Now let's ban MSFT Office365 too. It's of zero use to teach whatever to the kids.
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?
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"
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'.
That is how to think about office documents. Once you know what you want to do any tool can do that.
The goal of school is not to derail kids’ education by making them wrestle with self hosted sys admin nuances and failures.
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.
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.
(Nothing really compares to Excel in some of its most terrible bugs either).
I’m sure there are some genuine Excel experts out there doing important work but I’ve got to assume most of what’s being done is formulas, charts and pivot tables.
Excel has COM automation going back to the old days; from many programming languages on Windows you can instantiate "Excel.Application" and then script it as if you were using the GUI - and have the GUI visible and showing you what is happening. Add workbooks, worksheets, select ranges, copy/paste, enter formulae and get their results, apply formatting, etc. Because it plugs into Windows' COM system, you don't need to download an Office SDK or Excel-specific library for your language to use it, any language which can talk to COM can do it, including VBScript, PowerShell, Python with PyWin32, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, etc.
If you save an Excel document on a SharePoint (Office365) site, then multiple people can open it. When they do that, it's a multiplayer spreadsheet - you see who else has the document open, which cell(s) they are looking at, changes betewen all people are propagated in approximately realtime.
If you save an Excel document on an (Office365) site then Office365 has visibility into it, which means if someone else opens it, @tags you in a comment on a cell, Office365 will pick that up and email it to you for your attention.
Excel documents saved on O365 can be opened in a web browser, in a JavaScript version of Excel which has fewer features but can still join in with the above.
Excel documents saved on O365 are visible in the MSGraph API, for scripting with REST endpoints[2]
People who have been working in Silicon Valley, for FAANG companies, as software developers, pushing us all to the cloud for ten to twenty years, still thinking that Excel vs LibreOffice is a matter of a desktop program showing a grid you can put some numbers in and do sum or average, and whether you can bold or align the text, are experiencing some kind of cognitive dissonance.
Your CRUD app can now be a spreadsheet someone in HR opens, enters an employee code, and a script against the MSGraph API which offboards them, and if it hasn't worked the HR person can @ you in a comment. There goes all your custom CRUD UI, database backend, network connectivity, compiling, deployment, authorization, there's your "no code" or "low code" Excel as frontend for a small business.
Want to script a report for HR to look at? Thinking of downloading a JDK and PDF library for Java and asking for SMTP relay settings? Script MSGraph to make an Excel spreadsheet directly in a folder HR can see. A poor solution for a big business, a quick and relatively easy solution for a small business with an admin and a PowerShell script.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116088#32129830
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/excel?v...
Someone who can write elisp macros and have muscle memories for complex actions won’t be bothered with VS or VS code at all.
The other way around however…
Modern IDEs are not at all required for success in this industry. They can sometimes even be a crutch.
I still teach people Vim. Some learn other things later but the important thing is they have a fast and free baseline available in every package manager.
The point is to not pay Microsoft money to promote Microsoft's continued monopoly, which will mean you have to pay them money again next year.
Any school paying for closed source software when they could be funding a company to make open source software is doing it wrong. Same with textbooks.
100s of 1000s of schools all paying for something they won't own and will have to pay for again in the future.
Schools should not use the non-free products even if Microsoft provided them for free to them (which they did or do), because it is a Trojan Horse into kid's minds in order to create soft dependencies. People who learned to use one office suite are rarely motivated to learn yet another one.
This line of thinking is poison and will only amplify the monopolisic power of whatever select companies make the taught-in-schools list.
Proprietary technology has no place in educational institutions.
Teaching the concept of spreadsheets is totally possible without teaching students products of whatever specific corporation donates the most money or free licenses.
Libre also has different features than Excel which has different features than Sheets, etc, but Excel is the "standard". You're going to see Excel far more than Sheets in the workplace and I've never seen a job listing mention Libre Calc.
I know Excel, I started at a startup 4 months ago using Sheets, the first few weeks I had to 'unlearn' half of what I knew and try and figure out how to do similar in Sheets. If I only knew sheets, I'd probably have been even more lost going to Excel because Microsoft doesn't hold your hand like Sheets does with every formula you start to type. I'm guessing something like Libre Calc is worse than Excel and Sheets in that regard.
>Teaching the concept of spreadsheets is totally possible
Sure, but teaching someone to drive a 4-cylinder automatic driver's ed car doesn't prepare them to say operate a manual tri-axle or a an excavator. Sure they understand steering, acceleration and stopping, but all of the unique mechanics of say Excel are different than random free software.
Nothing at the level students do spreadsheets is different between spreadsheet programs
The hard thing is to find the book (with the information you want) and not reading the book itself (that was before google/inet)
Pretty sure this is how we wound up where we are.
The mostly pro TikTok comments here when news of it being banned indicates YES.
"Office proficiency" is a useful thing to have, and while it is taken for granted by the older generations, it is being a challenge for people joining the workforce now (it's an actual issue, hiring managers are having trouble with this)
As in: people can't write a simple text, set a phrase in bold, set the title with a different font size, etc. Or how to do some basic spreadsheet with simple calculations
2. Schools shouldn’t be trying to be in charge of shaping corporations. That isn’t and shouldn’t be a goal of teaching children.
3. That’s an arbitrary opinion you have. No text books either then? No published novels? No proprietary informational videos? Yes you COULD teach without these, but you would deliver a subpar experience. I’d again argue that schools shouldn’t be focusing on trying to push these moral ideals, they should be focusing on preparing our children for contributing to society in adulthood as much as possible.
In a marketing class, you absolutely would have to involve social media, otherwise your class would be outdated bunk. Traditional advertising doesn't work on new generation platforms. And billboards, TV ads, and magazine ads are expensive, inefficient, poorly targeted advertising, for all but the wealthiest behemoths of companies.
The same methods behind TV ads don't translate to social media ads. Social media ads aren't just trimmed down traditional ads.
I'm actually not even sure what I would gain by switching to actual Excel.
Excel is really difficult to use now.
I don’t imagine moving from libreoffice calc to excel would be easy.
The approaches to teaching can vary quite wildly. My mother was doing some resume padding when I was in middle school, so I got to compare what they were teaching with what my school was teaching. They were teaching rote skills with a separate book directed towards each product, which is to say Word had a book full of screenshots illustrating procedures and WordPerfect had its own book full of screenshots illustrating procedures. They were not laying down the foundations for transferrable skills, nor did they expect students to pick it up. In contrast, my middle school was using obsolete computers and had no expectation the software would be used in business. The emphasis was directed towards laying out and formatting documents instead, which had a much longer lasting impact.
I would argue it is far more helpful for 80%+ of kids to learn excel than to learn advanced maths.
There are many free implementations of spreadsheet software. Kids can get even more experience using different kinds of software, teaching them ways in which software can differ while still being able to do the same things. Ironically, this would probably make kids more skilled with MS Excel, if they were ever forced to use it.
There's no reason to teach kids MS Excel in particular, unless you think memorizing positions of buttons is a useful skill in the real world.
If 100% of a country's schools start teaching software from company A, thats a massive subsidy - basically 100% of the population will know how to use their software and prefer it to their competitors. Businesses will buy that software because everyone already knows it. You are massively distorting free market.
With a conoany thats already a monopoly, thats doubly unfair.