Posts Tagged ‘open source’
Another product I won’t use
I was all excited this morning reading Jane’s post about CoFFEE. It sounded like a great tool. According to the CoFFEE website,
CoFFEE – the new groupware application for digital discussions in a live classroom situation.CoFFEE offers customisable tools, such as a threaded discussion forum, graphical concept mapping, voting and more.CoFFEE is open-source and free!Available in: English, French, Italian and Dutch
I was intrigued because, although I work in a langauge lab, I don’t find the software there really works for the kind of teaching I do. The computers are critical, but the actual lab software is good but not necessary.
So I watched the demos and read all about it. I was impressed. And then I went to download it. And there is where I stopped. It only works on Macs and Windows PCs. As a Linux user at home, I couldn’t look at it to evaluate it. That means I am not going to look at it for use in my classes.
I know I am the one losing out by not checking it out on my PC at work. But this is something I feel strongly about. If you are not considering the Linux community when developing software, then I am not interested. Especially when your product is open source!
Change is hard.
Some people embrace change and others do not. And most of us, I guess, embrace it in some areas and not in others.
There have been a lot of changes at school technology-wise lately. For some of us it is easier than for others. One thing that I think is smart is that the tech guys are getting a few people on board with one or more of the different open source programs we are going to be using before springing them on everyone. It has been helpful, for instance, for me to be able to assure some of the office staff that they will be able to use OpenOffice without any problems, And someone else can tell us how convenient Zimbra is. There is a small group of “experts” who can take some of the pressure off the IT guys. But this is a stressful time for a lot of people.
The changes that are planned are good ones, I think. On both ethical and financial grounds I applaud the move to open source that has slowly been taking place on our campus. We’ve been using Moodle for over a year now, and we are running Linux servers. There is a long way to go still, and not everyone is as excited about it as I am, but I think this time next year few people will even remember what the fuss was all about.
A question for the experts…
On a discussion forum my husband participates in, a computer science student asked a question about computer science degree programs. My husband asked if I knew the answer, and I said that I didn’t, but that I would be happy to ask you, the experts:
Do you know of a college or university that teaches computer science and at least recognizes the open source movement? Is there a degree program out there that you know of that at least exposes students to Linux and mySQL and other open source software?
Thanks for whatever you are able to tell me.
