hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1735.txt

Episode: 1735
Title: HPR1735: Free tutorials for teachers
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1735/hpr1735.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:24:44

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Its Friday 27th of March 2015, this is HPR Episode 1,735 entitled Free Tutorials for Teachers
and is part of the series' Libri Office.
It is hosted by Ahaka and is about 15 minutes long.
Feedback can be sent to Swilnik at Swilnik.com or by leaving a comment on this episode.
The summary is, Professor Bernard Poole makes Free Tutorials available aimed at Teachers.
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Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our series on Libra Office.
And I know I kind of implied last time that we were going to be starting to impress,
but I actually have something else that I want to fit in here, just a one-time announcement really.
And that is that somehow or other, I guess word has gotten around of the stuff we're doing
and I got a very interesting email from a fellow named Bernard Poole, who basically said,
I've recently completed a set of tutorials for Libra Office 4.
If you want to use them or link to them or any other of my books, feel free to do so.
They are, of course, available free of charge.
Okay, well, you know, that's the sort of thing that would get my attention.
So I would take a look at this and it is actually some pretty good stuff.
So let me give you a little background on this.
That is that the focus that Professor Poole, he's a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
His focus is on education, on things that teachers can make use of.
And that's something that's near and dear to my heart because I used to be a teacher myself.
And so he's thinking this could be useful to people who are teaching education or a director
of technology in a school district or what have you.
Now, I remember years ago, I was working for a Lutheran college here in Michigan.
And I was talking to a lady who was in charge of the technology for a Lutheran parodial school.
And basically, these kind of private schools very often have no money.
All right, certainly the Lutheran parodial schools are not known for having a whole lot of money to spend on things.
So there was a lot of concern.
And how are we going to be able to provide the things that we need to provide?
And so, you know, I had a reputation of being kind of an expert on this.
I was doing all of the training at the University.
So she came to me and said, how am I going to be able to take care of my students?
Do you have any suggestions?
And I said, you know, funny you should mention that because I've just heard of this thing.
It comes out of Germany and it's called Star Office.
Well, of course, Star Office is, if you trace it back, the origin of what we now call Libra Office.
Star Office was a commercial product to some degree.
It was aimed at schools, developed in Germany.
And then what happened was that Sun Microsystems purchased Star Office.
And then turned it into an open source product that they called OpenOffice.org.
And I won't get into why it's called OpenOffice.org.
It was some sort of trademark problem.
But anyway, that's always the technical name of that.
And then it made some progress under Sun's tutelage.
And then Sun Microsystems got bought by Oracle.
And as I think many of us know, Oracle is an absolutely horrible place
for any open community-supported project to be living.
So essentially, what happened was that there were a lot of developers
who were kind of not happy to begin with because while Sun did the right thing
by making it open source, they also didn't really put much oomph behind it.
And so there were a number of things that people had been arguing for to say,
you know, we want to get a foundation to support this
and make it more community and that.
And they didn't really get very far with Sun.
But once Sun got bought up by Oracle, they just said, well, fine, that's it.
We're out of here.
And so the open document foundation was created.
Libra Office was forked off.
And now I think pretty much anyone would say Libra Office is where the action is.
So just a little recap of history there.
So if we go back to the Star Office days, when this teacher asked me about it,
I was able to say, well, Star Office had what at the time was a very good deal.
All right, it wasn't free as in beer or free as in freedom necessarily.
But it was pretty liberal.
All right, they base I was able to show her that she could get for her school a license
for like $50 that would cover everyone in the school.
And also that they could, you know, every student could have one copy
installed at home as well as what they were using at school all for that $50 investment.
So that was a fantastic deal, of course, and they very happily adopted it.
And, you know, what that illustrates to me, I think people don't think about necessarily,
as often as they should, is that, you know, it is expensive to take things like
Microsoft Office and use them in education.
And most schools are very, very short of money.
And so having something like Libra Office available is a good thing.
And what Professor Poole has done in putting this stuff together is he has a set of tutorials.
It's pretty good, okay?
The detailed table of contents shows that, and, you know, it shows that
we've got something like 300 pages of stuff.
The table of contents alone is 13 pages, but it's really it's like a book that he's written.
And what he says is the tutorials are designed to help pre-service and in-service teachers.
Learn the suite of productivity applications included in Libra Office, okay?
So, you know, there's, he also says they could be used effectively if you're not a teacher.
So I wanted to make sure you knew about this.
He wrote to me and said, hey, you know, I'm making this stuff available.
Do you think your fans on Hacker Public Radio would be interested?
And I said, oh, you bet.
I'm sure lots of people would.
So I wanted to make sure you understood this.
Now, the link to his site will be in the show notes.
So you'll know how to get there.
He has his terms for what he does here, okay?
So first of all, this book is available for download free of charge.
He does say, as a courtesy to the author, please send me an email to let me know you're
interested in reading the book and or using it to promote technology in the classroom.
He says, if you're a professor in a school of education or a director of technology
in a school district or system, please feel free to use the book with your teachers or students.
There is no limit on the number of copies you may make provided you comply with the conditions
outlined below. Now, condition number one, you may not sell this book for profit, okay?
So this is, I think he might have used a CC license, creative commons to get there.
But anyway, he says, you may not sell this book for profit.
However, you may in the context of a college course or other learning situations where
multiple copies need to be made, have as many copies as necessary printed as hard copy and then
sell them at cost to the students. If you intended to do this, please be sure to print the entire
contents of the book, including the front matter is published on the web.
Then he says, you may also use this text to raise money for charity.
If your intention is to raise money for a student scholarship, for example, or for some other
award that will benefit students, you may charge an amount on top of the at-cost sales price
as long as it will be absolutely and totally applied to that effect.
I.e. a student scholarship or some other award that will benefit students. Needless to say,
I cannot police this so I must trust your integrity. Any attempt to profit financially from my work
other than outlined above would be a direct infringement of the copyright.
And then the final thing he says, you will need a copy of several work files that must accompany
the online version of the text. I can send you these by return as attachments in email.
Please give me an email address that will not block emails that contain zipped attachments.
So, and I think basically he could have fit all of his conditions into the appropriate
and creative commons license. But that's fine. It's not unreasonable.
And I think he's done a very good job. And I wanted to make sure that everyone in the
hacker public radio community was aware of this opportunity and could take advantage of it.
So next time I will actually start on impress as part of our own tutorial series.
But check the show notes and you will see I'll put the link to Professor Poole's site
and you can go, you know, check it out. And make sure that, you know, if you know anyone who is a
teacher or who is involved in training teachers or otherwise involved in education, you know,
pass this along. I don't think you can ever give too many resources to teachers to help them out.
So, with that, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off and reminding everyone to support
free software. Bye-bye!
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