Education
Schools, Universities, ITO's
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.
I came across this from Stephen Downes. WARNING: images may make educators extremely envious:The principles of the Vittra School revolve around the breakdown of physical and metaphorical class divisions as a fundamental step to promoting intellectual curiosity, self-confidence, and communally responsible behavior. Therefore, in Vittra’s custom-built Stockholm location, spaces are only loosely defined by permeable borders and large, abstract landmarks.
Unleash the entrepreneur in your students. If you've ever played Angry Birds, or even heard how much money the developers make each month, you can see that game design is an incredible rewarding career (in every sense). For students who show promise in programming, here are three good open source engines to get them building games relatively easily.
Three of my favourite 'sights':1. Incidental comics is a cartoon blog that has really clever, heart-warming comics like this one:
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.
