux for students, but the MS monopoly is entrenched.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
"Schools have no place supporting or teaching proprietary software in the first place. They should teach concepts using publicly available software" Schools teach using proprietary books, and every piece of equipment in a school, from a projector to a powertool is proprietary too. I am not against the idea, but I am just pointing out it gors against the grain of current customs and norms.
- lrvick 4y ago
  I specifically said software. Appliances like a drill or a projector can be readily replaced with any other drill or projector. These do not have anywhere near the privacy and lock-in problems of proprietary software.

by lrvick 4y ago

bluGill 4y ago

Should need to teach how to think. Part of that means the ability to adopt to whatever tool. Thus schools should require students to use each of 4 different office system. O365 is only one of them, and LibreOffice is an obvious section choice (I'm have no idea what the others might be). tools come and go, but the concepts you are using the tools for stick around. I wasted a lot of time learning WordPerfect F-keys back as a kid a useless skill. Microsoft introduced the Ribbon and changed the way you use their office 20 years ago. I haven't even used a word processor in the last few years, but by focusing on good writing (well as good as I can do) I can figure out how to make tools submit, and that is what is important.

hkpack 4y ago
> Should need to teach how to think. Do you know if there is any sort of consensus on this topic on how to do it? It looks like a very popular belief, but do anyone actually knows how to think, and even more, how to teach how to think without making it just a different kind of propaganda?
- bluGill 4y ago
  Here I'm focused on the skills of making an easy to read/nice too look at paper, and not the much more broad skill of critical thinking in any situation. (though that is the real goal of school, I have no idea how to teach it - see the other reply) As such what we need to teach is when to change font size, when bold/italic is good, when column layouts are good, how to format table of contents, and many other things that you would do. Any word processor can do all of the above. Then a similar list of things for the other tools in an office suite. That is how to think about office documents. Once you know what you want to do any tool can do that.
- lupire 4y ago
  Teaching is always propaganda. What matters is what you are propagandizing. Robert Fulghum figured it out decades ago. The teacher should were two message buttons on their shirt: "Trust me; I'm the teacher" "Question Authority"
- Loughla 4y ago
  So not really. There are broad strokes ways to teach critical thinking skills, but (believe it or not) critical thinking is a very higher order skill that is difficult to transfer across domain areas. It follows a few steps: teach the scientific process, analyze analogies to whatever it is you're approaching, identify appropriate and relevant sources for information and how to assess their reliability/trustworthiness, identify biases including self-biases, and fostering open-mindedness and an ability to evaluate points from multiple perspectives. When you are critically thinking about things, these are the steps you take - quickly, and not in any order that you can identify. But you are doing that. That being said, because these are higher order, abstract skills for the most part, they are very hard to apply across disciplines. You need a level of base knowledge of the area to be able to sort through these steps appropriately. For example, it is easy for me to analyze statements and assess articles related to farming, education, and depression, because I have massive experience with these things. Whereas, I absolutely could not even get through evaluating appropriate sources when it comes to programming languages; I have no experience with them. In other words, it is possible, but it takes a concerted effort in nearly every aspect of the child's life. This is not something we can do JUST in the classroom, especially when parents, often, do not want true critical reasoning in their children; my experience is that if a child can do this effectively s/he is very difficult to keep 'under control'.
yunohn 4y ago
> Should need to teach how to think. The goal of school is not to derail kids’ education by making them wrestle with self hosted sys admin nuances and failures.

scrollaway 4y ago

ca. 2000, my elementary school put me and my class in front of some PCs running windows 98 (proprietary), and connected to the internet, made us open internet explorer (proprietary), made us type "google.com" (proprietary) and showed us how to find things on the internet. This was actually extremely unique - in france at the time, finding schools teaching any sort of computer skills, especially to young children, let alone *online*, was basically impossible. But I remember it very vividly. I don't know if the skills "learned" at that time had any influence on me, or ended up being useful (I probably would have figured them out eventually), but… I can't be sure, and the point is, it was I think a great thing. I am an open source activist whenever I can. But saying schools have "no place supporting or teaching proprietary software" is extremely off-base, simply because the world is made of proprietary software and schools should be able to teach the reality of the world to children, teenagers and young adults.

JTbane 4y ago

Honestly it would be amazing if schools started using Ubuntu or some other flavor of Linux for students, but the MS monopoly is entrenched.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

"Schools have no place supporting or teaching proprietary software in the first place. They should teach concepts using publicly available software" Schools teach using proprietary books, and every piece of equipment in a school, from a projector to a powertool is proprietary too. I am not against the idea, but I am just pointing out it gors against the grain of current customs and norms.

lrvick 4y ago
I specifically said software. Appliances like a drill or a projector can be readily replaced with any other drill or projector. These do not have anywhere near the privacy and lock-in problems of proprietary software.