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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access to at almost zero cost, work across platforms, are light enough to work remotely over poor connections, don't go out of date, quick to learn.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-t...

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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.

> I used Latex. None of this was a problem

I used LaTeX for years, and almost _everything_ was a problem. The moment I wanted to venture one bit beyond the obvious and typical, it's very crufty macro programming. The situation has improved somewhat w.r.t. packages supporting you in doing that, but still, "no problem" is certainly not how I'd describe it.

I think op meant that using different software (including LaTeX) was not a problem, not that LaTeX itself wasn't problematic

What seems to be happening in the past 5 years is BigTech aggressively pushing into education. Get them hooked young. A sixth form (high-school) headmaster proudly told me how his school was not under the thumb of Microsoft, because his was a "Google Academy". I have no idea what that even means by the way - other than that money changed hands in a back room deal.

Kids may not be told expressly "You must use Vendor X", but network effects and non-interoperability will pressure them in subtle ways. This is exacerbated when teachers ask students to submit course-work via proprietary vendor platforms. A departure from open standards and neutral tools, toward monopoly proprietary suppliers is obviously unacceptable in education. But the rationale, as always, is economic, and against a background of deskilling of educational ICT.

Wherever I get to choose tools and direct students I pick the most universal, accessible, free and open source software I can.

It's also.

Schools just plain old don't have much money.

Big tech has an advantage going into schools because schools LOVE end to end contracts that do everything.

No other vendors but Google and Microsoft are willing to fight over schools, because the margin is too low. Google and Microsoft however will, because they are vertical enough they can absorb the low margin.

They're willing to do this at low margin, zero margin, or potentially at a small loss. It's not just because they can absorb it. It's because mindshare is real. Having schoolchildren trained in your technology is a loss leader for the workplace contracts you're seeking from everyone from the corner store to the Fortune 500 companies.

The startup I work for in Scandinavia sells to education customers. As far as I understand, all schools here are either "Microsoft schools" or "Google schools".

And now all our kids are being tracked at school too. And in 20 years, their profiles will alter their "choices" of career because some HR will have access to it.

The problem is not to use the tool, the problem is that the schools forces it upon kids (because the teachers can't learn all the available tools -- which is understandable)

What a wonderful world.

This was Apple Computer's corporate strategy before the Macintosh was even introduced.

Something relevant might have happened five years ago but it wasn't 'Big Tech ... pushing into education', that strategy is older than most people posting on this site.

i remember this from my time at school, some 25 years ago now, and it was extremely unhelpful to education as well...

a lot of time spent explaining things like "how do i do something where i would normally right click?" or that the power button is this weird thing on the keyboard without the universal symbol for a power button on it... once they got some wintel machines from RM, another company that pushed at education, all of that went away and the lessons started becoming genuinely educational.

Looking at this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_keyboards#Twentieth_Anni...

I see models with a power button, clearly labeled with the ISO standard symbol for a power button, and models with no power button, because it moved back to the case (and used the ISO standard symbol on it).

By the time I was 13 I had used mice on four different GUIs so I have trouble sympathizing with your difficulty. User interfaces aren't facts of nature, which is a great learning opportunity to have in school. But learning opportunities must be taken.

Apple didn't use the IEC power symbol on their keyboards until the iMac-- prior keyboards used a left-pointing triangle on the power button.

But most of these machines shipped in an era where there wasn't necessarily any standardization of how to turn the machine on in the PC-compatible world either-- the now-standard momentary electronic switch on the front of the case came with the ATX spec in 1995. Before that, you'd usually have a flip switch or latching power button somewhere on the case. (Macs were unusual for the era in having power on the keyboard from the ADB keyboard on.)

Interesting, per ISO standard initiated by IEC:

  ⏻: "IEC 60417-5009, the standby symbol (line partially within a broken circle), indicates a sleep mode or low power state." [0,1]

  ⏼: "IEC 60417-5010, the power on-off symbol (line within a circle), is used on buttons that switch a device between on and fully off states." [0,2]

Of note, the slightly different IEEE standard using these symbols was inactivated 2020-03-05.[3] Unicode lists both standards for the character definitions.[4]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_symbol

1. https://www.iso.org/obp/ui#iec:grs:60417:5009

2. https://www.iso.org/obp/ui#iec:grs:60417:5010

3. https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/1621/3344/

4. https://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2300.pdf

5. https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/character.jsp?a=23FB

6. https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/character.jsp?a=23FC

> that strategy is older than most people posting on this site

True. And let's not misunderstand that this was only "big tech". I can remember (being older than most on this board) our BBC micros being ubiquitous in schools circa 1982 under government digital literacy edicts. That was a big win for Acorn at the time.

What has changed in recent years is full-spectrum domination of vendor values in education. Hitherto, we've at least been able to install the software we like, even if some vendors (Dell/Novell/Apple etc) pushed for hardware dominance. Later they pushed for operating system dominance. And the end-game seems to be pushing for full-stack application and service domination of fully locked-in ecosystems.

That's too much power, and it's not appropriate for schools anywhere. Not to mention that it's ultimately a disaster for competing educational software companies.

I certainly do not want to see any child educated with Microsoft values, any more than I want to see kids "nourished" to McDonald's nutritional standards.

So yes, it's a very old strategy, and has been a very successful one. Too successful, and has reached the point it needs firmly slapping down.

> Hitherto, we've at least been able to install the software we like

If you were very lucky and had an IT department not locking things down. Locking things down in this respect has been a key selling point for e.g. Microsoft for a very long time.

"I certainly do not want to see any child educated with Microsoft values"

Not just the children, one thing I have seen as of late is indoctrination of developers in Arrange Act Assert (AAA) - I specifically remember it being pushed because people were indoctrinated in Given When Then - however ironically most people end up indoctrinated in AAA, which is hypocritical to original point...

As an adult, constantly seek to push past (your) boundaries, because you are probably being fed some ill-informed BS about how "things should be". There are a lot of other places this holds true for as well, in tech (using the newest but not best performing tech your boss sold out for), in life (having a standard meal every day and suffering nutrition deficit or adverse health issues, eg.)

Given-when-then and arrange-act-assert are different variants on the same idea: tests shoukd show that a postcondition holds after an action occurs under certain preconditions.

It's the same thing as Hoare triples, really. It's sound computer science.

> that strategy is older than most people posting on this site.

Indeed. Silly to call it a "trend" when they've been doing it for 20+ years.

(At least they were doing it 18 years ago at two universities I attended).

I don't see what's wrong with this. Microsoft and Google are paying to educate people on their products. There is nothing inherently evil about Office or Google Docs. There is no lock in contract, and it isn't that hard to switch later. And the schools/students benefit from a cheaper education than if they had to pay full price.

> Microsoft and Google are paying to educate people on their products.

That was 1990. Now Microsoft and Google are paying to educate people on their values. That is different. Children having their educational horizons limited, curated, monitored and nudged by a few corporations is the problem here.

> There is no lock in contract

You've read them all? All of them?

> and it isn't that hard to switch later.

No this is plain wrong. Any IT person will tell you that migrating from one vendor to another is a nightmare. Getting too deeply into a relationship with one vendor is always a business mistake.

> And the schools/students benefit from a cheaper education than if they had to pay full price.

Another way of looking at that is since the vendor sets the price on am essentially zero cost service, subsidising one sector is an anti-competitive behaviour.

But that is not the point. Students should get the best education possible, not the cheapest. Corporate McEducations are why we're falling behind against nations like China who are quite happy to use our better products (Linux etc) to teach timeless principles instead of transient products to their students.

It gets harder to change such habits the older you get. Not so much in terms of ability. They can change, but it's less likely they want to take the time to do so. They know this, that's why it's important to target the young demographic, because it primes the growth for decades to come. At least, in a probabilistic sense.

It's funny to see this described as something new, because things used to be far worse in this regard.

That's not to say it's not still a problem, but it's not a new problem.

How can you get ‘hooked’ on a basic free text editor that works like all other text editors? I don’t get the intensity of your problem with it?

We are given AWS technologies inside specially-provisioned sandboxes to teach at the university, and the courses are marketed and badged as AWS. Students get free training, certification discounts and more.

No money changes hands, but AWS provide all the tech free, sponsor AWS awards for the students, come to jobs fairs... all the while hoping that X% of those compsci students will, in the fullness of time, come to be decision-makers who choose AWS technologies for their organisations rather than Microsoft or Google.

It's the Happy Meal principle, hard at work today.

> No money changes hands, but AWS provide all the tech free, sponsor AWS awards for the students, come to jobs fairs… all the while hoping that X% of those compsci students will, in the fullness of time, come to be decision-makers who choose AWS technologies for their organisations rather than Microsoft or Google.

They don’t need that, though that’s a bonus. A surplus of technologists skilled in AWS technologies, means that its easier to hire if you are looking for AWS than it would otherwise be, so it tips the scales for the decision-makers well before any of the students become decision-makers.

> Even conversions to docx work fine since your documents are simple.

In my day to day operation, converting pdf to docx is not a trivial task.

He meant converting whatever format is used to create the document to pdf _or_ docx. I doubt many people compose documents writing pdf files.

To be fair, converting pdf to any other format is not a trivial task. PDF has bigger interoperability problems than docx. I can collaborate with Word users using Emacs's org mode. I cannot do that with PDF.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

figures: This very post. Did you read it?

math equations: LaTeX.

Obviously you can represent anything you want with text.

eqn still exists for folks wanting the old-school troff-style tools.

https://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v3.1....

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