On Aug 26, 2006, at 5:12 AM, Thane Sherrington wrote:
At 01:04 AM 26/08/2006, Anthony Q. Martin wrote:
do you people really think that universities choose software just
for student use?
One would assume that's at least one of the criteria. The best
tool for the job is the one I'd go with. But free and open would
have to be pretty important. There's a local university here that
for years standardized on MS Office because MS gave them lots of
money and free product. The students had to purchase the student
edition at $250 a pop. Finally the CIS dept managed to convince
the school to switch because once MS had hooked them, it stopped
giving away stuff and started charging (a clever marketing ploy I
know) and they wanted to be able to give back to the community.
T
FWIW at both universities I've attended (undergrad+grad) Windows XP
has been available for $25, and MS Office has been available for $25--
for student use. Not sure what kind of deals the univs had to enter
into, but that's hardly onerous for any student.
OTOH, neither of these schools had any policies about what documents
had to be given in. My grad school actually had people giving talks
on how to write theses in latex (aimed at computer illiterates
basically). The individual professors could, and would require that
documents be turned in in a particular format. Do you have any idea
how often some clever student would create a junk file, send it to
the prof, who can't open it, and then say "oh, it got garbled in
transmission, let me send again / print out / whatever." (thereby
gaining hours / days to write papers in) It happens a lot in my
experience...
Scott
