[K12OSN] Open Office

[James P. Kinney III]

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 19:52 -0700, Mel Wade wrote:
> I listened to the interview about Open Office.  I gave it
> consideration but so far have not moved that direction due to the lack
> of good teaching materials.  I am using materails from Southwestern
> that is project based.  I really like it, because I believe that
> people learn by doing, not by hearing...  But I haven't seen anything
> like this for Open Office. 
> 
> Am I missing something?

How about: because of the license fee being so low the cost of making it
available to anyone who wants to evaluate is negligible. For 90+% of all
office suite users, it will do the job very well for all their needs. As
far as educational aspects go, it's just another office suite with a
word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool and another bitmap
editor. It's sort of like Drivers Education, you want people to learn
how to drive, not learn how to drive Ford (or Chevy, or...). All of the
basic stuff is there and it uses similar terminology. From a basic
practice standpoint, plop a kid down in front of it and let 'em go. It's
us _old_people_ that need the help learning how to use a new system :)

There are resources on the web that show how to use it. For people who
are very comfortable with another office suite, the book "501 things you
need to know about switching to Open Office" is a good reference to
have. There are some things that just work differently. The end result
is the same but some process nuances are different.

The hardest thing I have encountered is trying to get people to simply
get the text in the system first and monkey with the layout later. By
using the styles the flow is improved and becomes more transportable
when exported as a .doc. Exporting a properly style formatted .odt file
to PDF is great since it autogenerates the linked TOC from the headers
for each section/chapter/etc.

Keep in mind: people didn't suddenly decide to use Microsoft Word. The
truly efficient word processor users used WordPerfect and knew all the
keyboard shortcuts. The change to Word happened by dictate caused by a
more favorable licensing scheme and a prettier screenshot.


> 
> -- 
> Mel Wade
> "The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do." -
> BF Skinner
> www.melwade.com 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC        
770-493-8244                    
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
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