1. Once out of college, most students will not have access to preferred pricing. This means $140 (list) or nearly triple what a school pays for the home version. And to get the full version will be around ($400). Those are very different costs that we implicitly steer students as a side effect of offering them access to the gold standard.
2. There will be a small number of students who are frustrated enough to consider improving the product. Because it is open source they can make it better. There will be a smaller number still who have the talent and will act on that impulse. But that is the promise of working with open source.
3. As a student, what difficulties will you have transitioning from OpenOffice to Word. My anecdotal experience is that the problems will be minimal, especially if you have already cross-trained on other systems like google docs, yahoo's mail editor, etc. So if the incremental learning curve is small enough, there is only a nominal difference from an educator's perspective and it becomes a distinction without a difference.
_J
____________________________
Jason at jasonpj@yahoo.com
________________________________
From: Keith E Gatling <kgatling@MPH.NET>
To: ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Sent: Monday, February 9, 2009 8:59:28 PM
Subject: OpenOffice: Beyond the Cost Savings
OK, so I've seen mention on this list from many schools who have jumped on
the OpenOffice bandwagon as a way of saving a ton of money and fighting the
evil empire that comes out of Redmond. But here's the real question: when
all is said and done, were you actually satisfied using OpenOffice? Is it a
product that you might have actually paid *real money* to use, or are you
just using it to save money and to spite Microsoft?
I ask this because I was thrown into teach OpenOffice Writer to my 6th
graders when I realized, just as class was beginning, that Microsoft Office
hadn't been installed on our new laptops for reasons which need not be gone
into here. OpenOffice, however, was installed, and figuring that I can learn
any word processing program, I taught them that on the fly. Now they all
know the basics of it, but I'm not sure that I like the way it does things.
Even one of our die-hard Microsoft-haters says that OpenOffice Writer
"behaves like a free program." I'm thinking that some of the look and feel
that I've come to expect over the years had to be avoided so that there
wouldn't be a lawsuit. Of course, as I think about the fact that it's a
cross-platform program, and thinking of some of the issues I've had with
BlueJ for my Java class, it could also be a function of them trying to
create one interface for all three operating systems.
I've used many word processing programs over the past 22 years, from XyWrite
to WordPerfect, Word, MacWrite, WriteNow, ClarisWorks, NeoOffice, and now
OpenOffice. As far as I'm concerned Word is the gold standard, doing what
95% of the people want to do 95% of the time, and doing it well. Perhaps
with that in mind, the people in Redmond have earned their $50 per user.
I'll have a little more time to play around with OpenOffice Writer, and to
explore the joys that await me in their spreadsheet, but for now Word and
Excel are looking pretty good to me.
I'd be interested in hearing the experiences of others who have worked with
OpenOffice.
--
keg
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Keith E Gatling - Computer Instructor
Manlius Pebble Hill School
5300 Jamesville Rd
DeWitt, NY 13214
315.446.2452
http://www.gatling.us/keith
Some teachers teach subjects. Others teach people.
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