teachers

Many educators might have been hesitant in the past regarding embracing open source software. But not anymore as the number that has taken to open source software (OSS) has increased significantly over the years. As more teachers as well as institutions are now engaging with organizations such as Open Source Schools, SchoolForge among others. Consequently, these educators have begun to realize the potential inherent in OSS that can help transform education in many ways.

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I don't think any of us are surprised to find out that teachers matter. That has always been obvious, but what I did find interesting--and even surprising--about the information coming from the study on a teacher's long-term impact on a student conducted by Raj Chetty and John Friedman of Harvard University and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia University is the degree to which teachers matter. (See the executive summary or full presentation video.) Their research shows that having a good teacher benefits a child long after that one school year and that measuring a teacher's "value-add" each year is one useful element in evaluating that teacher's performance. » 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

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

You know what's fun? Watching an entire conference unfold on Twitter. That's what I'm doing at Big Ideas Fest 2010 (#bif2010). It's amazing how much you can rightly infer by paying close attention to a dozen people tweeting about the same speaker -- and it's also a great way to learn which elements of a speech had the most impact. » Read more

Imagine for a moment you're a graphic designer working within the marketing department of a major coffee-shop brand. Over the years individuals far higher up in the organization have raised profit margins by putting increasingly lower quality coffee into the customer's cup. They've replaced  experienced coffee bean importers with untrained proxies who make the cheapest selections. They have slashed the marketing and production budgets beyond recognition.

Several years in and sales have tanked. The powers-that-be settle on the designers as the source of the problem. » Read more