Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Last time I tried this wasn’t working……

After a long series of rumors and false-starts concerning distribution of the OLPC “$100 Laptop” (now known as the “XO”) in the US, the Financial Times reported today that Quanta, manufacturer of the XO, will market a low cost commercial laptop in the developed world. The hardware will be based on the XO, and since the XO’s software is all…

After a long series of rumors and false-starts concerning distribution of the OLPC “$100 Laptop” (now known as the “XO”) in the US, the Financial Times reported today that Quanta, manufacturer of the XO, will market a low cost commercial laptop in the developed world. The hardware will be based on the XO, and since the XO’s software is all…

After a long series of rumors and false-starts concerning distribution of the OLPC “$100 Laptop” (now known as the “XO”) in the US, the Financial Times reported today that Quanta, manufacturer of the XO, will market a low cost commercial laptop in the developed world. The hardware will be based on the XO, and since the XO’s software is all…

Here’s an email I just sent to Kenneth Whang, the NSF program officer in charge of their award for the Scratch programming environment: Dear Mr. Whang, I am writing in reference to NSF grant number 0325828, entitled “A Networked, Media-Rich Programming Environment to Enhance Technological Fluency at After-School Centers in Economically-Disadvantaged Communities,” which includes development of the Scratch programming environment….

If you’ve been paying close attention, you might have noticed last week a post warning of the potential liabilities of renting off-site servers which are exposed to potentially large fees for bandwidth overages. More to the point, the post was about the increasingly large amount of money I was being charged by a company called ServerPronto for bandwidth I was…

As you may have noticed, I like to advocate for schools to use open source software to maintain control of their own data. One implication of this, however, is that often this means managing one’s own servers, which comes with its own set of problems. You can host them locally, at your school or district, but then you also have…

The One Laptop Per Child project continues to seemingly follow Frederick the Great’s maxim: “Audacity, audacity - always audacity!” attacking computer security as boldly as they have every other problem. A detailed specification of Bitfrost, the security model for the “$100 laptop,” (now known as the XO) as originally reported on in eSchool News, was released last week. While no…

Anyone getting too geeked up about the idea of bypassing laptops and using cell phones as the 1-to-1 computing platform of the future should be required to read this paper by Tim Wu on the decidedly un-neutral and closed nature of the cellular networks. The rest of us, who already know this is a bad idea, can just read Cory’s…

From the Region 19 BOE Gazette: The Alex Eckelberry Op-ed piece in the Norwich Bulletin has triggered a very interesting set of responses (view all the comments).Alex got me wondering about what might have been the environment at the time of Julie Amaro’s malware encounter. What I discovered was more than a little troubling. In June and July of 2004,…

I was just pondering last week whether or not it was time to call out Project Inkwell. I checked out their site again. No activity. I Googled around a bit. Nothing. Were they ever going to release anything, or is this just another front group made up of industry insiders and useful idiots created to maintain the status quo by…

If you read my personal weblog, you might have noticed that it has been down since the end of last week. I was hacked. First off, let me say that this is by no means the first time a server or site I’ve run has been hacked, nor am I particularly alarmed or offended by this occurrence, any more than…

Tim points to Timeline, a free Javascript widget you can use to embed a cool customized timeline in any web page. The live examples demonstrate how you can create a wide variety of styles. The examples also show how a wiki can be integrated with the timeline to provide further commentary. Since timelines of various sorts are a common assignment…