What is Digg?194 Comments
- shrewduser, on 10/12/2007, -16/+107bicycles aren't cheaper than buses when you factor in all the costs associated with the complexities and logistics of moving a school of kids around with bicycles as well as the opportunity costs involved with the extra amount of time and energy the kids would have to put into their commute...
thats where your analogy (as most analogies do) falls apart, open-office, when all the costs are factored, is a much better value proposition for most schools/business/individuals... but a guy like you wouldn't be biased or nothing now would you? (*checks comment history*) oh dear... - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -12/+85@7of7
What an irrelevant and pointless comment. - Amablue, on 10/12/2007, -8/+65Actually, increased use of bikes is a good idea too. I know my GF's college promotes biking all the time, and mine has special secure bike racks installed all over the place.
Then again, my bikes aren't made by MS, so I don't know if 7 would approve. - anjinash, on 10/12/2007, -4/+31"it doesnt prepare kids for using office in the real world. sure, it may cost schools less, but it has less features and is too simplistic for any real professional use"
First of all, OO.o is hardly simplistic. Compared to the bloat of MS Office, sure.. it doesn't have all of the "features". But seriously, how many of the features in MS Office do most people actually use on a day to day basis? Not even in schools, in offices across the world.
Secondly, saying that OO.o does not prepare kids for using Office in the real world, well.. that's a self fulfilling prophesy. If OO.o was taught in schools, chances are a lot of businesses would end up using it as well and seeing the cost benefits of doing so. I know several small businesses in my area who already use OO.o instead of Office. They don't need the bloat of Office, so why pony up the cash for it or risk their business by pirating it?
In addition, OO.o is cross platform. Regardless if a student runs Windows, OSX or Linux at home, his or her documents would always be 100% compatible with what the school is running, and the file formats are open as well so there's no fear of becoming obsolete over time.
And it's not like somebody who's familiar with Write wouldn't be able to sit down in front of MS Word and NOT know intuitively how to use it. THese programs are very similar, so why the hell not use it at schools? - Pingspike, on 10/12/2007, -11/+35Dugg and fully agree that OpenOffice is an obvious choice for schools and infact any education system in the world.
- ggko, on 10/12/2007, -1/+23Instead of iPods, Michigan should pass out bicycles to each student.
Healthier kids, maybe even free up that PE credit for something else. - giant.robot, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20> School is to get kids ready for the real world.
No, schools prepare children to work in factories. Hence the bells, being quiet, and getting into straight lines. Teaching a sixth grader Office 2007 isn't going to prepare them for the real world, by the time they graduate few if any companies will still be using Office 2007. If instead those sixth graders were taught in a general fashion how word processors can be used to aid in their writing they'll be able to quickly and easily pick up whatever productivity apps they need to use when they are in the work force.
Even if they were taught Office 2007 right before graduation they aren't likely to find those skills terribly useful. Office is configurable enough that any given organization might have it set up in a completely foreign manner to what the student learned in school. Getting by in the "real world" is about learning to adapt not panicing when things don't look exactly like they did in a school course. - fishmasta, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18"Who the ***** is nate grondin?"
Exactly. - mookieXL, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16Every single of his comments is either praising some MS product or bashing competition.
- BZKyle, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16Eh?
Our school has been using Open Office since the beginning of this year... - ViceVirtue, on 10/12/2007, -8/+227of7, that comment has the strongest likeness to trollop, stronger than any other comment I have ever read.
You are a bad man. - brandoj, on 10/12/2007, -3/+15Price is not the only concern.
Many schools, and especially those at the high-school level, will tell you they are educating their students toward being integrated into the workforce. Predictively, once you see OpenOffice go mainstream in business, schools will follow. - h0dg3s, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14Who the ***** is nate grondin?
- GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15No kid in school uses any features of MSO that aren't in OOo and generally most of the that are used are accessed through a similar interface. Besides the key is always transferable skills. Things change, having only a specific understanding of a problem makes you worthless. It won't harm them learning to click the bold button in a different word processor, unless they are absolute idiots in which case they are no use to anyone anyway.
- jtown, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Teaching to a specific application is absolutely absurd. The programs kids learn in high school are not going to be the ones they use in the real world. Even if it's still got the same name, it's going to look and feel very different by the time they get out in the world. Think about what you were using 5-6 years ago. Think about 10 years ago. 15.
Schools should be teaching kids in a way that will prepare them to sit down in front of a computer running any major OS with any tools relevant to their trade. If we bring in an intern or temp and they can't do their job because they took a WordPerfect class and can't find their way around Word 2003 (or OO or AbiWord or whatever we're using for a word processor), they'll be gone before their chair gets warm. If the ad says "word processing", you'd better be able to use whatever word processing tool is provided. Anything else would be like taking a job as a courier and saying, "Oh, I can't drive a Ford van. I only know how to drive a Chevy truck." - Amablue, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10@lukas88
I don't think there'd be a whole lot of trouble for teachers and students. The only thing a school kid might be confused by is that the 'header' option is under 'insert' instead of 'view', which makes more sense anyway. There's not too much a school kid would use a word processor for outside of typing an essay. None of the more advanced features would really come up, which is where the real differences are.
@stou
Davis is actually the school I was referring to in my first comment =D - JonForTheWin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8"Well we'd use OpenOffice here in the office but it's not what the kids are learning in school."
"Well we'd use OpenOffice here on campus but it's not what the kids are going to use when they work at the office."
God damn it. - h0dg3s, on 10/12/2007, -8/+15It does indeed have a powerpoint equivalent. It's called "Impress". Next time pull your head out of your ass before you post.
- Chordonblue, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Yes, and only 15 short years ago that choice might have been Wordperfect. Another 10 years before and it might have been XYwrite. It should not be a school's duty to promote a specific product - just teach a skill. I'm a tech coordinator at a small all-girls school and we've been using Star/OpenOffice for 5 years now.
- garfonzo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I think for basic tasks, the MS Office suite could easily be replaced by Open Office. But, for more technical projects (I'm thinking of Excel & Access projects) Open Office might fall short in its abilities to teach students. I'm in a university course that is 100% Excel based. Part way through this semester I tried Open Office but couldn't do some very basic operations. So, I had to go back to MS. But for Elementary/Middle/ and High schools, I don't see why Open Office couldn't be a very viable option.
- Niz1, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8When i was in school i asked my teacher this exact same thing, i was told that the school gets it for a very cheap price compared to what we "pay" for it, and that's its industry standard and it would be pretty stupid for them to teach using anything else.
I agree it would have been nice to be using open office solely because of the price of MS Office its ridiculous, and having to upgrade every 3 years, yeh you can get it "free" but you shouldn't have to do it that way. - Phocion55, on 10/12/2007, -7/+14People still haven't added 7of7 to their blocklist yet?
- newl, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I'm going to agree with some of the previous posts that say OOo is quite a valid alternative and also agree that Microsoft Office no matter how much you may or may not like it is used by a large part of the business world.
That being said, back in my day we were taught how to USE computers, not particular applications. This permitted us to understand how the computers worked and thereby how the applications worked. This should still be the process of today if we want a better educations for our children in computer science (not limited to mind you).
If we continue to focus on specific applications to education our children on they will continue to fail to truely understand how to USE a computer. I would prefer my children to have a better well rounded understanding than to know one or two applications. - darkmule, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7I think Open Office looks a lot like MS Office 2003 myself. If you stand back away from it word looks a lot like the word processor. Yes it would take 'retraining'. But we're not dealing with teachers from the age before computers were in the classroom, we're dealing with people who are more technology competent. If schools can get away with switching to thin-client linux systems, they can get away with using Open Office on some machines in place of MS Office. Its not that big of a change, while I do agree that format issues may cause complications, in saving documents (in fact my dad does it all the time -- hes a teacher mind you) there.. are bigger problems to worry about than saving a document in the wrong file format. Walk into any school computer lab, there are software instructions all over the place, saving white papers would most likely be plastered on the walls.
- afruff23, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Some features though bug me. I like how MS word has exact margins, while OO annoyingly doesn't. To try for yourself: change the top margins and see that they don't lock into exact markings.
- arizonagroove, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Yeah, 'cos by the time those kids in elementary school enter the work force, MS Office 2003 will be totally relevant.
- Smills, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10Open office does not have a lot of things... but it is free though. But still, i don't think it is adequate for schools. I certainly found it to be very lacking feature wise when i installed it on my current computer because i didn't want to spend the money on MS Office. After using it for a few months i eventually got so frustrated (i do a lot of typing) I went out and bought office, and have not regretted it at all. Commence the burying. Button is over there>>>
- martalli, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6My office uses OOo exclusively for all our tasks. I know that one of our local papers also uses OOo for writing up their articles. Both of our businesses do not need complicated groupware features, but basic wordprocessors with spellcheck, etc. The local newspaper uses a proprietary program for layout. I realize that MS Office still leads OOo in many tasks, but for basic use much of its (and OOo's) functionality is unused.
As time goes by, more businesses will realize the advantages of OOo. Not only is the price and licensing right for students, but OOo increasingly is used by small businesses. - KiwiHopeful, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5We recently switched to OpenOffice in the school district where I work. (We are also running 2 labs of thin clients with Ubuntu, too.) Doing so allows us to divert money that would have been spent on software to purchasing hardware. With the savings in our small-ish district, we've been able to purchase several laptops and lcd projectors, data loggers for our physical science labs, and other items.
The major objection on the part of teachers was the 'MS Office is what they'll use in the real world.' Truth is, if we were really preparing them for business, we'd teach them MS Project, Lotus Notes, etc--rather than the 5000 hours of PowerPoint training they get now.
Of course, the irony is that many teachers are no advising students to use Google Writer and not taking 'I don't have my paper because my printer broke' as an excuse anymore.
We better prepare students when we teach them as many different programs as possible so they learn to move from software package to software package. - garfonzo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Well, the projects we did involved using solver. The intricacies of the model we had to create just weren't possible in Calc. I'm not sure if it was Calc's version of solver (does it have one?) or the data tables I needed to create, but there was something that prevented me from moving forward on the model. It may be the case that if I were to look hard enough, I would have found all that I needed. It just seemed that at the time I couldn't move forward with the project.
This seems like a weak counter argument because of my lack of specifics, but, this is all my memory could come up with since I tried Open Office about 2 months ago. - generalloy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Subsidizing a criminal monopoly is no excuse.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8I'm a senior at Buckingham Charter High School (www.bcmhs.org), and I've gotten about 6 teachers to switch to OpenOffice so far this year. I am trying to convince the board to adopt it, they are starting to understand that Open Source alternatives can save them much needed $$$ that they seem to never have enough of :)
Love OpenOffice, I will evangelize it until I die. - Smills, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6@ lowerlogic
That's funny, because he didn't say that open office didn't have a spreadsheet program, he just said it didn't have that particular function. - Chordonblue, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5It will be especially interesting when OOo 3.0 comes out with the bibliography plug-in. 50 different styles supported, direct link to library of congress to fill in data, automatic formatting. Nice!
- Earlofnecromium, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Open office is wonderful. Especially the feeling of an extra 500+ in your pocket.
- selrahc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4If people can survive the update from the older versions of Microsoft Office to 2007 I don't see why they can't survive the change from OpenOffice.org too.
- fishmasta, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7Well if Nate Grondin says it, it must be true!
- Katana314, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Heck, I'd recommend them to use GoogleDocs over Word, what with it being the insanely expensive yet useless piece of software it is. Most people use about 2% of its features.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Haha, hanging out at Best Buy convincing people *not* to waste their money sounds fun... I think I'll do it over Spring Break next week :D
- Amablue, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I've never used Word (or any of Office) for the past few years, including my entire college career so far. I've never needed to. All the functionality I've needed is in OOo. Even if I've had to teach myself a few things, that's only because I learned them in Office first. If I had learned OOo from the beginning, Word would seem just as foreign. I've done spreadsheets for statistics, presentations for some liberal arts GE class, and all sorts of essays, scripts, reports, and all of the rest with no trouble.
- Wrathernaut, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I'm using openoffice in place of MS products on my college course on MS Office, the ease of use and functional equivalence are startling. There's absolutely no reason you couldn't teach kids word processing, spreadsheets and presentations on the free alternative.
Anyone who bitches about retraining... I have a harder time learning to drive a Ford after driving my Dodge than when switching between MS and Open office. Give people some credit, not everyone has a cup holder built into their desktop. - rheaume, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Dugg for truth, unlike the rest of the posts
- bikeham, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Getting kids accustomed to using different software is a *good* thing. M$ has changed it's software and OS considerably in the past so each new version has a learning curve. The real world has other software besides M$ and if you work in the real world you find that companies change software and software companies frequently. There are formatting and conversion issues between versions of Word, even M$ can't get it right. OO is a good thing.
- SSCrow, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I hear you my brother.
You know what else OO.o does not have?
Spreadsheet: Fit print area to Page - busta, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@ GMorgan "Nobody builds a real DB in Access, it is entirely pointless."
I think you'd be surprised and even horrified to the extent at which *large* businesses (and government organizations) use Access databases to solve their problems. In fact it's almost hilarious the number of access databases some offices have, frequently with overlapping pieces of information with various degrees of recentness. Yes it's true that they really shouldn't be leaning on Access so much but when it comes down to it, the solution works and they just get a co-op student to whip it up for almost negligible cost in developement time. Real databases require paperwork, manager approval, impact/cost/needs assessments, money, and developers. Sometimes just because of politics and the nature of the company it's easier to just make an Access DB under the radar.
I'm not saying it's good, but it's the real world. - Blitzenn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4You have an interview for a job you want. You go to buy some good new clothes for it. Do you buy the tee shirt or the button down? The tee shirt is perfectly good and does the job just as well, but in the end the outcome may not be what you hoped for. I am sure this will get me dug down, but the schools need to teach all technology. Part of learning technology is learning how the different technologies can interoperate with each other. I am tired of seeing schools box children into one path and not giving them the opportunity to learn about technologies that a great number of other people might be using. I think the best path (for education) is one that mixes all of the platforms. Save the One Technology arguement for business and home. Give the kids the knowledge they need to make wise decisions for themselves.
- Influsion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Actually, the Singapore Ministry of Defense uses OOo; and so do a lot of startup businesses.
- GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4You shouldn't build models on Excel in any case, I know people do but they are idiots. It was designed to handle series of simple financial calculations. Modelling should be done in a programming language.
- localzuk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Why do they need to have documents open in Word? Also, why not alter the default save format for open office to word? The issues you discuss are implementation issues that your school has not taken into account properly, not a failure in Open Office.
See: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/01/25/configure-change-or-set-openofficeorg-to-default-save-files-in-microsoft-office-formats/ for details.
If the pupils need to open the documents at home, why not give them the website address of open office or give them a cd with it on? - localzuk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3You would be wrong... We pay nearly £5k for Windows, Office and Server 2003 CALS each year for 150 machines. That is a lot of money to a school but nothing to Microsoft.
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