Doing away with Microsoft

The New York Times today has an article of note on Zoho (the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/business/05digi.html), which provides a rich suite of online applications. Zoho's offering may appear redundant to Google docs, but the NYT reviewer liked the writing app better and Zoho evidently provides offline editing tools which sounds nice and useful.

CPS's provided email and collaboration tool, FirstClass, also provides a writing app, and is available via the web, although it is slow and cumbersome and has the very very annoying shortcoming of throwing away your work if you press the backspace key with the focus in the wrong spot (the browser takes you to the previous page, sans your work).

And then there is OpenOffice, the open source suite of productivity tools. Our Macs did not come with Microsoft Office on the Mac OS side (it did have the awful Office 2007 on the Windows partition -- how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways...), so I though OpenOffice would be a viable solution for our Macs. And it has worked okay -- the Aqua version for the Mac uses the native Mac interface, but there are odd inconsistencies and silly bugs and not so silly ones that are irritating. (Specifically, and off the top of my head: keyboard mapping is consistent I think with OpenOffice on other platforms, but not with the Mac, in particular the laptop keyboard, e.g. Option-Down Arrow to page down -- I cannot figure out how to page down on the MacBook; the RTF save option omits, or rather, screws up simple formatting stuff like centered text; the autocorrection has some oddities; Page Setup is not of the File Menu where I am pretty sure it is for every other app in the universe, instead it is on the Format menu; and we had a very difficult time with the presentation software hanging, but it is better with version 3.0.1). BUT... It is a free and feature-rich offering with a large user and developer community behind it. I am forcing myself to use OpenOffice just to know it and to see if there really is a fulfilling life post-Microsoft. And for the most part, yes, there is life after MSFT.

So why bother with the expense and general trauma of wrestling with Microsoft Office? Mainly because of the dead weight of history, that incredible inertia of user base and training and curriculum material specific to MSFT and .doc files and .ppt files that use some peculiar MSFT feature not ported to the online and open source alternatives. Eventually I think blunders like the Office 2007 interface catastrophe and plain old price will wean educators away from the MSFT teat. In the meantime, us tech teachers should be ecumenical in our approach to applications -- we should be teaching word processing and not Word; spreadsheets and not Excel; presentation software and not PowerPoint. I have found students to be very flexible in moving across platforms and applications.

The biggest obstacle I see right now for going to online tools in the classroom is the legal one of age restrictions on the accounts for students. Related to this is the potential issue, if student accounts come with public email accounts, of Internet safety. But is this really an issue? Don't the students already have their yahoo and hotmail accounts? I don't know. FirstClass could be a good solution, since student email accounts cannot receive email from outside of FirstClass, but the writing app is so difficult to use, and the other main tools, spreadsheets and presentation software in particular as far as I can tell are missing. There is also some risk that the online services will at some point change their terms of use or pricing models. Are they a safe basket to store eggs?

Anyway I have sent an email to Zoho regarding classroom use and student accounts.

jd