education

During my second year at Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey (SNDT) Women's University, the first of its kind in India as well as in South-East Asia, I attended a workshop on Python and Orca by Krishnakant Mane. My classmates and I were novices to free and open source software (FOSS) and astonished when we saw a visually impaired person using a computer with the same ease as we did.

I was aware of Linux and had learned the basics of Unix as a freshman, but I had never used Ubuntu, which I thought might be command driven. It had a great interface and there was a lot of new technology for us to learn. That day not only was our class introduced to a new world of open source, but so was the university as a whole.  » Read more

I’d heard some time ago of a couple of Stanford Professors running an online course in Machine Learning, with over 100,000 students registered for their course worldwide. Fortunately for me, 10gen—the company behind the wildly successful MongoDB database—started doing free training using the same delivery method.

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Here's a job title you may not have considered: Open Source Officer. The CIA hires Open Source Officers (OSOs) to collect and analyze publicly available information in foreign affairs to provide unique insights into national security issues. OSOs may specialize in an area of the world (country or region) or a specific topic (like, emerging media technologies or cyber security).

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Coding is the language of the future, with the power to create and modify the computer programs and websites that increasingly shape our day-to-day lives. While millions of people in the United States spend hours each day engaged with interactive technologies, relatively few truly understand how they work; and fewer take an active role in developing software and websites.

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The Open Book is an essential reference point for those interested in the culmination of a global movement for change in a time of rapid social progress.

The Open Book is

• free
• crowdsourced
• licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
• the third part of the Reaktio series

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In the next step of their mission to spread the magic of making music, Beat Making Lab has partnered with PBS Digital Studios to produce web episodes of the work they are doing with youth in Africa.

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In today's data driven world, the need for accurate data and informed analysis is paramount for innovation and progress. Data and statistics that are collected and aggregated have a huge impact on a country's education initiatives which can reform a country's polices and decision-making. » Read more

On February 23, I participated in my first hackathon event; not a coding event as typical of computer programmers, but an education hackathon—a "Course Sprint" where a group of 14 individuals (educators, open science advocates, community members, and students) collaborated to design and build an open, online course, An Introduction to Open Science and Data, for the School of Open on P2PU.

Creative Commons hosted the event at their office in Mountain View, CA and invited both face-to-face and remote participants, of which I was one of four remote. The event was held in support of Open Data Day to raise awareness and involve communities worldwide in exploring how to liberate, promote, and publish open data.

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As a parent of three (children aged: 10, 7, and 5), I'm eager to share with my kids the values that attracted me to open source and the hacker ethos: sharing and building great things together, taking control of your environment, and embracing technology as a means of expression, rather than as media to be consumed. In other words: » Read more

Boundless, the company that builds on existing open educational resources to provide free alternatives to traditionally costly college textbooks, has released 18 open textbooks under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), the same license used by Wikipedia. Schools, students and the general public are free to share and remix these textbooks under this license. The 18 textbooks cover timeless college subjects, such as accounting, biology, chemistry, sociology, and economics. Boundless reports that students at more than half of US colleges have used its resources, and that they expect its number of users to grow. » Read more