[SC.LUG] OpenOffice.org@Wilmslow High School

[Jason Lucas]

Paul,

Thanks for providing the details of this project - I'll up your mark to
9.3!
Seriously though, I think that we all pretty impressed by the effort
made by yourself and your school in promoting oss and developing the
business skills of your pupils. Keep up the good work!

Jason Lucas  

On Sat, 2004-02-14 at 12:28, FatMax wrote:
> Not even 9.1/10 for initiative? ;)
> As the article in the Guardian implied the current OpenOffice.org 
> projects running at WHS are as much about business ethics as they are 
> about the technical merits of any particular software platform. Jason 
> has a pretty good point about Internet access in Malaysia but may be 
> unaware that this is a fairly recent development - the result of a 
> United Nations Development Programme
> http://www.undp.org.my/Press/docs/pre060302.asp
> And who got their foot in the door first? The Ministry of Education's 
> popular products page makes interesting reading!
> http://www.moe.gov.my/select/explain.htm
> The licence fees and per capita cost of MS Office in terms of gdp
> http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_12/ghosh/index.html
> were another determining factor in our choice of Malaysia. BTW any 
> teachers reading - those figures in the link above make a nice little 
> modelling exercise for Calc!
> WHS projects are a VERY small attempt to encourage the use of FLOSS 
> in Malaysia. We've sent out about 100 discs so far with another 100 
> to go in the next fortnight. Our distributor in Malaysia sends 3 
> discs to schools (and now small businesses) on request encouraging 
> them to burn and distribute more CDs. We've also put together some 
> Thai CDs for the a school in Sussex that is launching a similar 
> project. The next batch we'll send out is a set of 50 "twin-packs" - 
> disc#1 OOo for Linux and #2 OOo for Windows. Each disc contains 
> localized versions in English, Bahasa Melayu, Chinese (traditional 
> and simplified), Tamil and Hindi. Where else can you get 12 versions 
> of an office suite for £0?
> The WHS project is currently being run as a non-profit organisation 
> by a small group of year 10 business studies students so...
>  <spam>
> ...if you're in the market for reliable office software at under a 
> fiver you can find them listed at
> http://distribution.openoffice.org/cdrom/#cdrom
> </spam>
> Back at WHS the introduction of OOo is a VERY VERY slow process :( We 
> currently have it installed on about 30% of our curriculum machines 
> but I'm the only one here who uses it regularly with students. 
> Nominally, all students and staff have a choice of OOo or MSOffice - 
> depressingly the majority of students (and ALL the staff) opt for the 
> comfort of what they're used to. Younger students however seem a bit 
> more inclined to experiment so chip, chip, chip... ;) Articles like 
> the one that appeared in the Guardian, and earlier the local paper, 
> are useful because they get staff and parents asking questions - not 
> to mention the fact that the school's management just love this type 
> of publicity! I see light at the end of the tunnel...
> Regards all
> Paul Burgess
> Wilmslow High School
> 
> 
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