Re: [seul-edu] Progress on Linux in Portland Schools

[Leon Brooks <leon@brooks.fdns.net>]

On Tue, 16 Sep 2003 19:26, Philip Immoos wrote:
> I have asked
> the IT teachers to trial OOo but they keep saying thet industary user
> MSoffice.

> Or is that they are scared or lasy.

Scared. If they do anything different, they might get blamed for it. The 
one thing Microsoft was always good for was a blame server.

Ask your IT fellas: "What if my students go to work for Telstra, who are 
switching to OpenOffice as we speak, when they graduate?"

If they stagger through that one, try "What about students who can't 
afford to buy MS-Office? Won't you be putting them at a disadvantage?" 
Magic word, that, "disadvantage".

Here in Perth, West Oz, you can elaborate on that argument: "[pick a 
number] of my students use computers at home which were supplied by 
Computer Angels [http://www.ca.asn.au/] and they don't run MS-Office, 
so they use OpenOffice. If we use OpenOffice here I can at least have 
everyone practicing on the same thing."

Think up about a dozen of these (macro viruses, I want to turn their 
presentations into Flash for our website, I want to turn their 
documents into PDF but don't want to shell out $XXX for Distiller, and 
so on) before you go in, so you always have another argument waiting in 
the wings.

They may give in when it becomes obvious that you can go right on asking 
sticky questions until Australia's galahs all sober up, or we empty 
Kiwiland, whichever comes first. (-:

Cheers; Leon