On 1/10/06, Steve Engledow steve@iffirewouldfall.com wrote:

Wayne Stallwood wrote:

...

A lovely article about the difficulties a Linux user had Switching to Windows.

http://madpenguin.org/cms/html/47/5937.html

Reasonably accurate too ;) Familiarity with OSs other than windows should be taught in schools.

Unfortunately schools felt the pressure to teach the industry standard (IBM compatible, followed by "Designed for Microsoft Windows"), and RISC OS and Mac OS faded away.

Fortunately Mac OS is on a resurgence in the home environment, and Linux isn't going to go away.

Tim.

Hi to the new members. Now to ask for help opening education:

"Safe Hammad" safe.hammad@sandacre.com

And a major part of that "industry standard" is Microsoft Office. Not only is familiarity with the world's dominant office package almost a prerequisite on many CV's, but also .doc and .xls files are still the de facto formats for exchanging data in the business world (though this is clearly changing with high profile shifts toward OASIS and PDF formats).

...and that's a long-overdue change. So-called "industry standards" are nearly always totally non-standard and Microsoft formats aren't well-suited for document exchange. See http://www.goldmark.org/netrants/no-word/attach.html

I think it's a total scandal there's tax-funded state advertising and supply of software from a large dominant foreign company when there is so much opportunity to develop our local economy.

Where does "education" think pressure to teach only an "industry standard" is coming from, anyway? The business world is asking for more transferrable, more flexible, more general skills. Retailers ignore previous training if it's only in one particular system: office-based businesses do the same. Most current state computing training looks like a waste of student time and a waste of our money, because it's only one particular system. The general concepts and principles are taught by a few visionaries and don't appear in the most common ICT qualifications.

I guess it's no surprise that the education regulators don't act on this. They're usually the local and national governments who are also mostly terrible and publish in Microsoft formats unless they get badly burnt by the lack of privacy in those files.

Even when nice words have been said about free software use, that has a bad habit to slide to "open source" which is then easily subverted into "open standards" or "open frameworks" which becomes ESR's "widget frosting" way of letting the same few proprietary suppliers keep their noses in the trough. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance...

So, the bodies who spend our taxes on education have shown that they are not competent to spend it wisely when IT is involved. We need to fix this ourselves, using the few levers we do have, like we can use the e-Government Interoperability Framework, Best Value, discrimination and information directives/laws to make government open up and stop giving free ads to a few suppliers.

Are there current similar official directives for education? If you know it, add it to http://open.egov.org.uk/ please.

Thanks,