education - Page number 5

One-size-fits-all is vanilla ice cream.  It’s plain white athletic socks. It’s “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with a recorder.  One-size-fits-all is an assembly line and a Model-T Ford and a straight line of school children marching to their class.   It’s industrial.  It’s lock-step.  It’s mechanistic.

And it just might save public education. » Read more

Microphone static crackles.

Hi, everyone–Mel Chua here, reporting in. I'm recovering from POSSE, the Professors' Open Source Summer Experience, where we just kicked off our our 2011 cohort of professors over in Raleigh, North Carolina. Each of the faculty members here has committed to getting the students in at least one of their courses involved in open source community contribution during this coming school year, and they're off and running now after a weekend of intense cultural immersion. Let's recap the high points of POSSE Basics 2011, shall we?

Going-back-in-time sound effect, hazy visual shimmers. » Read more

According to recent international comparisons, the US is ranked 35th in math education and 29th in science education worldwide. This downward trend is not a new revelation. Over the past several decades we've seen the quality of public primary and secondary education decline continuously due in no small part to an overall lack of financial and societal support.
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When I first got the chance to meet Greg DeKoenigsberg in person three years ago at a conference in Brussels, he mentioned a book as part of a talk he was giving: Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen. And that book helped me define what it's really all about: How can we change education using technology? One of the talks at the EduComm conference in Orlando, FL focused on why and how some technologies fail to disrupt education.  » Read more

Academics - students and teachers both - often want to know what open source community participation will "count" for. Course credit? Research and publication? Better tools to increase efficiency? Teaching? Presentation opportunities?

The answer is "yes." » Read more

When it considers Golan v. Holder in the coming months, the United States Supreme Court could potentially put an end to a decade-long copyright battle whose outcome significantly affects educators' abilities to use public domain works. In the process, it will wrestle with a thorny question of copyright's power: Is removing works from the United States public domain—and bringing them back under copyright's umbrella—constitutional? » Read more

The Linux Foundation will be teaming up with Oregon State University's Open Source Lab (OSL) for Linux Learners' Student Day, to be held in Vancouver on August 16 (the day before LinuxCon begins). The program includes sessions from OSL presenters on Linux basics, Python, embedded systems, and careers in open source. » Read more

There has been a good bit of press covering Google's Chromebook and how it will change, how it won't change, or how it » Read more

Two weeks ago, 16 Girl Scouts and their troops' leaders went to RIT for a Scratch-fueled, day-long workshop in game design and development in pursuit of their "Games for Life" interest project. The workshop was the fifth sponsored by RIT's School of Interactive Games and Media, Rochester Women in Computing, and Digital Rochester. » Read more

Let's be up front about things: I'm angry about the rhetoric I hear of late surrounding education. Teachers (and their unions) are being vilified, legislators and parents are demanding "accountability," and at the same time, the financial support necessary to educate a society is being slashed drastically. Regarding education, everyone has an opinion---and they feel their opinion is "informed" in some way simply because they went to school. » Read more