Education

Glen Moriarty talks about empowering open education with NIXTY, part 3

In part 1 of our interview with Glen Moriarty, CEO of NIXTY, he talked about the importance of open education. In part 2, he addressed the community's involvement and NIXTY's challenges. We have just one question left:

How do you see NIXTY empowering open education? » Read more

0 CommentsPosted 22 Oct 2010 by Mary Ann (Red Hat)

A hole in the wall: How children learn without a teacher

Sugata Mitra began with a question: “What would happen if I cut a hole in the wall that separates my New Delhi office building from a neighboring slum... and embedded a computer for children to access?”

What he found led him into over a decade of research on how groups of children, when left with a computer, can teach themselves just about anything. » Read more

16 CommentsPosted 12 Oct 2010 by Rebecca Fernandez (Red Hat)

Content management and the open source way with CEO of NIXTY, Part 2

In part 2 of this series on open education course tool NIXTY, Glen Moriarty, the organization's CEO, talks about the open source community and addressing NIXTY's challenges. Read part 1.

» Read more

0 CommentsPosted 7 Oct 2010 by Mary Ann (Red Hat)

South Africa welcomes POSSE

Next week, we'll be live blogging from POSSE South Africa on opensource.com, and you'll get to witness some of the bridge-building between academia and open source.  You and others like you can take away lessons that help universities evolve in a world where open source is a major focus and enabler of the future.
» Read more

0 CommentsPosted 30 Sep 2010 by Karsten 'quaid' Wade (Red Hat)

Generation Facebook and higher education

I read Gary Hamel's piece, The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500, with great interest. In it, he talks about the tensions that traditional, cubicle-land corporations will likely face as a creative, connected workforce comes on-line. I was particularly interested because, as a member of the higher educational establishment, I'm part of the pipeline, sitting in-between K-12 and the workplace. More importantly, I think that higher education faces many of the same challenges that the Fortune 500 does. So, with that said, I'd like to parallel Gary's piece, edging towards the extreme in my reflection (playing agent provocateur, perhaps) on the tensions between the Facebook generation and higher ed. » Read more

4 CommentsPosted 29 Sep 2010 by Matt Jadud

Can academia "release early, release often?"

A few months ago, opensource.com ran a story on a textbook for college students learning programming (Can Professors Teach Open Source?, Greg DeKoenigsberg, Apr 6 2010). The textbook, "Practical Open Source Software Exploration," was created the open source way on the Teaching Open Source wiki. (Read Greg's article for more on what we mean by creating the textbook "the open source way".)

Although the textbook was written with students in mind, it turns out that professors are pretty important when it comes to teaching, too. » Read more

0 CommentsPosted 23 Sep 2010 by Ian Weller

A game changer? An interview with Glen Moriarty, CEO of NIXTY, Part 1

A few months ago, I was perusing the web and ran across an article titled “Online Course Construction Gets a 'Do-It-Yourself' Web Site.” Hook. The first line was, “A new player entered the field of open online education last week: NIXTY, a Web site that allows any user to take and create courses for free.” Line. Then came a quote from David Wiley: » Read more

4 CommentsPosted 20 Sep 2010 by Mary Ann (Red Hat)

Teaching Open Source Practices, Version 4.0

In 2007, Sean O'Sullivan, one of the founders of MapInfo, graciously made a donation to his alma mater, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY with the specific goal of creating a center for the promotion of open source among undergraduates: » Read more

2 CommentsPosted 8 Sep 2010 by Luis Ibanez

Open source goes to high school

Before heading out to film this story on the Open High School of Utah, I wasn't sure what to expect. I had a lot of the same questions most people would have about an online high school: What kind of students go to high school online? How are teachers building their curriculum from open educational resources and what does it look like? How are the students interacting with their teachers and other students in an online venue? » Read more

15 CommentsPosted 7 Sep 2010 by Mike Esser (Red Hat)

An open source education--for educators

One of the challenges of working in the space between academia and open source communities is translating the cultural and timescale differences. One approach to bridging the gap is to empower people already in the academic space–like professors--to navigate the free and open source software (FOSS) world and bring that knowledge back to the institutions they come from. The week-long POSSE Professors' Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE) workshop, sponsored by Red Hat, aims to do just that. » Read more

1 CommentPosted 2 Sep 2010 by Mel Chua (Red Hat)