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By Brian Proffitt True story: On Monday this week, my 10-year-old got off the school bus and said "wanna hear a joke?" For those of you who are parents, you will surely know that the humor of fifth graders is, at best, a little bit weird. My daughter, who is normally pretty sharp, can descend into giggles when she hears the word "fart." So it was with some trepidation that I said, "sure, I'd like to hear it." Here goes:
I laughed pretty good at that one and my daughter was pleased, because she's heard me mutter under my breath about at least two of the people in that joke. (She actually said that when she heard the joke at school, Hillary Clinton was the third character, but she changed it because she likes Obama better.) Of course, I don't share this joke to endorse any particular candidate, nor do I seriously advocate throwing anyone out of a plane. Ever. (I suggested the next time she related the joke to put parachutes on the characters.) But it occurred to me that even as I was laughing at this joke, the impact we have on our children is sometimes so profound that we might miss it when it happens. It's not just watching the parents and listening to what they say. It's picking up on our values, too. My youngest uses my old LT laptop, the one I used to take on trips before I got my new laptop this spring. But last night the battery (which has been behaving badly for the last couple of weeks) finally gave up the ghost and rendered the machine useless, until I can get a new battery tonight after work. With a report to work on, I let her use my laptop instead, since her document was on a thumb drive. She dove right into Linux (she's been trending towards Windows lately, citing the better game availability when she's done with homework. Sigh.) with her usual confidence, fired up OpenOffice.org, and off she went. No troubles, until this morning when she called from school. See, here's how I approach interoperability for them: assume lowest common denominator. Which is why, on both my girls' machines, regardless of platform, the default formats to save to are the Office formats. Because I know if they are doing any kind of homework, their teachers are only going to accept Office stuff. Not so on my machines--it's ODF all the way, by default. Instead of doing Save As, she did just Save, and ended up taking an ODT version of her report to school. Where they have never even seen OpenOffice.org. She figured out what happened, of course, and called me and told me what needed to be done: I needed to come to school and convert the file to .doc with my laptop. Which is what I would have done and did. I realize that this may sound like I'm bragging on my little one, and perhaps I am a bit. But there is a larger point to all of this. Our children learn so much from us: how to dress, how to talk, how to move through society. It makes sense, therefore, that they would learn how to approach technology. My daughter got another lesson in dealing with proprietary applications today and hitting the wall because of it. Is she going to start a revolution at school and force the deployment of OpenOffice.org? I doubt it. Will she be a Linux-using computer user all of her life? I hope so, but you never know. What she did learn, and what all of our children can learn, is that knowledge needs to be sharable across all technologies. Walls and barriers are usually arbitrary and often unnecessary. Openness is a better way. It's a great lesson for computers... and for life.  
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