open education - Page number 2

This year I made a New Year resolution to foster a more open education at home by joining a growing subculture of society. To start, I began replacing some commercial household products, such as toothpaste, with 'open source' ones. After all, there is no patent on or trademark for baking soda (2/3 cup), salt (4 teaspoons), mint oil (1 tablespoon), or melted coconut oil (2-3 tablespoons)—what you need to make homemade toothpaste. They are readily available and accessible, except for the mint oil perhaps (but you can substitute it with cinnamon or vanilla extract, or other possibilities if you just use your creative, open mind).

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The end of 2012 is here and over time I think it will be considered a revolutionary moment for open education and open source. A tipping point. A seismic shift. The world has not seen this type of revolution since the early 1400s and the arrival of the printing press. » Read more

I hereby declare 2012 the year of open source in libraries!

If not the year, it was still an impressive year for open source in libraries. It was 2004 when I first learned about the Koha open source integrated library system and started researching what it would mean to our library to make the switch to open source. Back then, when I asked people if they knew what open source was » Read more

Here we are again—the dawn of a new year is upon us. I really can't believe it. It is me or do the years seem to go by faster and faster?

Before we close this chapter, let’s take a quick look at the ten most popular articles from opensource.com in education for 2012, starting with number ten and counting down. » Read more

MOOCs—or Massive Open Online Courses—have been getting a lot of attention lately. Just in the last year or so there’s been immense interest in the potential for large scale online learning, with significant investments being made in companies (Coursera, Udacity, Udemy), similar non-profit initiatives (edX), and learning management systems (Canvas, Blackboard). The renewed interest in MOOCs was ignited after last year’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course offered via Stanford University, when over 160,000 people signed up to take the free online course.  » Read more

Municipalities across America should be working to bring open source educational tools to schoolchildren so they will have the necessary digital literacy skills to tap into their creativity and imagination, or even to provide them with valuable future life and workforce skills. And the case of the Feoffees of the Grammar School in Ipswich, Massachusetts—the oldest charitable trust in America—illustrates this point well. 

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Hampshire student and FSF campaigns organizer Kira shares the success of their ambitious project to help fellow students get started with free software. The achievements of Kira's organization, LibrePlanet/Students for Free Culture, is exciting and replicable outside of Hampshire. Kira provides suggestions to help other students realize the same changes at their schools.

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A group of colleagues—Stoney Jackson (Western New England University), Sean Goggins (Drexel University), Darci Burdge (Nassau Community College), Lori Postner (Nassau Community College), and Greg Hislop (Drexel University)—and I have recently been awarded an NSF TUES Type 2 grant we’re calling OpenFE for Open Faculty Expertise. The expertise that we’re trying to build here is in the area of supporting student learning via participation in humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) projects.

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Open source can provide schools with high quality, well-functioning IT solutions at low cost, according to a case study done by VTT, a Finnish government research institute. The researchers looked at the use of Linux and other open source applications by the Kasavuoren Secondary School in Kauniainen, a municipality near Helsinki. The case study, available since May 2011, underpins a plea to schools to increase their use of free and open source software. 

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While Thomas Edison is often lauded as the most prolific American inventor, his mother, Nancy Edison, and how she fostered an open education and an open mind in her son is often overlooked.  When a headmaster labelled Edison as being 'addled,' slow, and unteachable, his mother disagreed and decided to withdraw her son from school and teach him at home.  She knew her son was a bright, curious, creative child who thought divergently yet was often disorganized, disruptive, and hyperactive; today he would most likely be diagnosed as having ADHD.  

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