[wellylug] community education

[Joseph Booth]

On 19 May 2004, at 07:59, Wood Brent wrote:
> --- Damon Lynch <damon at photo.geek.nz> wrote:
>> On Tue, 2004-05-18 at 20:07, Jamie Baddeley wrote:
>>> someone asked me today why people don't do openoffice courses at
>>> continuing education places like wellington high etc. You know,
>>> introduction to excel, introduction to OOcalc etc.
>>>
>>> I didn't know why.
>> Likewise, there are people who go around to people trying to get back
>> into the work force, and they teach these skills.  I have wondered if 
>> it
>> would be great for them to say to people with little money to spare 
>> for
>> expensive office suites "hey, we can give you this office suite at no
>> cost"
>>
>> I think the main problem right now is the ubiquity of MS office.
> I very much agree. Everyone uses MS Office because everyone uses MS 
> Office.
> It's not just the OS competition that's missing out, other commercial 
> suites
> are falling by the wayside as well, & often quality & functionality 
> has little
> to do with it.
>
> Getting OO more into the public eye is prob much of the battle.

Ya.. if you use it.. and like it -- tell someone.  Basically. then it's 
just left to convince the boss to spend less money...

[putting on WelMac hat]
The Wellington Mac Society (http://welmac.org.nz) of which i'm an 
executive member, regularly runs workshops in which one of the basic 
bread and butter requests is MS Office tutoring.. As OO only runs under 
X11 on Macs, it's less popular.. especially when the productivity Macs 
come with AppleWorks pre-installed (note not many requests for tutoring 
on free 'good' software.. only expensive MS stuff) - I can add Open 
Office to the list of suggested tutoring topics, and see the response 
-- but I wouldn't profess to be an expert in it.. just a geek.

In our regular meetings we also demo products and software, and in the 
next month or so will be possibly running a Open Source Software / 
Communications etc etc meeting - if anyone from WellyLUG (me and 
probably Ed for a start) is interested in expounding the virtues of any 
(mac compatible) Open Office/ other Software then they are most welcome 
to contact me off-list (welmac at mangee.net.nz).

[taking WelMac hat off to reveal hidden Linuxy things]
WelMac is non-profit.. and meetings are free to attend.. these days 
most of the open source software installs and runs without problems on 
Mac OS X, with it's BSD Unix underbelly.  In fact it has been said 
http://www.google.com/search?&q=Linux+switch+OS+X+Mac that Linux users 
are 'switching' to OS X in droves.
I just use OS X Panther it at work and home.. still gotta Linux 
x86/450Mhz laptop with me at all times till someone gives me that free 
17" PowerBook.

The question is.. Is WellyLug into advocacy? ;) or even getting paid to 
tutor?

--

Jo 'Mangee' Booth
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