On 03/12/2011 06:33 AM, Ian Lynch wrote:
On 12 March 2011 02:00, Craig Olofson<c.olofson@gmail.com> wrote:On 3/11/2011 4:36 PM, drew wrote:On Fri, 2011-03-11 at 19:22 -0500, webmaster for Kracked Press Productions wrote:On 03/11/2011 07:04 PM, drew wrote: or marketing group. Since they have several college/universities in the Ithaca area. Cornell is a major player in status for New York State Colleges. A lot of major research partners with industries at Cornell.Actually from what I can see MSO is not the competitor any longer, not in the USA and not in Education - it is Google Docs.Yup. Google Apps (which includes Docs) and, I'd argue to a lesser extent, Microsoft Live. I just want to re-emphasize Drew's assertion and go a step further. The relative importance of office suites is in flux. In terms of importance, collaboration is ascendent. This means having, not only productivity tools but, document management (i.e. versioning) and calendaring. For the last 4 or 5 years, MS' lunch has been eaten in the higher education space, not by other applications but by Google Apps. And this is only because Google is the furthest along in recognizing the tools important to collaboration. MS is late to the party but, it'd be wishful thinking to believe they won't stay& fight.I have to say that I use Google's spreadsheet a lot more than Calc because I need to use it collaboratively. I don't use the Google WP much because I put information straight into Durpal pages and rarely need to print them. For that reason I'm using Writer less and less. I never used Powerpoint or impress much but come to think of it I have used Google's presentation program a couple of times at least partly because of being able to embed the presentation in a web page. I also use Inkscape more than Draw. Now I think about it, I problem use OOo mostly as a compatibility tool when people send me MS Office documents. So to me, there should be two over-riding priorities. One is to get LibreOffice to be a collaborative web tool - (ok its a massive job but if it isn't done OOo/LO could well be irrelevant in 5 years time) the other is to get it to work well on mobile technologies. That could amount to the same thing if internet connections become cheap enough and reliable enough. They aren't yet.
The biggest problem with something like Google Docs and other online/cloud systems is the fact it is relying on the student having Internet access. What happens when the net connection goes down? That happened at least once a week at the last college I went to. How about when the connection bandwidth is overwhelmed with users trying to deal with Cloud computing? I have seen that as well at both college levels and middle and high school levels. Ever have a simple web page take 3 or 4 minutes to "download" and display completely? That was a problem when the computer labs were filled and the school could not afford the "business class" access account that had enough bandwidth. The whole college with over 500 computers shared a T1 line [about 1MB download] My access for residential has 10 - 15MB and it cost about 1/4th the price of the "business class" T1 line.
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