Learn - Stuff about using computers to help people teach and learn better.

50 OSS Alternatives List

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:20:11 -0500

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.

TETC 2007 Presentations

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 03:54:42 -0500

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

Another $100 Laptop

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 17:03:37 -0400

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's $500 laptop

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 17:11:07 -0400

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?

Online a friendlier place than Real Life

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:47:25 -0400

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.

Looking in the Wrong Places

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 09:30:47 -0400

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.

Bibus and OpenOffice.org Looks like Endnote to me

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 15:58:55 -0400

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.

Laptop Lashback

Wed, 23 May 2007 12:25:45 -0400

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.

On the Cover of the Rolling Stone

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 07:28:27 -0400

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.

In which we learn that handwriting isn't what it used to be

Wed, 09 May 2007 12:40:47 -0400

In a shocking article in the Boston Globe we learn that handwriting is becoming more of an "art form" and that because NCLB and computers we are short-changing students from this important skill.

On Redefining Education

Mon, 07 May 2007 01:17:40 -0400

I've been thinking lately about the problem with schools (actually, I've been thinking about that since at least the 6th grade). I'm still trying to refine the argument, but I think it comes down to the fact that there is no so much information in the world that is ever-rapidly being produced that old ideas of learning "the basics" just don't make sense anymore. It used to be that you could learn how to design bridges, heal the sick, or, maybe build cars (probably using very few skills that you learned in school) and be set. Now, however, the job that you'll be doing in five or ten years, especially if you are a high school senior, probably doesn't exist.

On Plagiarism in the VIrtual Classroom

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 12:08:05 -0400

So I came across this article called Probing for Plagiarism in the Virtual Classroom (the link generates an error at the time of this writing). I didn't actually read it; I just read a synopsis of it in a book. It's apparently about teachers fears that online classes somehow increase students ability to plagiarize and about electronic measures that we can take to catch people who turn in stuff that they didn't write. I think that the words that caught my eye were "academic integrity." It goes on to talk about how we can give time-limited quizzes that are proctored to keep people from cheating on them too.

To me this game of cat and mouse completely misses the point. If the things that we ask our students to do seem so pointless that students would rather to spend time searching for something that looks like what they were supposed to do, then something's fundamentally wrong with the assignment. I see a couple ways to solve this problem.

Portable Apps

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 18:04:43 -0500

The FreeSMUG peoplenow have portable apps. See portableapps.com for Portable apps for Windows.

15 minutes of fame. For my dog.

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 11:31:56 -0500

Well, I don't normally post personal stuff here, but this is pretty funny. I sent these pictures of my dog Thor and his cat, Modi, to a friend of mine who works at a TV station. Yes. My dog has his own web site. Now he's a TV star.

Meeting the needs of Tennessee Technology Trainers

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 14:39:59 -0500

A recent post to the Tennessee Technology Trainers email list outlined a few "Help Needed" items. This post comprises my knee-jerk reactions. They may be wrong.