This is the first Fedora release since … Fedora Core 3? … where I wasn’t buried up to my neck getting the documentation ready for release. Paul and I have carried the Fedora Docs banner for a long time, but it became very obvious that we were standing in the way of progress by enabling […]
Category Archives: Free Culture
And I didn’t have to do a thing
10-Jun-09The evolution of Fedora as an entity of freedom has been an interesting experience. For example, participation in the project wasn’t always as freely available as it is now. Before Core merged with Extras in Fedora 7, the only way to contribute to the central part of the distro was via an employee of Red […]
If you, your friends, colleagues, business associates, or just about anyone who needs … Support for how and why to invest resources in open source A cluebat about why your organization should participate in upstream projects … then send them to Esplanade 302 for my 11:50 am session this Monday 01 June, the first day […]
Running a little late posting these because I wanted to produce a nice set of speaker notes, and they didn’t exist before I gave the talk at LinuxFest Northwest. In addition, there were some slides that were missing from the presentation (my bad!), which had me going to a Web browser during the talk and […]
Wow. It’s not just that the student-designed and -built OSWALD devices are innovative and cool (they are, and I saw the on-campus sweatshop to prove the student-built part.) The brilliance is the way the OSWALD is the linchpin in an OSU strategy that reinvents computer science teaching, while making room for disciplines outside of CS […]
On Saturday 04 April I gave a version of the ‘Fedora Remix’ talk at FeltonLUG. The Fedora Remix talk covers what remixes and spins are and why to care, then dives in to using all the tools available (`livecd-creator`, `livecd-iso-to-*`,` liveusb-creator`, `pungi`, and `revisor`.) I used a local `yum` repository of Fedora 10 base, using […]
Dead tree irony
26-Mar-09A 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 […]
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 […]
Free and open texbook FAIL
07-Feb-09An article this week (“Free College Texbooks: Fad or Fabulous?“) got me excited that truly free content might be making its way to a more mainstream use in education. The company, Flat World Knowledge, promotes their content as being, “Created by experts … enhanced by users … free to all,” and they appear to be […]