Change is hard.

Some people embrace change and others do not. And most of us, I guess, embrace it in some areas and not in others.

There have been a lot of changes at school technology-wise lately. For some of us it is easier than for others. One thing that I think is smart is that the tech guys are getting a few people on board with one or more of the different open source programs we are going to be using before springing them on everyone. It has been helpful, for instance, for me to be able to assure some of the office staff that they will be able to use OpenOffice without any problems, And someone else can tell us how convenient Zimbra is. There is a small group of "experts" who can take some of the pressure off the IT guys. But this is a stressful time for a lot of people.

The changes that are planned are good ones, I think. On both ethical and financial grounds I applaud the move to open source that has slowly been taking place on our campus. We've been using Moodle for over a year now, and we are running Linux servers. There is a long way to go still, and not everyone is as excited about it as I am, but I think this time next year few people will even remember what the fuss was all about.