On 10/27/05, Lee Harr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >My son is learning something about using a spreadsheet - extremely > >useful and I support it 100%. That he thinks what he is learning is > >Excel is absolutely unforgivable, in terms of my understanding of > >ethical norms that once prevailed in an institute of higher education. > >
I've never worked in any workplace where anything else other than Excel was used. For a majority (pick a percentage out of the air) of workplaces, Excel will be used as well. Why? Because everyone uses it. Yes, it's horribly circular, but I would like to offer the pragmatic view on this. > >We understand that all the functionality he will ever need from Excel is > >available for free in other spreadsheet software. > > Probably couldn't leave nasty scripted easter eggs in your bosse's favourite spreadsheet upon finding a new job so easily... > Probably. Anything beyond the common spreadsheet functions is almost > certainly better done another way. > For better or worse, Excel is the market leader because Lotus 1-2-3 isn't anymore, so they had to have done something right along the way. It also depends on what you'd call common spreadsheet functions. > > More frightening to me than the ubiquitous use of MS Office is the > omnipresence of windows. Every time a student sits down in front > of KDE in our lab and says "Where is the internet?" I can only cringe. As one who's recently installed Ubuntu, and played with Gnome/KDE/XFCE among others, I can't honestly see any advantage from an open source GUI environment, other than the fee. When I was learning how to use computers, the phrase "X11 Windows Server" would've left me terrified to use a GUI, lest I be incurring charges for connecting to the internet. Gnome & KDE run worse than Windows XP does on my computer, which I'm somewhat gobsmacked about still, as I can't really see why that would be so. I would blame the composite windows, but XFCE does them fine. I note that with the release of Breezy Badger, XFCE is what you get from using startx at console, which is nice. I do wonder why you cringe. Educate the user. He is expecting his usual metaphor, and it's not there. The majority of the world has it, remember, so he expects you to as well. I must apologise, but I'm detecting a slight theme of... dedication to open source from both of you gentlemen. Open source is a wonderful and lovely thing, but it has it's flaws, as does a certain corporation dominant in the market. If you look at ease-of-use for beginners, you can see why the majority of computer users, a great deal of whom have had to learn how to use them to stay viable in the job market, but really don't understand them, learn Windows & MS Office, which is usually more applicable in the job market, and then stick with what they know. As a semi-coherent bunch of metaphors, Windows does alright. 98% of Office's features aren't used by anyone, but they can get the basics done. With regard to moving to Open Office... I've worked with people who have books of 'pathways'. The Copy pathway is 'Select text > Edit > Copy' and trying to teach them about the wonders of Control + C is a dead end. These people resent any and all change. When a recent workplace of mine moved to Mozilla, there were some very unhappy people, and in the end, they relented and reinstalled IE for those who really wanted it. Don't mess with the pathways. > Microsoft may not own the internet, but that is not what we are > teaching. I seriously get about 10% of users who are unable to > see any other browser as performing the same function as > internet explorer. This is annoying, when the head of IT has made his living chanting "Outsource" and his favourite outsourcing firm says "Only if it's Microsoft." as it means I can't get a browser with tabs. > If "what is a spreadsheet?" is pretty scary. "What is a browser?" is > downright terrifying. > I get that all the time at work, as I take calls from people who are having trouble using my employer's website. Generally it's cookies/caching, which is simple, and 1 out of 20 people will say "Oh right, my cookies, yeah no worries." and hang up. The other 19.... as there's different... 'pathways' for various browsers, we ask "What browser do you use?", followed by "A browser is the programme you use to view web-pages." and then "No... that's your ISP. Can you click the Help menu... It's right up the top... No, it is there. Can you see the word File? At the other end of the list of words, it should say Help. Ok, now click on Help. Down the bottom it will say About, can you read that out? Okay, you have Internet Explorer!" This is a website used to form limited liability companies (www.companies.govt.nz), search the companies database, and is generally very useful, and a lot of people will use their minimal skill and get hopelessly out of their depth, as they've installed 4 programmes which block cookies, and don't know how to disable them. Or there's the ones who threaten to sue for discrimination due to lower fees for online services... > >Do I care that I am made to feel that this point of view is somehow > >radical on a educational forum that is an offshoot of an open source > >software community. > > > > Hmm... more like "preaching to the choir" isn't it? > I really can't see why focusing teaching on Microsoft products is considered bad, other than from an ideological point of view. Certainly, teaching Lotus 1-2-3 to the exclusion of all else would be bad, as it would contain product specific knowledge for a nearly non-existent product. Likewise, to emphasise open source products at the expense of the products which employers will expect you to know is to also do a disservice to the students in question. You can't really separate spreadsheet from Excel, or word processing from Word, in the general public's view. I can name about four of each type of programme, but 3 of those are from the days when I considered an alternative OS to be DR-DOS. I like open source, I love Python, I love Gimp, I adore Bash, and Gaim is sweet. XFCE is awesome, and made up greatly for the let-down of Gnome. I hate Microsoft's "tie in" where when I wish to build a C# assembly it tells me I need to open it in Visual Studio and save it again, but I love .NET and Monad. I hate open source documentation, and I hate the fact that Firefox's right click context menu isn't, because of open source. I have "Back, Forward, Reload, Stop" in my context menu, entirely un-necessary, I don't need them, and they're very out of context when I click on an image. And, they're here, because of the way open source works - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=136665 But, I love Firefox. Liam Clarke _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
