I got a nice email from a colleague who’s been writing me as part of an ongoing discussion about the use of Open Office in a K-12 school system. Long story short we’re going back to using Microsoft Office 2000 with students because using Open Office 2.0 made some teachers uncomfortable. I’m not sure how that happened, but it’s safe to say that there were some closed minds involved. I guess there are some salient features in Microsoft Office that you can’t find in Open Office. I really don’t know what they are but apparently there are.
As the IT director I believe that students need choice especially those students who don’t have the monetary resources of their teachers. When you make $35,000 a year to start and your employer puts Microsoft Office 2003 on your desktop as part of your employment it’s easy to become a fan. It’s even relatively easy to go out and spend $130 for Office 2007 for Home and Student when you got that kind of change in your pocket. It’s another story if your Mom and Dad, if you even have two parents in the same home have that kind of money to shell out.
Another part of the story is that education ought to be about education and not about training. There is certainly a place of training in education, but education in general ought to be about expanding your horizons and getting you to look at the big picture. Education means literally to “draw out” or expand the mind. It’s about thinking big thoughts and getting the permission of your teachers and peers to expand on those “big thoughts.”
I learned how to write with a pencil and paper. Back in 1959 when I wrote my first prose in first grade I used a big pencil and paper. Those writing skills later transferred to a ball point pen, a fountain pen and with some addtional training I put them on paper with a typewriter. I went to college using a typewriter. Word processing came later, much later, when I was well over thirty years old. I moved through a succession of word processors each more elegant than the next. Bank Street Writer, FredWriter, Apple Works, MacWrite, Microsoft Works and Microsoft Word. They all had the same features and because I’m reasonably intelligent I learned to use them with the minimum of training. Face it, I can use this word processor on WordPress and I didn’t require special training. I got an education and because of that I can write sentences and sometimes they make sense.
What’s the big deal with Powerpoint or Open Office Impress? I’m surrounded by teachers and administrators who “ooh and ahh” about some kid using Powerpoint. What the hell? Sister Mary Margaret used Powerpoint in 1960, only then it was called a transparency on an overhead projector. Her Powerpoint presentations were just as boring as most of the software presentations I see today. There is no real innovation here only a new medium that utilizes and expensive computer and if you actually use Powerpoint and not Open Office Impress you are spending way more money than Sister Mary Magaret did.
Most of my colleagues have no clue how to use Microsoft Excel. In fact most of them use Excel to make seating charts and schedules. You can actually do that in Open Office Calc or either Microsoft Word or Open Office writer with tables. You can also use a pencil and a ruler. The pencil and ruler are much less expensive. The killer application in Microsoft Office Professional is Access. To be sure Access is a tremendous relational database, but I’ve only met a few people who ever use it. We don’t even have a class anymore where Access is taught to students.
Most of our students go on to college where they will use a variety of software packages including Microsoft Office, Open Office, Wordperfect Office, Google Apps, and others. Most of our students will graduate to a world of work where the United States is no longer ascendant. They’ll be competing on an ever flattening playing field with students from India and China who use Open Office. They’ll be in companies where the bottom line is way more important than some “bloatware” that underlines your latest changes. All students need to learn how to read, write and reason. That is the present and future challenge. We desperately need information technology workers and those workers need those three basic skills and they have to be open to new ideas and new training.
Here is a little comic relief if you’ve read this far.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp8dugDbf4w]