Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Another win for the good guys in the pursuit of open standards and formats for office documents. Reuters is reporting that Microsoft

will offer free software that will allow Word, Excel and PowerPoint to handle documents in rival technology formats. The translation tools will be developed and licensed as open source software, and will be offered as downloadable add-ins for several older versions of the Microsoft Office system, the Redmond, Washington-based company said.”

Now let’s just hope the release of this software doesn’t take as long as Vista. But once it is, everyone can expect that I will be sending out documents in ODF format only. No more .doc files!

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Slashdot reports that the Belgian Government will be requiring the use of the Open Document Format (ODF) with documents beginning in the fall of 2008. They also indicate that software should be able to read ODF the year prior.

Now if the State of Massachusetts will hold their ground and other goverments will follow suit, perhaps OpenOffice users will finally be able to share files with everyone else in the ODF format. Students will also be able to use OO without having to purchase MS Office. Whether this will be the end of MS’s dominance in the office productivity suite market is debatable. But at least it would push MS to compete in the market based on the quality of their software instead of maintaining their dominance simply because everyone is using their format.

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Over on fadtastic, Andrew Whitacre notes that Times New Roman has been removed as the default font in Office 2007 betas in favor of a new MS san serif font, Calibri (read about the new fonts in Office 2007).

Whitacre also raises some good questions about this change:

But what will happen to Times New Roman? In ten years, will it be just another term-paper alternative? Will instructors’ syllabi accept Calibri, or will they stand firm with Times because so many Word documents are still printed out to be read? Would you ever write a paper in Calibri because it’s easier to read on a screen, and then change it to Times at the last moment for your print reader? What about Phil’s theory about The Secret Lives of Fonts—is Calibri so pretty that universities will experience a round of aesthetics-inspired grade-inflation?

The good: with this change, students will need to be taught to make conscious choices about font use depending on whether the document is meant for reading primarily in print or on the screen, something that visual rhetoric and new media theory already encourages us to teach.

The bad: they may not often make the choice even after we teach them to in writing classes (sigh).

More important: I’m wondering if this isn’t a trend toward the word processing document becoming primarily a text to be read online? If I think about all of the word processing documents I have received and created over the last year, the majority were not meant primarily to be printed out by others or I did not print them out myself. Part of this is influenced by collaboration and feedback. So many of the word processing docs I get or create are drafts that are shared electronically. Writing teachers regularly make use of Words commenting feature, a revision tool which is designed for screen use. In what other ways have word processing docs become screen texts and how does this influence the teaching of writing?

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One more step closer to having ODF (the open standard used by OpenOffice) replace MS Office’s file formats as the ubiquitous file format used. Groklaw reports that the OpenDocument Foundation has offered the State of Massachusetts an ODF plugin for MS Office. This would allow MS Office users to save and open ODF files in any version

of MS Office dating back to MS Office 97. The ODF Plugin installs on the file menu as a natural and transparent part of the open, save, and save as sequences. As far as end users and other application add-ons are concerned, ODF plugin renders ODF documents as if it were native to MS Office.

As far as I’m concerned, once this plugin is available, no one will be getting .doc files from me any more. If everyone can get used to having to download Flash plugins, Quicktime, and Adobe Reader, they can certainly be expected to use the non-proprietary file format standard.

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Here’s an exciting bit of news–Google has bought out Upstartle, the company responsible for Writely Web Word. Mat Tschirgi and I have been using Writely extensively to collaborate on our graphical adventure game book. While it’s not quite as effective as Microsoft Word, it gets the job done–though I’ve heard complaints that its files aren’t quite as clean and web friendly as some folks would like. Anyway, I’m very interested to see what innovations Google will bring to the program.

Well, the news is out–Sun has finally released Open Office 2.0. I’m using a torrent to download it now, and will hopefully be able to discuss its comment/track changes and autotext features (with an eye towards migrating from Word) shortly. At any rate, 2.0 is sure to be much better than 1.x, and I’m really hoping they’ve managed to improve the speed. I’ll also be taking a critical look at Impress, OO’s “PowerPoint” equivalent. Maybe–just maybe–this product will be of sufficient quality to allow me to final

An interesting headline on Slashdot today. Apparently, Abiword now has beat Sun the punch to develop the first free software word processor with integrated grammar checker. We all know how big of a step this is–one more reason why students still using Microsoft Works, WordPad, or Notepad need to download Abiword.

I haven’t gotten a chance to check it out yet, but I’m wondering if they’ve managed to do anything with Word’s powerful track changes and comment feature. I’ve grown to love the functionality I get out of Word for grading papers–autotext + comments + tablet PC = RAPID RESPONSE GRADING PROCEDURE. I’m able to offer students 40+ comments (some custom, some canned) on their papers in less than 15 minutes each. The last version of Abiword didn’t have any support for Word comments, and OpenOffice Writer BETA had only a very primitive comment feature.

Just finished reading Christian Einfeldt’s interview with Gary Edwards of OpenOffice and OASIS. Edwards reveals that IBM and Adobe, among others, are onboard with OpenDocument and explains why the MSXML solution is not an optimum solution for business. Definitely a worthwhile read for understanding the future of XML, and, I think, a good predictor of why MS might soon loose their monopoly on office productivity.

David Wheeler describes in detail why open standards are important to OpenDocument’s adoption in Massachusetts and how this affects MS. I had not realized that the EU had already informed MS that they wanted an open standard, too. Looks like MS may be pushed to implement OD. As an OpenOffice user, I’m extremely happy that MS may have to adopt the document format standard that my word processor uses

Yippee! It’s about time:

The state of Massachusetts Friday made it official: It will use only nonproprietary document formats in state-affiliated offices effective Jan. 1, 2007. . . . As part of this new policy, the state will support the newly ratified Open Document Format for Office Applications, or OpenDocument, and PDFs (portable document format) as the standards for its office documents.

Yes. Only a techie writing teacher could get excited by government adoption of an open document format. But this is a big deal

From CNET, Word blunder exposes U.K. split on terrorism,

The U.K. government is in trouble over dodgy document management, with an apparent split within the government over new antiterrorism laws exposed by a letter from Home Secretary Charles Clarke. The letter, sent via e-mail as a Word document to the members of the opposing Conservative party, appeared to back controversial plans to hold terrorism suspects for up to three months without trial. However, anybody applying the Microsoft “track changes” function was able to see Clarke’s original wording, which expressed concerns over such measures.

Link via datacloud.

Here’s an interesting piece over at XML.com by Peter Sefton describing how to hack the XML and XLST files in OpenOffice writer. Also talks about how to add custom style sheet menus. One day, I think it would be great to see EMMA capabilities applied to OO using some of these techniques.