News

My student Debbie Lee sent me this list of 50 OSS alternatives to proprietary programs entitled The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy — and Their Open Source Alternatives.

I have 3 presentations at this year's Tennessee Educational Technology Conference. Click the "read more" link to find out more about them.

The Washington Post has a story about Asustek Jumping on to the $100 Laptop bandwagon with their own Low-Price laptop. This one is $200 or up to $300 for more stuff. Like MIT's offering this one will run Linux. It's great that so many people are working to equip kids in 3rd world countries with laptops since all the kids in the U.S. already have ubiquitous access to computers.

Microsoft goes low-cost in India, or so the headline reads. They're going to start selling PC's in India for $500! That's really impressive. Or is it?

So C|Net says that One in three teens bullied online. I guess this is supposed to sound pretty horrible. Better not let kids online. Oh, wait, the kids say that they're more likely to be bullied face-to-face. It seems like when people are online they act a lot like, well, people.

The Challenge

We in the field of educational technology need to pay more attention to finding ways to provide students in teachers with the tools that they need to increase identifiable learning outcomes. Too often we can be pulled in by the sirens of cool toys or be convinced that if only we could train teachers to understand how to use them, students would learn better. I posit that teachers and students now know quite well how to use computers to increase learning, but that the computers they have do not provide even the simplest supports that they need to do so.

The Challenge

We in the field of educational technology need to pay more attention to finding ways to provide students in teachers with the tools that they need to increase identifiable learning outcomes. Too often we can be pulled in by the sirens of cool toys or be convinced that if only we could train teachers to understand how to use them, students would learn better. I posit that teachers and students now know quite well how to use computers to increase learning, but that the computers they have do not provide even the simplest supports that they need to do so.

A student wanted a Linux laptop so that he could run Bibus, a F/OSS reference management tool that talks to OpenOffice.org. It's not part of Ubuntu, but there's a Debian version, so it installs with a couple of clicks. It took me a minute to figure out how to insert citations, but I did. It looks pretty easy. And it created what appears to be a correctly formatted bibliography. I can't get the BibTeX import to work (I keep my stuff in BibTeX), and the export that JabRef did of my database (of some 2000+ references) didn't seem to include the journals. This may still be a decent tool for me when I'm forced to create word processing documents, and it's likely a worthwhile tool for you if you don't already have 2000 items in a database using another tool that you really, really like.

Dangerously Irrelevant has a piece called $2,000 pencils where he links to a piece about a a "Laptop Lashback". It seems that throwing laptops in schools doesn't really change things and that what we have are $2,000 pencils.

TechTrends came today. The cover says: "Also in this issue: Open Source Software," and it's my article: "It's Time to Consider Open Source Software." Before I post a copy online, I suppose I need to re-read the thing I signed to see how many of my rights I gave away to them.

Update

And this is interesting. The thing has been picked up by LinuxInsider. It's in Two parts and they provided links for everything. The electronic version of the original TechTrends article is now available to subscribers or to UT people..

Now I really am on the cover of the Rolling Stone

So I submitted the article to Slashdot, "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." My article is on the front page. Since the article's not on my server, I don't suppose I'll get Slashdotted, but I do suspect I'll get a bit more traffic tomorrow than I usually do.