Education
Software and services for Education
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Following the adventure of putting together an open source school: Albany Senior High School in Auckland, New Zealand. covers pedagogy, learning, software, hardware, learning management systems, libraries and anything else I feel like talking about.
More on Albany High School - one of New Zealands newest schools - which is going Open Source.
One thing holding back the greater adoption of free software in this country is free software.
Schools could use Linux and other open source technologies, but the Education Ministry very kindly negotiates on their behalf with Microsoft for a licence covering all New Zealand state and integrated schools.
It's a gift that Albany Senior High School, which opened last year, looked at and rejected.
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Not quite do-it-yourself surgery, but an open source surgical robot nonetheless. Ensuring that corporations don't own, limit and control the technologies used to save lives is extremely important. I'd love to see more of these open, transparent and shareable approaches to medicine:
Great video on a large solar installation that charges 500 XO laptops at a time. The installation was completed by a team from Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, Green WiFi, and Haiti's National OLPC Coordinator and took place at EFACAP school in Lascahobas, Haiti. "With the system having been designed and built to power 500 XO laptops it was - and very likely still is - the world's largest single-school solar laptop charging deployment."
A different angle on the charter schools coming to New Zealand. Ali Carr-Chellman looks at cyber charter schools in the US. 4 million students took part in cyber charter schools in the US in 2010, 250,000 of whom were full-time. She links cyber charter schools to the wild west and the goldrush, saying that, like in goldrushes in the past, people are making a lot of money out of cyber charter schools at the moment. Huge amounts of money are being diverted from public schools: US$1 billion in 2010. That includes paying private company CEOs annual salaries of up to US$2.6 million.
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I have over fifteen years experience in systems and network configuration and support. For most of that time I have been working with Open Source Software, and believe that Open Source software provides the best solutions for business, educational and personal use.
