Education

Spread the momentum with Open Access Week

This week is Open Access Week, celebrating its fifth year of helping academic and research communities learn more about the benefits of open access and inspiring wider open participation.

From Open Access Week: » Read more

0 CommentsPosted 25 Oct 2011 by Ruth Suehle (Red Hat)

Martha Kanter and Jim Shelton of the US Department of Education open the 2011 Open Education Conference

Martha Kanter, Undersecretary of Education in the US Department of Education, gave today's opening keynote at the 2011 Open Education Conference in Park City, UT, followed by Jim Shelton, the Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement.

When President Obama took office, he asserted that the US should strive to have the best, most educated, most competitive workforce in the world. But right now we're 16th in the world in education and being outcompeted by other countries, including Singapore and China. » Read more

1 CommentPosted 25 Oct 2011 by Ruth Suehle (Red Hat)

FOSS meets IT Education at ACM-SIGITE

The Association of Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group in IT Education (ACM-SIGITE) met at West Point's Thayer Hotel on the first day of the three-day conference--and free and open source software (FOSS) was one of the top items on the menu.

The conference offered a three-paper session and a panel on using FOSS in the classroom that were well attended and generated good questions (and answers) about approaches, tools, and techniques for bringing students into FOSS. » Read more

1 CommentPosted 20 Oct 2011 by Stephen Jacobs

BlueJ: From closed to open, an interview with Ian Utting

If you've learned Java in the past 10 years, there's a good chance you've encountered BlueJ or its younger sibling, Greenfoot. Originally developed by Michael Kölling, BlueJ provides a simplified development environment for novices learning to program for the first time. It features a minimum of interface elements » Read more

2 CommentsPosted 19 Oct 2011 by Matt Jadud

Dialing the right mix: open source principles and collaboration

This should come as no surprise: Open source principles are great guidelines for conducting successful collaboration sessions. What wasn’t as obvious to me was that the different principles are more important in different collaboration situations. Imagine the concepts of trust, openness, transparency, and release early, release often as ingredients in a mix, controlled by a row of dials. The environment determines how much you need to 'dial up' or 'dial down' each characteristic. » Read more

1 CommentPosted 17 Oct 2011 by Mary Ann (Red Hat)

How university open debates and discussions introduced me to open source

My experience with the open source way of doing things dates back to my university days in India. During those days, I had a very narrow view with regards to what exactly open source is and what its true meaning is. This view was limited only to the question “why should one give away his work for free to anyone?" I was ignorant about the beauty of the open source methodology that rests on the principle of creative collaboration. » Read more

4 CommentsPosted 7 Oct 2011 by Aseem Sharma

On open educational resources -- Beyond definitions

Despite the attempts at single sentence definitions so common in the published literature, “open educational resources” is a highly context-mediated construct. However, because philanthropic and public funding agencies commonly require grant outputs to be open educational resources, the ability to quickly and clearly categorize a variety of creative works as “open educational resources” or “not open educational resources” has become critical. » Read more

2 CommentsPosted 3 Oct 2011 by David Wiley

Saddened and bewildered by academic copyright assignments

Karl Fogel reminded me to check the copyright assignment for the scholarly papers I'm starting to submit on Teaching Open Source (TOS), particularly POSSE. I sat down and did some digging, and here's what I found--keep in mind these are the notes of an unschooled grad student new to the topic, uneducated on copyright and new to academic publishing--let me know if your experiences have involved other interpretations of these policies. In fact, I'm posting these assertions in the hope that people will correct me if I've made mistakes (and I will edit this post and provide attribution for the edits). » Read more

9 CommentsPosted 30 Sep 2011 by Mel Chua (Red Hat)

How to fight censorship and share books during Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week, held the last week of September each year since 1982, is an opportunity for libraries and bookstores to draw attention to censorship with challenged books. In the 29 years since the first Banned Books Week, more than 11,000 books have been challenged, including 348 reported to the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom in 2010 alone. They estimate that 70-80% are never reported. » Read more

3 CommentsPosted 27 Sep 2011 by Ruth Suehle (Red Hat)

OpenCourseWare All Grown Up: Hal Abelson at the RIT GCCIS Dean's Lecture Series

The Rochester Institute of Technology Gollisano College Dean's Lecture Series established in 2003 was "designed to expose 'real world' experts to our students and to provide professional development opportunities for our alumni and community friends." Last year brought Walter Bender of Sugar Labs to speak with the crowd about another world-class FOSS campaign brought to us by the MIT Media Lab. » Read more

5 CommentsPosted 22 Sep 2011 by Remy DeCausemaker