:: Intrepid Spaniel ::

A good essay on the dumbing of America. The current anti-intellectual, even anti-rational climate is a concern for me. Do your part; get out your maps and learn about geography, don’t plunk your kids down to be mesmerized by the same video they’ve watched dozens of times, go to the library and pick up something substantive to read. If these things are to difficult, I challenge you to have the attention span to read this article, I know it was a challenge for me, but then again, I’m just an Idaho farm boy.

Call Me a Snob, but Really, We’re a Nation of Dunces: By Susan Jacoby for washingtonpost.com

This article suggest that educators and especially teacher educators should use F/OSS whenever possible and that the freedom offered by F/OSS can outweigh shortcomings in the software itself.

Training teachers and students to use a piece of software makes that software more valuable. Vendors know this. Business sense, not altruism, is what drives deep discounts on software for education. I once spoke to a vendor of an online grade book who, upon learning that I train teachers, was very interested in my using it in my classes.

The article suggests many alternatives to proprietary software and how they may be used.
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/57760.html

Nextstudent.com recommends 10 top web tools to save you time as a college student.

From todo lists (MyNoteIt, TaDaList), chat/IM(Meebo), writing bibilographies (ottobib), collaborating on documents (Google Docs), to keeping up on news plus more (Google Reader), there are some good free tools there.

I like Del.icio.us as well for social bookmarking.. to see what I’ve bookmarked, look here.

http://www.nextstudent.com/NextPath/nextPath-Online/Top-Web-Tools-for-College-Students.asp

For searching for ISBN #’s and finding great deals on textbooks I’ve used campusi.com and textbookland as well

Open source software made a big showing earlier this month at the National Education Computing Conference (NECC) in San Diego.
…

ke Huffman, Indiana Department of Education Special Assistant for Technology, did a presentation on the state of Indiana’s InACCESS project, the largest K-12 desktop Linux deployment in the United States. With 24,000 Linspire desktop computers built by Wintergreen Systems rolled out at various high schools, the program has already saved the state about US$1 million. The deployment, which started in 2005, will grow to 170,000 computers within a year and could potentially reach over 300,000 within several years.

…

“Public education can sometimes be a budgetary black hole, and technology spending in the public school system is no exception. In California, the recently approved budget increases education spending by almost US$3 billion, bringing the total percentage of the state budget spent on public education to a lofty 58 percent. Open source software could potentially reduce the burden on taxpayers and help the state increase the quality and efficiency of public education. As Mike Huffman says, “As long as we keep waiting for big bags of cash to fall from the sky, we aren’t going anywhere.”

(Read more…)

“With the current price of a new algebra textbook approaching $110 and publishers bringing out a new edition every three to four years just to prevent students from selling their used books, we have decided to create a site where the textbooks are free.”
They only have one up right now but plan to add more, along with video and audio lectures.

view and download this textbook at totallyfreemath.com

Here are some more links for free text book resources… (Read more…)

Good article showing benefits of Open Source in schools. Big savings, lower maintenance costs, lower disposal costs, lower software costs, increased student/computer ratios.

One story from the article…
“”Our school has been running the Linux terminals for students for over two years. We currently have 110 student terminals available. We use OpenOffice for our student and faculty. The conversion has been a great success, savings are over $100,000 while our users remain satisfied with the computer tools they have available. You may read this article for some details. In 2003 we were running near to 110 five year old machines with Windows NT and Office 97. We also had new machines that were running Windows NT and Office97 and needed a software upgrade. The $100,000 savings was the amount saved from switch to a Linux terminal server configuration on the student lab PCs and switching to OpenOffice on all faculty and student PCs.”

Yes, $100,000.
Read on for the full story.. (Read more…)

Pocatello Community Charter School hosted it’s first Expedition Exhibition in it new building. on Wednesday, January 18th.

The building was completed in time for school to start January 9th.

This site is a podcast of an interview with Paul Nelson.

“Paul Nelson is Technology Director at Riverdale High School in Portland, OR and co-creator of the K-12 Linux Terminal Server Project. K-12 LTSP is a really cool way to take older machines and breathe new life into them by connecting them to a powerful server that takes over the bulk of the computing tasks. For standard Web browsing and Office-like applications, schools can save a bunch of money using thin clients vs. full PCs.

Our podcast should be a pretty good introduction to Linux, open source, and thin client computing. We mention RedHat and Edubuntu, two Linux distributions of particular interest to schools, and the K-12 Linux in School Project which seeks to promote free and open source software in educational settings.”

Download and listen here:
http://support.hopkins.k12.mn.us/podcasts/STP-PaulNelson.mp3

More details on the $100 laptop, Jobs offers OSX, MIT declines, opting for an open source solution that can be tinkered with. The current plan is for an AMD chip and Red Hat Linux.

WSJ.com - The $100 Laptop Moves Closer to Reality

This is a seriously cool design, imagine what this could mean to the developing world, or even our kids in the U.S.

When can I get one? I can’t order in quantities of 1,000,000, but perhaps someone will resell them.

The black and white screen mode for ebooks looks interesting.

news article [arstechica.com]

Be sure to check out the pictures. Also the carrying strap doubles as an AC adapter, the battery compartment doubles as a handle, and the hand crank to power it!

pictures [media.mit.edu]