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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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.
What evidence do you have for this? Based on my experiences with k-12 tech education in the US, this sounds like complete BS.
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.
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. ;-)
> 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.
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.
So these paid products more often than not would be much more superior in terms of experience.
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 :-)
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.
When I was in school (read in grandpa's accent), it was teaching Text602 (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.
Libreoffice, now? Yes.