Plea to Educators: Don't Force a Format Down Students' Throats

[ugm6hr]

Moved to the Cafe; not a support request.

My personal comment:

Support for ISO / opensource formats as well as multiple OS would be nice in the commercial as well as educational world. Job applications are frequently supplied as .doc files.

The educational world is easier to influence as a student body; a local Linux users group could offer support to their peers as a start. IT services often allow "unofficial" documentation to be put on their website. While not ideal, it conforms to the current norm of requiring a community to support Linux.

As an aside - I can connect my Ubuntu laptop to my work network for internet without any difficulty (just entering the proxy details); connecting a Windows computer is actually much harder (but is officially supported)!

[MikeTheC]

This has already been discussed ad nauseum.

FWIW, at my college there are plenty of students *not* running Windows who are having absolutely no problems whatsoever functioning in a nominally Windows-based environment. I myself often use my Ubuntu install to handle things I do for school, and also my Mac.

One university does not the rule make.

[phrostbyte]

They do it because they don't know any better (usually). We have to educate the educators. :)

[MikeTheC]

They do it because they don't know any better (usually). We have to educate the educators. :)

Sadly, that is often our role in society.

[shatteredmindofbob]

They do it because they don't know any better (usually). We have to educate the educators. :)

Or sometimes money (though I guess open source would fix that..except for the point I'm getting to...) For some reason in college, we were stuck using Windows even though we were being trained to work in a Mac-centric industry.

Man...my internship was painful...(first time I'd ever been faced with a Mac)

[tiggsy]

After a recent experience fixing one friend's computer and failing to fix another - both infected with downadap - i suspect windows is going to get a lot less popular very quickly

[t0p]

After a recent experience fixing one friend's computer and failing to fix another - both infected with downadap - i suspect windows is going to get a lot less popular very quickly

You reckon? Viruses and other assorted malware have been crippling *******-infested computers for years, but the majority of users keep asking Redmond for more. I see little reason to believe this will change any time soon.

[sydbat]

Perhaps a related article - at least for the ideas...

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=796

[geoken]

After a recent experience fixing one friend's computer and failing to fix another - both infected with downadap - i suspect windows is going to get a lot less popular very quickly

I doubt the people who are running with a several month unpatched system will be savy enough to know about Linux.

[Polygon]

some colleges are doing it right. my college uses just a web based system for school stuff (any operating system that has a browser that can run javascript can run it) and also even for streaming movies, they use a java app. Although, they didn't really provide any documentation for getting it running on linux, but i discovered that it works just by installing a simple package. My college is very linux friendly :)

[cardinals_fan]

I'll stop to point out that the RTF format supports most Microsoft Office formatting and works very well with OpenOffice/Abiword/Google Docs

[bruce89]

I vote for LaTeX.

[mamamia88]

my campus probably has a computer for every student. but seeing how bootcamp/vmware/virtualbox is always an option and students can usually get windows on the cheap it shouldn't be a problem

[Z_Cee]

My wife is an educator and she has no say whatsoever in what computer system to use or not to use. It is like that in every school system that I have dealt with personally. In the school system my wife works for, she cannot even use her own laptop in meetings unless an administrator authorizes it prior to usage and then it cannot be used to access the internet. Doing so without prior approval can mean on-the-spot dismissal.

I've done volunteer work at school simply vacuuming the dust-bunnies from inside desktop computers because a school system does not have enough people on staff to do simple maintenance.

Each school has a storage room filled with unused computers. What's the problem with those computers and why doesn't the school system give the unused computers away to needy students? The computers may simply need a hard drive replaced or it could be something more serious like a motherboard? All the computers run Windows 2000 or XP and it might take 2-3 computers to make one useful computer, but there are no personnel to do it. They rarely auction those computers because private information may be on the hard drive and also because of Windows licensing agreement with the school system. There are no personnel available within the school system because of tight budgets for them to even consider taking computers to the landfill. The individual school administrators cannot even gather volunteers to haul those unused computer to the landfill because those computers are still listed on the school's inventory of equipment.

The problem with Linux NOT being used on school computers is not at the classroom or individual school level. It is at the School System Administrator level which ties in also with a State's Education Department.

I've even offered to take several computers and make them useful by installing Linux and giving them to needy students. This would take care of all private information and Windows licensing agreements because the hard drives would be wiped clean when installing Linux. That idea was shot down too...

[Polygon]

I'll stop to point out that the RTF format supports most Microsoft Office formatting and works very well with OpenOffice/Abiword/Google Docs

rtf is a terrible format though. its good in a pinch, but the files balloon to like multiple megabytes with just a 3 page document.

pdf or odf should be the formats accepted by teachers. Especially now with office 2007, we now get compabilities with clueless students turning in docx files and then other people don't have office 2007 or vista so they cant open it (even if they have word 2003). every OS has pdf support pretty much built in and word supports odf...right?

[Johnsie]

In the real world... companies force formats. If you work professionally with data then you will know that. I'm a programmer and I often make people send me data in csv format because it works well with my programs. The printers want pdf because it works well with their printing software and printers. Normal office people like doc and xsl because most of them have Microsoft Word/Excel at their fingertips. Those things are widely accepted in the workplace and nobody wants to have to convert formats all the time (except maybe the programmer, because it makes him look smarter than everyone else )

In the real world people expect things in certain formats, so teaching it in school is only preparing them for the realities of the workplace.

If they don't understand the tools/methods used in most workplaces then they wont be very employable.

[sydbat]

rtf is a terrible format though. its good in a pinch, but the files balloon to like multiple megabytes with just a 3 page document.

pdf or odf should be the formats accepted by teachers. Especially now with office 2007, we now get compabilities with clueless students turning in docx files and then other people don't have office 2007 or vista so they cant open it (even if they have word 2003). every OS has pdf support pretty much built in and word supports odf...right?Nope. Microsoft only supports their own proprietary .doc/.docx.

[cmay]

write to the goverment and ask for better support of the free programs like sun open office. sun helps a lot with science and other things and is open source. as i read it to be.
i like sun and open-solaris so i checked out a bit who they are but not that much yet.

however i think to ask in the name of using their software as they are contributing to alot of different things could be an angle. just point out that the programs open office can run on linux and windows too. i am not sure about mac but i would be surprised to know that either star office or open-office did not find its way into a mac yet.