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Articles by Don WatkinsFeed
Young programmer turns love of gaming into a Google Summer of Code project
Recently I installed the GCompris educational software suite on a friend's Linux laptop. While researching information about the application, I found out about Rudra Nil Basu, a young programmer from India, who has blogged about his contributions to GCompris. Based on his work, he was selected to be a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) participant and will receive a stipend to continue working to improve GCompris.
How open source is advancing the Semantic Web
The Semantic Web, a term coined by World Wide Web (WWW) inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, refers to the concept that all the information in all the websites on the internet should be able to interoperate and communicate. That vision, of a web of knowledge that supplies information to anyone who wants it, is continuing to emerge and grow.
Phoenicia is a new Android app for teaching kids how to read
Have you been looking for software to help your child to read? Well, your quest may be over. Phoenicia is a new literacy application for Android developed by Michael Hall, an open source software developer, community manager, and technology evangelist currently working at Canonical, maker of Ubuntu. In this interview, he talks about the diagnosis of his oldest child with an Autism Spectrum Disorder, his learning curve of Android development, and why user testing matters more than you think.
Developer opportunities to code for good
As I was searching for open source projects that help learners with disabilities, such as blindness or dyslexia, I came across Bookshare. That led me to Bookshare's parent company, Benetech, a technology nonprofit based in Palo Alto, CA which focuses on empowering communities in need. Read more about Benetech in our interview with CEO Jim Fruchterman: Open source product development most effective when social.
Program LEGO Mindstorms robots over WiFi with BrickPi
For the past year, I've been teaching students how to build and program robots using the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 platform. From the outset, I wanted to find a way to use Scratch and other open source programming languages to extend the capabilities of the platform. That search led me to BrickPi, a Raspberry Pi add-on board from Dexter Industries that easily interfaces with Mindstorms sensors and motors. I requested a teacher trial to see what it could do.
A long chat with Cable Green, director of Open Education for Creative Commons
Open education is a hot topic in both the K-12 and higher education spaces due to a number of factors, including the desire to make education more affordable. The cost of textbooks has added a tremendous financial burden to students around the world. In response, the U.S. Department of Education initiated the #GoOpen movement last year, which helped provide the impetus for schools and universities to consider the use of open educational resources seriously.
How the University of Hawaii is solving today's higher ed problems
Openness invites greater participation and it takes advantage of the shared energy of collaborators. The strength of openly created educational resources comes paradoxically from the vulnerability of the shared experience of that creation process. One of the leaders in Open Educational Resources (OER) is Billy Meinke, educational technologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The University's open creation model uses Pressbooks, which Billy tells me more about in this interview.
Solid state drives in Linux: Enabling TRIM for SSDs
After installing my first solid state drive (SSD) in a computer that was running Linux, I have begun to explore how to take care of them. Solid state drives are different than traditional magnetic drives in the way that they operate, and they require different care from the software side in order to function optimally. On traditional magnetic drives, deleted files are not completely removed from the disk at the time of deletion. This is why you can recover deleted files.
Open Up Resources steps in to provide programs for school systems desperate for standards-aligned curricula
Open Up Resources is a nonprofit collaborative formed by 13 U.S. states that creates high-quality, standards-aligned open educational resources (OERs) that are openly licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Unlike other providers, Open Up Resources provides curriculum-scale OER options; they believe that while many people seem to know where to find supplemental materials, most curriculum directors would not know where to look if they were planning a textbook adoption next year.
Can academic faculty members teach with Wikipedia?
Since 2010, 29,000 students have completed the Wiki Ed program. They have added 25 million words to Wikipedia, or the equivalent of 85,000 printed pages of content. This is 66% of the total words in the last print edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. When Wiki Ed students are most active, they are contributing 10% of all the content being added to underdeveloped, academic content areas on Wikipedia.
Learn how to experiment with The Open Climate Workbench
You can't look anywhere these days without seeing evidence of the changing weather patterns on the earth. Monthly, we are confronted with facts and figures that point to a warming planet. Climate scientists warn us that inaction could be fatal to our futures here.
A conversation with Avni Khatri, president of Kids on Computers
Linux and open source software are not just fueling charities, they are gifting the freedom of education and knowledge to the people the charities are helping because of the low cost, yes, but also the exceptional technology. This sentiment is proven when you look at the work the Linux Foundation does supporting a variety of community initiatives and organizations that are using Linux and open source software.
The intersection of open source software and open educational resources in 2016
It was an exciting year covering the ways open source software and open educational resources provide an interesting intersection of the maker movement, with the emphasis on coding and creating using open resources and tools. We have even seen activities at the highest level of government in regards to the use of open educational resources. Professor William Stein at the University of Washington told us about his creation of SageMath.
Open education is about improving lives, not taking tests
While recently reading The Innovator's Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent and Lead, by George Couros, I was struck by the parallels between the author's thinking and that of Jim Whitehurst in The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance. Early in the book Couros says, "Sometimes it scares me to think that we have taken the most human profession, teaching, and have reduced it to simply letters and numbers," Couros says early in the book.
Using the command-line calendar and date functions in Linux
I have always interested in historical dates and determining what actual day of the week an event occurred on. What day of the week was the Declaration of Independence signed? What day of the week was I born on? What day of the week did the 4th of July in 1876 occur on? I know that you can use search engines to answer many of these questions. But, did you know that the Linux command line can supply those answers too? July 4, 1776, was a Thursday. July 4 in 1876 was a Tuesday.
A free and open source tool for creating interactive, HTML5 content
Many educators want to create interactive content for their classroom or online course. If you're not a HTML5 programmer like most of us, but you have heard HTML5 can simplify your work and provide a great, standard web experience for your students, here's how to get started. H5P is a free and open source tool that helps you create HTML5 content in the browser of your choice and share it across all operating systems and browsers.
Interview with Martin Dougiamas, Moodle's founder and lead developer
Moodle is the de facto standard in open source learning management systems. It is described as "a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalised learning environments." Plus, Moodle is free software, licensed under the GPL.
2 free desktop recording tools to try: SimpleScreenRecorder and Kazam
A picture might be worth a thousand words, but a video demonstration can save a lot of talking. I'm a visual learner, so seeing how to do something has been very helpful in my education. I've found that students benefit from seeing exactly how an application is configured or how a code snippet is written. Desktop screen recorders are great tools for creating instructional videos. In this article, I'll look at two free, open source desktop screen recorders: SimpleScreenRecorder and Kazam.
How to succeed as a remote documentation contributor in OpenStack
Alexandra Settle, an information developer at Rackspace, will be speaking at OpenStack Summit in Barcelona. Alexandra is a core reviewer for OpenStack manuals, also working on the OpenStack Ansible and Swift project documentation, and serves as a mentor in documentation for the Outreachy project. She's been interested in information technology since high school and is a fan of Fedora Linux.
ev3dev is an open source project for Mindstorm users
I was introduced to LEGO Mindstorms eighteen months ago while applying for a STEM grant at a local library. LEGO Mindstorms are kits to create customizable, programmable robots. As I researched the product I discovered that the EV3 brick, which is at the core of the Mindstorms robots, runs on Linux. Despite that, all of the coding software distributed with the project runs on Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android. I found an open source project that allowed the EV3 brick software to be modified, ev3dev.
You don't need a green thumb with this farming robot
FarmBot is a robotic open hardware system that assists anyone with a small plot of land and a desire to grow food with planting, watering, soil testing, and weeding. It uses a Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and other awesome components, including weather-resistant materials. Founder Rory Aronson talks details with me in this interview, but make sure you watch this video. I studied mechanical engineering in school and graduated in 2013.
Building an open medical records system for the developing world
How do you introduce a woman whose very life is the epitome of humanitarian efficacy? Judy Gichoya is a Kenyan medical doctor specializing in radiology and an experienced programmer who's accelerating the growth of OpenMRS.
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