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Britain Advises Against Vista, Office 2007 for Schools
An anonymous reader writes "The British government's educational IT authority has issued a report advising schools in the country not to upgrade their classroom or office systems to Windows Vista or Office 2007. According to this InformationWeek story, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency says costs for Vista and Office 2007 'are significant and the benefits remain unclear.' Instead, Becta is advising British schools to take a long look at Linux and open source suites like OpenOffice.org."
Having used both Office and OpenOffice.org extensively, I'm not really convinced that OO.o is really superior. Now, it is of course better in that it's open source, and it uses openly-documented file formats. But the user experience of OO.o is still lacking in many respects. Even on fast systems, it's slow and bloated.
I think it would be better to teach these children how to use LaTeX. It offers the openness of OO.o, but allows for the preparation of much more professional documentation. It would also be very useful for those students who wish to pursue university studies, as most math, science and engineering papers are formatted using LaTeX.
A Government department suggesting schools investigate the use of Linux? That's rather encouraging and should be seen as significant.
They want their excuse back.
No, really. I'm tired of answering your fucking phone.
Perhaps you might have been "insightful" two years ago, but Linux (and FOSS in general) is much more accepted and deployed in real-life situations these days. Nowadays, especially with Vista, people are serious when they talk about switching to Linux. It's no longer a negotiation tactic. It's *fact*. It's honest.
I've helped with Linux migrations for businesses that didn't even know Linux existed two years ago. Believe me, people are *tired* of taking it up the ass from Microsoft.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
As long as we're questioning the educational value of a "standard" OS, let's question the educational value of "standard" end-user software. Face it, 10 year olds aren't very interested in playing with a word processor or spreadsheet. How about something that will actually engage and challenge them? Even if they don't go for the XO, schools should consider installing some of the software from that system. Which is not terribly tied to the OLPC project, or even to Linux. OLPC's innovative user interface also deserves a close look.
In the British public sector, people don't get fired.
Well, they do, but they tend to have to commit serious crime for it to happen. Kiddy-fiddling, murder, that sort of thing (little things like defrauding the taxpayer of tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds tend not to cause much of a fuss).
It also doesn't matter two shits what the IT staff want, because they don't make the decisions. That's why we have organisations like BECTA, who (thankfully) have a relatively level head about such things and can tell local authorities what the deal is.
Of course, local authorities are typically in the supplier's pockets, and there's only so much BECTA, et al, can do about that, but at no point do they actually care what the skills of the IT staff are. As far as the local authority's concerned, the IT staff are employed to manage and maintain whatever the hell it is that they've decided should be in place this year.
Enough with the ripping-off BS. Every company borrows successful features from other people's work, thats life.
You create something, i like it & attempt to improve with my flavour. Someone else sees my work, picks an aspect they like & run with it. Endless cycle, hopefully producing something new and interesting with every evolution.
I do not deny for one minute that there are a minority of specialised MS Office users who write macros and VB programs for which OpenOffice would not be suitable - but for the majority of MS Office users that do use only about 10% of its features, OO is a perfectly good substitute.
And dare I mention one important fact. I work in the IT industry and have a large group of friends who also (mostly) work in high tech industry. All of them have MS Office on their home PCs but not one of them has actually paid for it - they've either borrowed a corporate license from their workplace or use cracks of the Internet. In my experience, when these people compare MS Office to OpenOffice, they forget that MS Office should probably have cost them a couple of hundred dollars/pounds/euros whereas OO is entirely free. If they were forced to pay for their copies of MS office, they would be a lot more inclined to at least give OO a try.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I do not deny that IT staff who support Windows day-to-day in the Public Sector would need to be trained to support Linux. But I'm sure this additional cost would soon be outweighed by the monies that no longer need to be spent on Microsoft licenses, anti-virus software and new PCs everytime a new MS OS is released.
If it does turn out that deploying Windows is cheaper than Linux, then I'm more than happy to see them stick with Windows - but the fact is that, so far, estimates of migrating to Open Source are just guesses without any real truth in reality.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
...go for it - what's the problem with this approach?
Like the other AC poster, you are commenting from a position of ignorance.
AT&ROFLMAO
But I don't want my tax spent on immigrants OR war......
What is your point? Britain wastes money?
There's a difference between "borrowing" and "ripping off." Usually it's involved in the character of the person doing the deed.
In Microsoft's case, they rip off. They don't really even improve. They have built a (very successful) business around stealing other peoples' ideas, while contributing *nothing* back. It's not like they are building on the work of others. They copy the works of others, and pretend *they* invented it. They don't give credit (part of the obligation of "borrowing"). They don't admit they are taking. They have a "not invented here" mentality when it comes to execution, but they definitely follow a "wait 'til the market proves it" mentality when following creativity.
So, they are risk-averse. (Understandable.) They are no creative. (Many companies aren't.) The problem is when they try to take claim, either implicitly or explicitly, for other people's inventions. *That's* the problem.
It's not BS. It's truth. In literature, we call it plagiarism. That's where Microsoft has been most successful. (To the point where I've heard *many times* that Microsoft invented the Internet.) They are good at stealing ideas, but very bad about giving ideas back.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Perhaps you have never heard of the term innovation or maybe they way M$ keeps using perhaps they don't really understand what it means.
I heard exact the same sort of nonsense about DOS or Unix and even for, fuck sack, about low res green screen monitors, gees, we don't need no stinking GUI.
Times change and it is only appropriate that teachers teach what will be used and not what was used. Education is about the future save history lessons for the history classroom not computer lab. Not to far off and every school child will have a durable cheap laptop computer that will cost a couple of hundred dollars and it will be far cheaper than the text books it replaces and one thing it absolutely will not have, is software on it that costs many times more than the hardware especially when you never ever can stop paying for that inevitable proprietary forced upgrade.
Yes, we are sick of the corporate B$ marketed Real World (TM), we want the real world (people) back.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The things aren't meant to be LAUNCHED! You just keep them around to look pretty and threaten people with.
You know, when I was growing up in the 1980s just beceause we didn't have to have Vista and Office 2007 or whatever didn't make me totally helpless in the workplace. The first time I had a class that used the computer writing lab in 7th grade was the old blue-screen WordPerfect. The first time I did any computer programming at school was BASIC on a TRS-80. The first time I worked with a spreadsheet was in Lotus 1,2,3 on a Mac in 6th grade. Somehow I managed to be able to translate these non-Microsoft skills into being able to use what "90% of the workplace" uses, and somehow it didn't manage ending up being "wasteful".
On the contrary, I think the computing diversity we had in the 80s is sorely missed.
If that is the case. The schools are teaching the wrong things. They should teach concepts not particular applications. Word Processing is understanding the following things: opening files, closing files, printing files. How paragraphs work, word wrap, newlines. Line and word spacing. Indents, margins, headers, footers, fonts, fixed and variable width fonts. Page breaks. Columns, insertign graphics and using styles.
Anyone who has any training should be able to set down and go "oh, I want a document with 1 inch margins, single spaced in a 10pt serif font, paragraphs with first word indented" If you understand the concepts, then everything else is menu surfing in a program you don't know. There is only a handful of concepts no matter how much you tart it up.
On the other hand if you only teach how to use word (or any word processor). 90% of what the student takes for granted are program defaults. They never think about line spacing or margins. They just take for granted the layout they are given.
vi +
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
When I was at school in the seventies, the bright kids got an education. The less bright girls learnt to type, because there would always be work for copy typists, and the less bright boys learnt to use a lathe, because here in Birmingham (England, not Alabama) there would always be work in the car industry.
I wonder how that's working out? I was taught transferrable skills, like how to learn, and thirty years later I'm still learning. Meanwhile, there's no car industry and copy typing, shorthand and the rest may as well be candle making for all the traction they have.
I don't know what software my children will use in the workplace in ten or twenty years' time, and if I did I'd be making a fortune producing it. I don't know what JOBS they'll be doing in ten or twenty years time, perhaps (indeed probably) in a very different landscape to where we are now. What I do know is that flexibility, adaptability, the ability to learn and reskill and change, are going to be vital in a world where the linear career is dead. And that's why the best thing you can learn is how to learn.
So as a matter of policy, whatever software the kids are using at school, we use something else at home. School right now is Office 2003 on XP, so home is iWork '08 on Mac. Spreadsheet problems I show them how to do by hand, and I'm about to start showing them how to knock up code to do it (and I'm choosing a language they're highly unlikely to use in school: I'm torn between Scheme and Processing). We did a poster project with Keynote, but also with a razor blade and cowgum.
You can teach your children ``the workplace'' if you like. I think you Americans call those sorts of lessons ``shop''. Someone who has a good degree in a pure science or a legitimate humanity can learn to use Word to a sufficient standard in a morning. Someone who knows Word, but can't use a library or do calculus, is welcome to try learning those in a morning. How many successful authors can touch type, and how many just did hunt and peck? Same principle.
How did Brunel build the Great Western without the help of Office? Which was more important: using Office, or being a great engineer?
And before anyone makes the point, I realise these aren't binary, black/white choices. But in terms of mentality, they are: do you regard education as about learning the direct skills of today, or the ability to learn the skills of tomorrow? There's a word for people with the first sort of education, or indeed training, and the word is `poor'.
ian
Education is about providing long-term skills. Teaching Office 2007 is simple short-term training - anyone with OpenOffice skills can easily pick up another office package such as Office 2007 very quickly.
Second, at the time these kids come out of school, the world will _not_ be using Office 2007. In ten years time, Microsoft will have lost the battle against open standards, and the world will be using either Open Office, or whatever Open Office compatible software Apple ships for free with MacOS X version 10.12.
Third, are you telling me that people can't use Office 2007 if they didn't learn how to use it at school? Is the user interface so horrid and counter-intuitive that some who was happy with AppleWorks 2.0 cannot use Office 2007? (Answer: Yes, it is.) Well, in that case Office 2007 should be avoided like the plague - which, as I said before, the real world does.
Fourth, you have a complete misunderstanding why kids at a school use a word processor. They don't use it to learn how to use a word processor, they use it to write papers and their homework. So the software that should be used should be as easy to learn as possible so that it doesn't interfere with the job at hand (no Office 2007 then), it should be future-proof so that teacher's handouts written today can be used in years to come (no Office 2007 then), and it should be compatible with what kids have at home, if possible (no Office 2007 then).
By pure coincidence, the code that I had to type in to login to slashdot was "hostage". You don't want your school and your kids to become hostages of Microsoft, do you?
From a programmer's perspective, I thought it would be easier to implement it just like all the other file formats, not make a special case for it. That takes EXTRA EFFORT. Therefore, there must be a reason that this effort was expended in MS Office 2007.
This makes it look different because Linux isn't mentioned at all; it's about a reasonable feature request by a customer (please consider supporting this standard file format) which is implemented, but implemented so lackadaisically as to imply a deliberate insult. Why should you upgrade if (a) there is no great business case to upgrade yet and (b) it's not cheap and (c) your software vendor is publicly urinating on your head.
We're talking about the flagship product of one of the world's largest software companies; it's not as if they don't care about these details. Sigh.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?