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German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

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Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#101

Post by constantcrying »

partiallypro wrote: post #89
weinzierl wrote: post #57

At the beginning of the pandemic Microsoft Teams was practically forced on everyone with children in Bavaria. With practically forced I mean you could either sign a document to get Teams for free or your child could not participate in online classes. A whole age group of children whose first online experience is Microsoft. In my opinion we should start there: Instead of unrealistic bans that no one will ever enforce…

The problem is those free and open-source tools may simply stop existing and all the skills the students learned with those programs could become completely useless. Germany, somehow, is a decade behind most of the other Western industrial powerhouses in terms of digitizing. I think the constant flux and reluctance to just move on is holding them back.

Basic technology skills easily transfer. All office software is similar, it does not matter what you learn. And even more important than learning this or that office package are fundamental skills about knowing the basics of what a computer is, how it works and what software is and what it can do.

What german schools need is technically competent people who are able to teach their students actually relevant information. The problem is that it is quite hard to find people who are technically competent and able/willing to teach. (This is somewhat of a structural problem, due to how the teaching profession is set up.)

The best part of my IT school education (in Germany) was when my school hired a professional software developer who taught programming for a semester. The worst part about it was that half the class clearly didn't care.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#102

Post by causality0 »

BartjeD wrote: post #69
causality0 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm wondering is, how is office 365 really any worse than Windows 10/11 itself?

I am also wondering this. But I hope it won't move quite so far or fast as to ban Windows.

Just imagine how lovely things would be if regulatory pressure forced Microsoft to make Windows 12 as non-user-hostile as Windows 7. A man can dream...

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#103

Post by denton-scratch »

> Dropshippers and other online entrepreneurs may want to conduct business outside non-EU countries

That doesn't seem to make sense. Do they mean "in non-EU countries", or "outside EU countries"? Has my reading comprehension failed me?

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#104

Post by Dave3of5 »

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #87
Dave3of5 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio quality is very poor by default (you can switch in better with a setting). Uses a lot of memory and is slow Frequently crashes my machine The UI for discussions I find poor. No one uses the "teams" concept and everything is done in private chats.

User mode apps that crash the machine are not the app's fault. It's your machine's fault. You either have buggy drivers or faulty hardware.

This happens on multiple machines (on my macbook and my windows PC). It's not buggy drivers of faulty hardware.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#105

Post by pmontra »

rekoil wrote: post #67
pmontra wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS, G, AWS will end up offering local datacenters operated by local companies owned by them. They'll cost a little more.

I'm actually expecting they'll be forced to have local ownership of the datacenters as well, but probably with some kind of peering agreement with the global company. Is this the start of something like datacenter franchising maybe?

Yes, I expect that they'll 51+% own those local companies, maybe not the datacenters (there are plenty of them everywhere.)

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#106

Post by denton-scratch »

partiallypro wrote: post #92
dijit wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is those free and open-source tools may simply stop existing and all the skills the students learned with those programs could become completely useless. That's a really bad argument when history shows the inverse. Name a FOSS program that no longer exists and I will give you 5 proprietary programs that suffered the same. Even in the same lineage as Teams there is: Communicator, Lync and Skype for Busin…

We're talking about O365 as a whole, not just Teams. Chat in general is a bad example, because it's a product far more in flux and pretty easily replicated/replaced. Show me how not learning Excel is beneficial. Excel is one of the most important programs on Earth, and students should suffer by not learning it...and instead learn LibreOffice? Then they go to their jobs as adults and don't know how to use what most ev…

> Excel is one of the most important programs on Earth

Excel is just a spreadsheet program. It's hardly unique; there's one in LibreOffice. They all descend from VisiCalc.

The idea of a spreadsheet was a revolutionary invention (Dan Bricklin); I believe he failed to patent it. As far as I can see, Excel was just a GUI rewrite of Multiplan, which was supposed to be Microsoft's Lotus-123 killer.

> The whole point of schooling is to build real world skills.

That's called training, not schooling.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#107

Post by II2II »

constantcrying wrote: post #101
partiallypro wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is those free and open-source tools may simply stop existing and all the skills the students learned with those programs could become completely useless. Germany, somehow, is a decade behind most of the other Western industrial powerhouses in terms of digitizing. I think the constant flux and reluctance to just move on is holding them back.

Basic technology skills easily transfer. All office software is similar, it does not matter what you learn. And even more important than learning this or that office package are fundamental skills about knowing the basics of what a computer is, how it works and what software is and what it can do. What german schools need is technically competent people who are able to teach their students actually relevant informati…

> Basic technology skills easily transfer. All office software is similar, it does not matter what you learn.

I had the benefit of being taught how to use spreadsheets. Not Excel. Not even 1-2-3. I also had the benefit of being taught how to use word processors. Not Word. Not even WordPerfect. The teacher understood that transferable skills had to be taught since they knew the product we were learning with would never be used in the workplace.

My mother was taking similar courses around the same time, only they were geared towards the workplace. She was provided with three books over an inch thick that walked the students through a particular product. One set of books for Word, then another set of books for WordPerfect. These courses didn't treat skills as transferable, and I'm sure a lot of students suffered because of that approach since I have seen many people freeze up or complain when presented with a product they weren't taught.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#108

Post by donmcronald »

constantcrying wrote: post #101
partiallypro wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is those free and open-source tools may simply stop existing and all the skills the students learned with those programs could become completely useless. Germany, somehow, is a decade behind most of the other Western industrial powerhouses in terms of digitizing. I think the constant flux and reluctance to just move on is holding them back.

Basic technology skills easily transfer. All office software is similar, it does not matter what you learn. And even more important than learning this or that office package are fundamental skills about knowing the basics of what a computer is, how it works and what software is and what it can do. What german schools need is technically competent people who are able to teach their students actually relevant informati…

> Basic technology skills easily transfer. All office software is similar, it does not matter what you learn. And even more important than learning this or that office package are fundamental skills about knowing the basics of what a computer is, how it works and what software is and what it can do.

Exactly. The big problem with the current status quo is that kids are being taught that SaaS is how everything should work. You log in to your apps, save your data in “the cloud”, and pay forever. By the time they finish school many don’t even know how to use a local file system.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#109

Post by hilbert42 »

partiallypro wrote: post #96
dijit wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even within the very well-worn "core" products of the MS office ecosystem: huge UI design changes de-skill millions of workers. they're not optional. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/find-commands-easily-in-word-20... I can easily imagine a world where other office apps are shutdown, you have the golden children like Excel, Word, Outlook and Powerpoint. Which change UI and design language or change features over the year…

You can believe whatever you want and come up with every excuse to support your world view but putting "proficient in LibreOffice" on your resume is not going to help you get a job or help the company. "Proficient in Excel" will. The UI of Excel isn't overly important, formulation is and as I said it's cheaper to pay the O365 fee than to pay individual licensing fees, so throwing out random product names that aren't…

"Germany has struggled with digitization, sometimes it feels like you're walking back into the 70s when you're dealing with it."

From an outsider's perspective it's not only Germany but much of Europe is suffering from the same problem. The EU is such an all-pervasive force in Europe that one wonders why EU objectives haven't been set to rectify this. Why is this so?

I'll explain what I mean by example: if the EU would provide incentives to businesses, governments and schools to use say LibreOffice as well as finding a means to subsidize LibO's development including its potential developers then it would not take that long before LibO would not only be up to speed with O365 but potentially even better than it—in an environment nurtured by the EU, LibO could have thousands of developers.

Here's another example: there has never been a proper and comprehensive WYSIWYG HTML editor that's both open source and free. The closest we've gotten to that is BlueGriffon but one has to pay to get it to work properly. Even then, it's late on updates not to mention short on features and it uses quirky procedures and nomenclature. It is a primary candidate for such treatment by the EU. …And there are many more examples like these.

An EU-wide perspective would set the agenda for determining what are the most relevant/important aspects of programs to develop first, and so on. Moreover, both LibO and BlueGriffon are European based which ought to aid matters considerably.

I find it truly perplexing that the EU hasn't put a high priority on (a) developing a more robust software industry and (b) ridding itself of its dependence on US-based software.

If Europe had a stronger software industry then there'd be much less problem with the GDPR, using European software would ensure that user data would remain on servers located within Europe.

This ought to be a no-brainer, so why isn't it?

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#110

Post by MiguelX413 »

denton-scratch wrote: post #103

> Dropshippers and other online entrepreneurs may want to conduct business outside non-EU countries That doesn't seem to make sense. Do they mean "in non-EU countries", or "outside EU countries"? Has my reading comprehension failed me?

Both of your options mean the same thing, and I don't think it means either of those but the opposite.
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