education - Page number 2

Almost 25 years ago a young engineer started an operating system project "just for fun" to run on his own hardware. He opened it up to the world, and through a combination of good design and good luck, Linux was born. The Internet was the fundamental enabling technology of the large scale collaboration that produces Linux. The ability to cheaply and easily share files has created a system and community that has disrupted major industries, where Linux’ impact has been felt from super computing to mobile phones.

Higher education is facing a similarly disrupting force powered by the Internet—Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) make information available to anyone, anywhere, as long as they have a connection to the Internet. » Read more

When I started teaching PostgreSQL education courses in 2001, PostgreSQL was the ugly one in the data center. Many of the people who were learning how to work with it were doing so grudgingly because of some specific requirement. They had inherited a PostgreSQL database, for example. As a result, many of them tried to learn just enough to do what they needed to do. The other population of students were serious technologists, die-hard open source devotees who wanted to use only open source solutions and were learning PostgreSQL because they needed a relational database for their operations.

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What's new for Google's Summer of Code (GSoC) internship program this year? For one, GSoC accepted 190 mentoring organizations, which is more than any other year. The very first GSoC program began in the summer of 2005, so this year also marks another milestone—they're 10th year anniversary. » Read more

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) estimates the US market for pre-K to 12th grade educational software and digital content to be over $7.96 billion USD. Testing and assessment comprise the largest category and a 35% growth rate from last year. » Read more

The people behind the scenes who work tirelessly to make your Linux distribution run smoothly are the packagers. The vast majority of Linux packagers are volunteers who dedicate their evenings and weekends to create and maintain the gears of the Linux distributions they love. » Read more

Opensource.com held its first Youth in Open Source Week from January 13 - 17, 2014. Articles published during this time were focused on how kids and teens are using open source today and how we can get more young people involved in open source.

We announced this series by publishing an article on Friday, January 10, 2014. This article was updated throughout the week as new articles were published. It now contains the full list of articles published for Youth in Open Source Week (YOSW).

During the week of January 13 - 17, we published nine articles as part of the series. We also published three regular articles for a total of 12 articles published during that week. » Read more

In six weeks, a team of three college students with no industry experience and only academic software-specific knowledge, developed and designed a health care provider search system using only open source software. To tell you how they got there, let's start with a little history of open source software in the US federal government workspace. » Read more

Women use the Internet 17% more than their male counterparts yet are underrepresented in programming and open source. Public libraries (and public schools) have a critical role to play with improving the dearth of diversity in coding and open source.

Over the holidays, I completely lost my unlimited home Internet access, which caused me to reflect on life for those without unlimited home Internet access at all. When I finally had my Internet access restored and retrieved the messages about Opensource.com's Youth in Open Source Week (was held January 13- 17) and Women in Open Source Week (this week, January 27 - February 7), I felt like banging my head. » Read more

Catherine Dumas is a PhD student in the College of Computing and Information (CCI) at the University at Albany at the State University of New York (SUNY). She teaches two undergraduate courses, one in the Computer Science department and one in the Informatics Department.

Aside from her PhD work and teaching, Catherine is very involved in encouraging men and women to pursue their dreams in the field. She does this by staying active in the student chapter of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) and in the activites going on at the College of Computing and Information Women in Technology (CCIWiT) group. Open source software is also a topic she's passionate about, and for the past three years she has helped organize the annual Open Source Festival at SUNY.

Read more in this interview.

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If you're looking around for 3D printers that are both inexpensive and open source friendly, the Printrbot Simple Kit will probably catch your attention.

This Kit sells for close to $300, and for our team required a full-day of DIY assembly, though skilled makers might be able to put it together in four hours or so. Our team was made up of three PhDs and two R&D engineers, and it took us close to eight hours to complete the assembly, which of course included some philosophical and licensing discussions and a couple of trips to the hardware store. It was indeed a lot of fun! » Read more