Re: Affecting Institutional Change (Yeah Right)
> > Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
> > > Perhaps they can provide an easy pointy-clicky-gimmik that
> > > transforms their doc files to something useful. It may be as
> > > simple as adding a button to a tool bar, right beside the "save
> > > as doc file", a "save as something useful" button. The author may
> > > not have the skill or permission to change the toolbar directly.
> >
> Amy Templeton wrote:
> > Hmm...that would be an interesting trick. I'll google around on
> > that; if I could find something about that it'd be pretty useful.
Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
> Talk to the people who actually run the college's network and
> computing infrastructure. If they run MS on their servers then
> there's not much hope. If they run Linux or BSD then they may be
> of some help. It may be them that set up the profs' desktops and
> don't allow the profs to alter the setup, which is why the
> sysadmins may be the ones to get to add a dooclicky. I would talk
> to them before trying to google and find a clicky.
Good idea.
Gnu_Raiz <Gnu-Raiz@midsouth.rr.com> wrote:
> Just as an aside I would suggest maybe next time to use the security
> angle. Instead of getting blue in the face about the virtues of not
> using .doc, explain how metadata is bad, and how your personal secrets
> can be revealed.
> http://www.lawpro.ca/LawPRO/metadata.pdf
> Then I would mention what steps they are taking in protecting their
> information. I find this angle to be of great use as most places are not
> very security aware especially when it comes to documents. Then you can
> always ask what metadata cleaning tools they incorporate to protect
> against such things.
Yeah, I definitely do mention things about version control,
privacy, etc., more than the virtue of free software (because
strong as the latter argument is, it doesn't hold up unless people
care). Basically my argument is always "Not everybody can open this
file; that's bad. Here's how to save it as PDF or text. By the way,
it's not just me that you should take this into consideration for,
because people can see previous versions, it doesn't show up the
same on other computers even if they're running the same version,
if somebody's running a previous version they're forced to
"upgrade," oh and they carry one of the most popular forms of
computer virii. By the way, next time [if they're using their own
computer and not a school one] consider downloading OpenOffice for
free instead of shelling out a couple hundred dollars for a program
that does it worse" [not an actual quote from any given spiel]. The
problem is, there are a lot of people who need to hear this spiel
two or three times before they'll listen, and a lot of people who
need to hear it.
Anyway...I will check out your article on metadata! It seems like
that could be a useful snippet to throw at them (which is what I've
been looking for here--useful documents to back me up). Thanks for
your response!
Amy
--
One possible reason that things aren't going according to plan is
that there never was a plan in the first place.
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