when i was in school in the late 90s it was all microsoft all the time. we had courses specifically on Microsoft^TM^ Word^TM^. that sort of indoctrination isn't visible in the workplace until the people going through it are old enough to work.

[–] some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I graduated in 2011, and same. My high school had a pretty janky mix of various Dell Inspiron towers, running mostly Windows XP but with a handful of Windows 2000 and ME machines that for some reason (prolly hardware too old) escaped their upgrades. We went through impressively comprehensive MS Office training and even Computer Tech classes (essentially an intro to an intro to computer science where we learned data concepts and built a PC).

A few years later, 90% of those machines had been scrapped, the mandatory courses were all gone and the kids all had cheap crappy Chromebooks. Now any tech courses are just electives and the students are expected to magically know how to use the software they're required to use. (Because "they're young, of course they know it!" Nevermind that they've only used iPads since birth).

Consequently, any class involving a computer, even if it's just word processing for English essays and such, has the teacher taking time out of instruction to show the students how to use the stuff. Otherwise there are problems. It's a sorry state of affairs and a lot more kids are getting left behind when it comes to tech. Google might be the worst thing happening to education now if it weren't for the GOP.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

i was a ta in uni in 2011-2015 and while ipad babies weren't a thing yet we did definitely have to explain to some people what files were. as far as i understand from my contacts at the university it it's way worse now.

[–] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

Ohhh, I can sign off on this.

The amount of 20 year old university students that do not understand how to save a file to a specific location on their computer and then retrieve that file later has skyrocketed the last five years.

This is very obviously a consequence of them only ever having worked through tablet- or phone-type interfaces, where the file system is completely hidden to the user. I teach these people to program, and their eyes gloss over when I ask them where they put the data file they need to parse for the assignment. Once they understand the question they'll typically open the file explorer, click on "recent files", and ask me why their python script won't open it, when the files are right there next to each other in "recent files".

[–] flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

To be fair, that's about all there was... Corels (?) WordPerfect was ass, for sure. Office 97 was freaking amazing.

Although, I was a product of the time as well.

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

I used Applix on Unix / Linux and it was fine.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

sure, but computers are so much more than office suites.

[–] some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't believe you

[–] lime@feddit.nu 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

our lab computers ran novell netware, which definitely told me that microsoft wasn't all there was. but yeah, it definitely conditioned an entire generation into only understanding windows.

[–] flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

To be fair, NetWare again was the product - microsoft didn't have anything worthy of respect until much later (and I can't remember if AD was any good in the early 2000s!)

NT4s Lanmanager was rubbish - NetWare was light years ahead as a directory service. I'd argue the institutions simply had the right tools for the job.

You are right about the hostile defaults / corpos getting into education to capture a generation, of course (and institutions want to be relevant to the market rather than to the principles or foundations, which is a shame)