This is very positive, and I have been preparing to do the same at my (rather oppressive) school.
On Mon, 2006-12-11 at 14:14 +0000, chombee wrote: > Following Ubuntu installs we've been doing for people over the last year > or so, we found that if students are writing an essay at home on their > Ubuntu laptop, they have to remember to export the essay from OpenOffice > in either .doc format or .pdf (neither of which is perfect). The > university computers in the open access labs run Windows with MS Word. > > So Erik Chakravarty and I wrote a letter to the university computing > services explaining the situation and asking them to deploy OpenOffice 2 > due to its support for the Open Document format. A couple of weeks > later, the university replied and said they've looked into it and will > be deploying OpenOffice 'early in the new year', and even suggested > they'd be training their staff to provide support for it :) > > Students using Ubuntu on their home machines will now be able to save > their work in OpenOffice, and open it in OpenOffice when they get to > school. > > More info, including a PDF of our letter and a photo of their response, > can be found on this page: > > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SeanHammond > > Now we'll wait for computing services to do the real work of deploying > OpenOffice. When that happens, it might be a good time to try and get an > article about it in the student newspaper. > > Ideas for following up on the employment include asking the university > to establish some sort of open formats policy, whereby they'll provide > support for open formats wherever they can. For example students should > always be allowed to submit work in OpenOffice as opposed to MS Word or > PowerPoint formats, and lecture notes and assignments etc. should never > be available only in closed formats. And getting some Linux (probably > Fedora) machines available for students in the open access labs, > alongside the Windows machines and Macs that are already provided. The > School of Informatics already runs a very large number of open access > Fedora machines, but they are open only to informatics students. > > > -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.kubuntu.org/UKTeam/
