A school district in Texas has US$4.6 million in textbooks sitting in warehouses and school backrooms. Why? Because they must provide textbooks for all children according to the state constitution, and they do so in the classroom, but don’t give them out to take home because of damage and loss being charged to the school […]
Monthly Archives: March 2009
Dead tree irony
26-Mar-09The last day of CUE 2009 I was stuck by the pure awesomeness of one of the final presentations in the open source pavilion. It was titled Intro and Demo Open Source (Free) Software Programs for Educators! (found 1/3rd of the way down the conference sessions page). The three presenters, Shin, Katalin, and Branka, were […]
As of now, the Fedora Project and JBoss.org are a co-joined mentoring organization for Google’s Summer of Code this year. Sweet. According to the timeline, 18 to 23 March is the time for students to talk about project ideas with the mentoring organization. On 23 March, students can begin submitting proposals, which are due by […]
If you happen to be a user of Apache Hadoop, or want to use Cloudera‘s cloud software, it is available as an RPM from the company’s website. Oh, with a long set of installation instructions that include extracting RPMs from Sun’s Java 6 installer. I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if you could just do […]
After we discovered, along with our pals from the Linux Foundation, that the Fedora Project didn’t have any one to represent Fedora on a community contributions panel at the Collaboration Summit, the right folks at LF got together with us and sorted out what we needed to do. I volunteered to represent Fedora, and got […]
My favorite thing to hear from the mouth of Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst is (to paraphrase), “Red Hat is here to help customers becomes contributors to the projects that matter to them.” In that vein, I’ve made a few submissions of a talk/keynote, “Participate or Die“, including one to this year’s Red Hat Summit […]
Moodle as a killer K-12 app
06-Mar-09We talk about killer applications, the killer app, which are programs so good they change the nature of a situation. Email is long considered a general audience killer app, when you think about the impact it has had over the years. For educators, is Moodle the killer app? Sure looks like it. This is written […]
Stumbling around in the K-12 space
06-Mar-09This week I’m fulfilling a talk obligation that David Nalley and I set up last Fall, to talk about the advantages of bringing a culture of participation to the classroom. In particular, this is the Computer-Using Educators (CUE) conference, with teachers and technology coordinators from K-12 districts across the country. K-12 is short-hand for primary […]