Blog Juice for Educational Technology

In the past week, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and Novell all announced major new initiatives revolving around Linux or open source software. The most straightforward is today’s announcement by Sun that Java will be released under the GNU General Public License. This not only means that going forward everyone will be able to view and make modifications to the Java source…

My buddy Jim Willis writes: Anyway, if you’re in Rhode Island you can lookup all sorts of wonderful election-related data at the Voter Information Center (written and hosted by my brilliant team of IT wizards). If you’re in NJ, well, there’s this (pretty lame) application. Just look at the URL on that beast. The funny thing is that both RI…

Congrats to Chris Lehmann for being named by the National School Board Association as one of the twenty “Ones to Watch,” “a group (of educators) who are becoming the new generation of technology leaders.” Chris’s work with open source software at Beacon was a major inspiration to me when I got started down this path, along with Eric Harrison and…

Via Stephen Downes and e-Clippings, we find the KnowledgeWorks Foundation’s Education Map of the Decade (2006 - 2016). e-Clippings says: I think one reason I might like visual explanations so much is because it is harder to leave things out of the picture without their absence being noted. I pretty much rely on the “find” feature of my PDF reader…

Andy comes down a bit on Google: My guess is that other educational bloggers will have similar reactions. Not unlike the Google Literacy project launched the previous week, Google for Educators seems more like a promotional stunt, lacking in any new resources tailored for educators. Given Google’s superpower strength in the Web 2.0 universe, one might expect them to focus…

Mark Pilgrim has an excellent summary of the recent Mozilla Accessibility Summit (for the historically-challenged, Mozilla is the parent project for the Firefox browser and many other open source projects). For the past few years, if you wanted to shut up an advocate of Linux and free software in schools, the best way has been to challenge them on whether…

The best source for One Laptop Per Child news continues to be Walter Bender’s weekly reports. The only thing that is missing is an RSS feed, so even I tend to only remember this about once a month. Today in my monthly sifting, I was extremely happy to discover this tidbit: Alan Kay reports that Steve Jobs has agreed to…

Matthew Yglesias, Adam Thierer and Leslie Harris pass along rumors of possible legislation to regulate instant messaging in the wake of Foleygate. Harris: In true Washington style, the Foley scandal produced a stampede among lawmakers to the podium — not to announce reform of the House Page Program or the long broken ethics process, but rather to propose new laws…

Simón Anibal Ruiz Rolfs is a technology assistant at Bloomington High School North in Bloomington, Indiana who is personally responsible for 279 Ubuntu Linux workstations in 9 English classrooms as part of the state’s Indiana ACCESS program. He’s started a new blog, Linux @ BHSN, to document his work. Simón seems to have the kind of mule-headed idealism and gumption…

Andy Carvin has brought my attention to the tale of the Committee for Students’ Rights at McLean High School in Fairfax, Virgina’s protest against their school’s adoption of Turnitin’s anti-plagarism services. I hadn’t realized that Turnitin keeps copies of student work and uses it as part of their commercial service. I don’t know the super-fine points about the legality of…

I’ve moaned and groaned on a number of occasions here about the lack of open source tools supporting the Schools Interoperability Framework, and I’m happy to say I’ve finally done something about the problem, specifically, with a little help from my friends, I’ve written a free Zone Integration Server, called TinyZIS. I’ve been poking at it on and off for…

I agree with the premise of David Brin’s article on Salon, “Why Johnny Can’t Code,” that it is a problem that on Windows and the Mac, all users don’t have easy access to a simple programming environment, the way we used to on our Apple //’s or Commodore 64’s when they’d boot into BASIC by default. The idea that computer…

Neil Fraser has made judicious use of a little Javascript, a little Python, and a little PHP to create MobWrite, a nice little lightweight collaborative editor of the genre pioneered by The Coding Monkey’s SubEthaEdit on Mac OS X. Basically, a document in MobWrite is like a real-time wiki. People on different computers can open a document in their browsers…