When I first started my career in education as an adjunct computer instructor for a community college in North Carolina, the only way I could describe the computing environment within the typical classroom was "homogenous". It was like the experience of walking into a shopping mall; once you've been in one, you've been in them all. This wasn't just the case at the institution I was teaching at. The situation was similar throughout the majority of higher education institutions in the United States. Computer labs were filled with whitebox PCs (or perhaps, a black-cased PC from one of the large corporate vendors) loaded with a copy of Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer set as the default web browser and, maybe if you were lucky, a copy of Netscape Communicator.

It was somewhat distressing for someone like myself, who began learning to use a computer during the early 1990's when there was still some semblance of a heterogeneous ecosystem among computing platforms on college campuses. I remember admiring the rows of Sun SPARC workstations that were deployed in the Engineering Department labs at North Carolina State University, the university which I attended and graduated from. NCSU's College of Management, deploying whitebox Intel 386-based PCs from a local hardware vendor, had Lotus 1-2-3 loaded as their primary spreadsheet application alongside a lesser-known, new spreadsheet application called Microsoft Excel for those who wanted an alternative. And then there was a favorite of mine, the Macintosh operating system; which at that time was deployed even in some unsuspecting places outside of its traditional publishing and graphics environments. Before I left NCSU, I even ran across a personal workstation or two running a relatively new OS called Linux.

But as the adage goes - what was old becomes new again. The days of the homogenized computing workspace I entered into as a community college instructor is changing to an environment similar to that of the early 1990s when I was attending college.

Only this time, it isn't the countless number of proprietary software developers from yesteryear that are occupying the desktops of workstations within the classroom. It is, instead, increasingly occupied by a diverse selection of software driven by user demand and communal development between corporate contributors and individual volunteers.

The workstations within academic computing labs and classrooms are increasingly occupied by open source software and open platforms.

In my 8-plus years in academia, I have never seen so much interest in open source software in education and open learning materials as I have been witnessing now.  Whether it is the avalanche of budget cuts flowing down on educational institutions due to the recession or simply educators feeling that licensing fees for mere point updates and the management of them has simply been unproductive, the use of open source software for instructional purposes is gaining tremendous ground.

I recently had the pleasure of giving a presentation before a group of educators at this year's Free and Open Source Software-Vermont (FOSSVT) conference regarding the use of OpenOffice.org in an educational environment. For a second-straight year, FOSSVT was a sold-out conference attended by teachers, administrators and IT staff from schools throughout the Northeastern United States whom all had one common interest; how to adopt and maximize the use of open source software to meet their instructional objectives in the classroom. Moreover, organizations like the National Center for Open Source and Education (www.ncose.org) and INGOTs (www.theingots.org) are working hard with primary schools and their educators to recognize how valuable the process of FOSS creation is to not only the resulting products, but to the new 21st century skills they are teaching.

Two years ago, I would have found this level of attendance to an open source conference focusing on education to be astonishing. However, I walked away just as astonished this year when I found out that not only were the educators in attendance interested in learning more about open source software and how to fully leverage it in the classroom, but that they were already using some open source software for instructional use, most notably OpenOffice.org.

The reason I was so astonished wasn't because they were using OpenOffice.org and other open source solutions in itself. After using open source solutions for over 5 years myself both on my personal desktop and in the classroom, I knew the quality of much of the open source software either matched or exceeded that of its proprietary counterparts.

No, the reason was because there were all of these instructors; all of these schools using open source software. When you read the educational journals, your local newspaper or your mainstream tech news sites and magazines, you are always left with the impression that very few institutions are using any "alternative" computing platforms or software applications, particularly open source solutions. Yet, the reality is that lesser-publicized applications, particularly open source platforms and software, are quietly being deployed and utilized for instructional purposes in significant numbers.

But that's the nature of the beast with open source software projects, and open course content development for that matter. The software and content is so openly accessible and free in its distribution that it's often very difficult to measure the impact that its making. However, due to my work with writing open course content for OpenOffice.org and other open source applications, I've been very fortunate to have educators share their success stories with me that are otherwise not being told.

In the coming weeks and months, I hope to share with you a number of these success stories. I hope these stories, in part, will let everyone in academia know that they are not alone when it comes to their commitment and desire to utilize OpenOffice.org to better the lives of their students through education. I hope it inspires other educators to share their untold stories, as well as open source project volunteers to keep up the good work they often thanklessly perform each and every day.

The work everyone is doing within the academic and open source communities is making a greater impact than they realize.