Windows at school, a student's perspective

[Marc Lijour]

On March 28, 2005 01:32 am, B B wrote:
> > > ...can you call yourself an educational
> >
> > institution where from
> >
> > > the start you have predetermined what the students
> >
> > must think, what they must
> >
> > > love and what they must do?
> >
> > That describes the majority of our educational
> > institutions, actually...
> >
> > > Final line. What kind of society do we get when we
> >
> > tell people what they must
> >
> > > think and how they must think?
> >
> > A society much like our present one.
>
> Hey hey! Don't feel so bad. School has really never
> been a place of innovation and it is rarely set up to
> be one either, by and large it is a processing plant
> not too different from where the Colonel gets his
> chickens.

I feel that it is sad to think this way.
btw, Linux does not come from a student doing some kind of OS assignment?

> Once and a while something miraculous 
> happens and genius is recognized or an innovation is
> accepted but those are few and far between. You, (Us!)
> must be persistent and use our best weapon, our brains
> and our voices to gain world domination.
>
> Thanks for the update of the other side. When I go to
> the install-fests I get the impression free software
> is growing on campus and that people love it. When I
> meet students at the meetings or read the Linux news
> sites I get the same feeling so to hear this from a
> student reminds me there is still work to be done and
> very little of that work is programming. Remember,  WE
> ARE WINNING.

Awareness is growing.

> Publicly funded Schools should, of course use open
> file formats and not force you to submit work in
> proprietary file formats. If M$ wants those programs
> in schools it should be forced to GPL the code but
> instead it looks like it has chosen to bribe the
> schools and deceive the students with pretend
> innovation and con man offers.

Public schools use software given for free by the Ontario Ministry of 
Education and that includes WordPerfect and StarOffice. But the latest is too 
recent and most staff training is done on Corel's product.

The irony is that the administrative staff use MS office.

It depends on what you mean by free. You can read MS Office XML publicly 
avaiable now.
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