A new lesson has been posted providing details regarding how to print color-managed photographic images using Apple’s Preview application bundled with Mac OS X. This lesson includes how to confirm and change the image resolution, how to assign working profiles to an image, how to view a soft proof of the image prior to printing and more.

To view the entire lesson, visit the Resources | Documentation page or go to directly to the lesson page.

When OpenOffice.org usage in education is discussed, it is often thought of in the context of using it for courses in office management, introductory computing courses enrolled by both IT and non-IT majors, primary and K-12 technology courses and perhaps even english composition courses. However, there are many other educational programs where OpenOffice.org is ideal, some of which are often overlooked.

One such educational program is also one that has been garnering a lot of attention among many state economic development leaders in recent years. Entrepreneurial training and resource programs for many states has been one of its primary economic development initiatives when trying to address rising unemployment, outsourcing by companies of productive works previously performed by salaried employees, moving of manufacturing facilities to emerging economies oversees and creating economic growth in rural areas. In the United States, for example, small businesses now account for between 60 and 80 percent of all net new job creations and employ about half of all workers.1

So while newspapers and local television news organizations splash headlines touting the occasional successes of large companies locating to an area and providing jobs, often with the caveat of reduced or the elimination of property and income taxes for those companies to even consider the relocation, small businesses without said benefits quietly, without fanfare, continue to be founded by local entrepreneurs that create sustainable economic growth and significant local job creation.

So you may be asking, "How does OpenOffice.org fit into all of this?" I feel I can best explain this by citing my own personal example while I was the director of a small business development center at a community college. These centers, often referred to as Small Business Development Centers (SBDC) in most states, are in part federally and/or state funded and often located at university and college campuses throughout the United States. They are established with the mission of providing one-on-one confidential counseling, training and educational resources to existing small businesses and entrepreneurs.

One of my first uses of OpenOffice.org for instructional purposes was when I was involved in a project providing instruction for local, small farmers in need of receiving computer skills training to assist them with better managing their farm operation records. These farmers came from diverse backgrounds, and raised a variety of livestock, as well as fruits and vegetables for various wholesale markets. Many of these farmers were carrying on with this occupation in tradition; many of them were the third or fourth generation of farmers within their families.

But there was one thing they all had in common; they all had been affected by what has become known as the "digital divide". Many of these farmers had little or no computer training. Most of them were still using a single paper ledger to manage their revenues and expenses. Or worse, their receipts and expenses were kept in a shoebox underneath the seat of their pickup trucks.

Moreover, they lived in areas where dial-up access was still the primary gateway to the Internet. Yet, despite their limited knowledge of operating a computer and using software to manage their records, the United States Department of Agriculture and local banks were increasingly providing electronic record and loan submissions as the only means to submit such documentation.

With the cooperative efforts of my Center, the local agricultural cooperative extension service office and the state cooperative extension service office at the local land-grant university, computer courses began to be offered to these small, limited resource farmers to help them utilize the personal computer as their primary record keeping and documentation submission tool. In the end, over 100 farmers received this training in my service area alone. These farmers started with the basics, such as developing proficient keyboarding skills and using the operating system. They then progressed to using word processors and spreadsheets so that they could become proficient enough to create documents such as business plans, balance sheets, profit and loss statements and cash flow statements.

And what was the primary word processor and spreadsheet application used for this training? It was OpenOffice.org Writer and Calc, as well as NeoOffice when instruction was provided in the Mac lab. There were many reasons for choosing OpenOffice.org, but three I found to be most important.

First, OpenOffice.org provided an alternative to proprietary office productivity suites such as Microsoft Office and AppleWorks, which were also used during the training. By having the availability of an alternative suite of applications for providing instruction, it focused the farmers on developing the conceptual skills of operating a computer and creating key documents, rather than focusing on learning a specific software application through rote memory. This proved to be an effective way of getting the farmers to realize there were multiple ways of approaching a task, as well reinforcing confidence in their ability to operate a computer and create documents in varying environments or when technologies change.

Second, the generous licensing terms of OpenOffice.org allowed copies of the software to be distributed to the farmers for personal use without incurring licensing fees. Upon completion of the series of courses, these small, limited resource farmers would be eligible to receive a personal computer donated by local businesses and agencies that were being taken out of deployment and replaced for newer models. The donated computers would be refurbished by training program administrators and volunteers to operational condition and installed with a legally licensed operating system and software. By making copies of OpenOffice.org available to the farmers, they would receive a full-featured office productivity suite capable of creating the various business documents they need to produce while saving both the donations program and the farmers money from having to purchase copies of proprietary office productivity suites.

Third, the use of OpenOffice.org added value to the instruction the training partnership provided, as well as to the local economy. The small farmers participating in the computer training program were excited to learn that they could receive a copy of OpenOffice.org on a CD at no cost to them. It inspired the farmers that had computers at home to load the software there and learn as much as they could outside of class. It also provided added value to the Center's training program and services; providing low-cost instructional solutions that instilled to those receiving the training that the Center and its partners were making an investment in their future and success.

Moreover, by freeing the farmers from having to utilize scarce financial resources to pay licensing fees for software necessary to help them better manage their farm operations and become more profitable, those dollars instead were, in part, used to buy other products or services provided in their local community. This scenario often leads to adding additional value to the local economy and creates additional jobs. Typically, 45% of money spent at a locally owned business or service provider remains in the local economy, whereas as little as 14% or less remains in the local economy when spent with businesses and service providers that are headquartered outside a local area.2

So the adoption of OpenOffice.org, when included in a broader inventory of instructional tools and resources, can have substantial benefits to learners, teachers and educational institutions alike. And when utilized in often overlooked educational and community support programs like that of entrepreneurial training, the possibilities for even greater positive effects can be too numerous to list.


References

1 United States Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy, Frequently Asked Questions, 2008. Link: http://www.sba.gov/advo/stats/sbfaq.pdf

2 "The Economics of Buying Local", Denise Blaha, New Hampshire Carbon Challenge. Link: http://carbonchallenge.sr.unh.edu/newsletter/economics_buying_local.jsp

The OpenOffice.org Marketing Project has announced that on Wednesday, October 28, 2009, the one hundred millionth person clicked on the “Download OpenOffice.org” button since version 3 of the software was released just over a year ago.

According to Florian Effenberger, co-lead of the OpenOffice.org Marketing Project, this figure only includes the downloads recorded from the OpenOffice.org website. This figure does not include downloads from third-party resources, such as Linux distribution application packages, community CD distributions, peer-to-peer networks and other media.

Congratulations to everyone that has made OpenOffice.org version 3 so successful!

The OOo4Kids project has released a new video detailing the features and benefits of the new, beta-release of OOo4Kids 0.5.1. Created by Jean-Marie Lafon and Ben Bois, the video provides details of this new office productivity suite being created from the OpenOffice.org source code specially for use by students age 7-12 within an academic environment.

The video is currently only available in French, but an English version will be proposed soon. The OOo4Kids software, Beta version 0.5.1, is available online for trial and supports Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. The software itself currently supports the English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese languages.

The video can be viewed via Vimeo, YouTube and DailyMotion.

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.