Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I am, as you may have noticed, unequivocally in favor of the adoption of free and open source software by schools and governments.  I have also spent a considerable portion of my career in ed-tech creating tools that support interoperability via open standards like RDF, iCalendar and SIF.  Open source and open standards are two good things.  So I have…

“Retiring baby boomers are creating a vacuum that is not likely to be filled with the students currently being educated in American schools. Why? Because the American educational system, having hit its stride in the 19th century, is finding it difficult to maintain a sure footing in the 21st.” James Schultz’ article, The Global Race: Is America Still a Contender?…

The Senate Commerce Committee yesterday approved major telecommunications legislation that would open the door for telephone companies to begin offering video services to compete with cable companies. The committee deadlocked 11-11 on a controversial amendment ensuring “net neutrality,” a provision favored by many education and consumer groups–and this tie vote means the full Senate will consider the bill without the…

The most sweeping telecommunications overhaul in a decade is underway in Congress, and the results could have significant implications for schools. Legislation passed by the House and under consideration in the Senate would replace the local video franchising system currently in place with a national system. Supporters of these bills say they’ll pave the way for telephone companies to start…

I’ll agree with Clarence Fisher…Flock is my new browser of choice, and that just after a few hours of playing. It took me absolutely zero time to configure it so I can blog right to my Word Press site, save bookmarks in del.icio.us, upload pictures to Flickr and (thunder and lightning) read my feeds all in the same space. I…

Laura Ascione, the Assistant Editor of eSchool News was gracious enough to aks me for some of my thoughts about Social Networking sites and whether they are safe or not for her article entitled, Safe Social Networking Sites Emerge. Although I’m a bit skeptical of sites like Whyville - not because they are unsafe but it is simply becuase of…

The U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee recommended this week that EETT receive no funding in 2007. Regardless of what you might think about school districts’ dependency upon Federal dollars for important programs, the sad truth is that many districts rely almost exclusively on this money to fund technology initiatives. I find myself wondering how we expect schools to prepare…

If you’re a science teacher, you’ve got to be reading the Make Blog, which is a limitless source of cutting edge science projects, like the homemade quadrifiliar helicoidal antenna, which you can use to pull down raw images directly from weather satellites.  If I was designing a high school today, I would call it “Make High.”  As an aside, some…

Ethan Zuckerman has a comprehensive rundown of technical details for the OLPC laptop prototype. Lots of interesting details….

As you probably know by now, the new “Dapper Drake” version of Ubuntu Linux, and its education-specific derivative, Edubuntu, came out on Thursday.  This is a “long term support” version of Ubuntu, which will be commercially supported by Canonical,Ubuntu’s parent company, for five years on server installations.  Sincethey’re committing to support Dapper for such a long time, it is arelatively…

“We feel strongly that broadened availability of a robust, independent, open source ZIS reference implementation is key to the continued momentum of the SIF standard in education.” So said Sun Microsystems’ senior manager for international sales Mark Silzer over four years ago. At that point, Sun had developed such an open source reference implementation for SIF, the Schools Interoperability Framework,…

I realized it had been a while since I posted here. I miss the ability to just post at my blog and also direct it here. I’ll do better. I wanted to share a post I made on my blog this morning. The Wikipedia definition of pedagogy is the art or science of teaching. Pedagogy is also sometimes referred to…

Dave Cormier, in an a post entitled Oreillyism - A conversation for Open Source people everywhere, writes: Let us take a case in point. Webct was created at the University of British Columbia as a collaborative project amongst many different people in and out of UBC. Last year, while trying to incorporate moodle into a school, I was told by…