[ale] wireless card

[James P. Kinney III]

Well, if it were for a corporation, I would not be so hard on the PDF
stance. But schools are about LEARNING!!! If a professor _can't_learn_
there are other issues involved.

Most places I have seen in academia that insist on M$ format papers do
so because they are sending the papers off to a research service for
plagiarism testing.

Any time a professor gets knicker-twisted about the format of a
not-for-publication document, the students are likely suffering through
a bad semester already. There are certain formats that are easier to
read (double spaced, no "weird" fonts, etc) and when I taught college
nearly anything was OK. I had people sending me ASCII text (which I
actually preferred so the CONTENT was important and not the pretty
factor).

I know I take a hard-line stance on this (and kicked and screamed
through 3 colleges doing it) but I expect people to in academia to be
more capable of learning new stuff than corporate people. I have no
problem standing toe to toe with a tenured professor who is requiring a
non-standard document format and getting them to back down and accept a
real document standard (Sun even provided a plugin that allows legacy
office suite users to open ODT format files correctly). I have done this
as a student, as a teacher and again as a parent. Now I'm doing it again
as a consultant to schools. The legacy crap is on the way out and so are
the people who insist on requiring it.

The only reason that is truly valid for a professor to NOT accept a PDF
document or an ODT document, for that matter, it the professor is lazy.
If they will admit that in front  of their peers, I'll back down and let
their peers will take over. If all of the peers join them in the
admission, then I lose and walk away with my dignity intact. Then I
hammer the IT support department and the head of the school with the
financial argument and begin to pull out my kids from the school.

Yes, I _am_ that personally convinced that what I do is the right way.
See: Peters Laws of the Sociopathic Obsessive Compulsive. If you can't
beat them, join them, then beat them.

On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 14:34 -0400, James Sumners wrote:
> A couple of things.
> 
> 1) Unless you know about free PDF printers for Windows, and they do
> exist, you probably don't have any way to create a PDF from your Word,
> or whatever else, document. So requiring PDF adds more difficulty.
> 
> 2) The scenario I am talking about is standardized. _Everyone_ at CSU
> has access to the same version of Microsoft Office. Well, except for
> us Mac users. We get a slightly older version. But newer versions of
> Office usually don't have a problem opening older Office documents.
> I'll agree that it doesn't work well going the other direction.
> 
> You can take your PDF stance all you want. I'm just saying that if you
> were in the same situation, it would be a lot easier to use the
> software your instructors are using. After all, you don't want to make
> things complicated for your professors. If you are the one person
> standing out with some sort of special requirements, they will take
> notice, and they won't like it. I'm sure that statement holds true for
> any university.
> 
> On 9/28/07, James P. Kinney III <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com> wrote:
> > Maybe I'm just the prick on this stuff but...
> >
> > Electronic format document transfer that has the requirement of intact
> > format MUST be sent in PDF.
> >
> > Zip.
> >
> > No other alternative is possible.
> >
> > If student has a new version of M$ Orifice and teacher has an older
> > version (quite common situation), the document won't work for the
> > teacher.
> >
> > Saving ODT as a M$ .doc does an OK job but it's not perfect. The
> > formatting _will_ change because the M$ format (I use the term only
> > generically here) is so convoluted that even they can't always make it
> > work right.
> >
> > So any student who is REQUIRED to submit electronically should ALWAYS
> > send a PDF and no other format. Even if the teacher is using
> > OpenOffice.org, they should send PDF. The only time PDF should not be
> > sent is during collaboration time before the document is in final form
> > and the teacher is going to edit things.
> > --
> > James P. Kinney III
> 
> 
> -- 
> James Sumners
> http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/
> 
> "All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
> pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
> is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
> drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."
> 
> Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
> CH:D 59
> _______________________________________________
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> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> 
-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC        
770-493-8244                    
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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