This fall semester at HACC, I've been piloting a collaboration project in my MS Office classes utilizing MS OneNote. While OneNote is impressive both as a stand-alone note-gathering tool (especially when coupled with a tablet computer) and with some direct interface with MS Outlook, there's still a few glitches to be worked out by Microsoft in the upcoming Office 14:
- To be a useful notetaking tool in an academic environment, there needs to be the ability to post citation information into OneNote, and then have that meta data "copy" to a Word document when the final paper is drafted.
- Shared OneNote notebooks are currently "smooth" only on a single shared network. Sharing OneNote notebooks across the Internet is currently problematic, in that neither FolderShare or LiveOffice Workspace accommodate the OneNote files seamlessly.
- Other minor "clipping" problems have been reported, both from Mozilla Firefox and from browsers other then IE.
But, from the "careful what you ask for" department, we as faculty must realize that with added functionality comes the need for added instruction. On most campuses, the Intro to Business Software course covers some combination of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and/or Access. And most instructors are hard-pressed to fit that into a typical 3-credit course schedule.
One we "sign on" to collaboration and personal information tagging as must-have skill sets for our graduates, we then must get all the stakeholders in the process to agree on exactly what constitutes a "trained" entry-level worker. Should MS Groove and/or OneNote take precedence over Access Queries? Should exposure to LiveOffice Workspaces be substituted for Goal-seeking?
The time for baccalaureate institutions, community colleges, and publishers to forge an agreement on these issues is now, before Office 14 is released. Otherwise, the added functionality available in Office 14 must lie dormant, untapped by academia for an entire textbook cycle.
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