Not only is Moodle an equivalent to Blackboard, many claim it to be superior. Also, it’s free, while Blackboard is very expensive. The Video Screening…
Posts published in “Community”
One thing we learned a long time ago here at FOSS Force is that the world could use more people like Phil Shapiro. The FOSS…
What’s it like to advocate for open source and be a rep for Mozilla in Slovenia? Nino Vranešič tells all. The FOSS Force Video Interview…
In this story, “Roblimo” takes us back to 2002, to an open source conference in a country where the common belief was that “nobody knew…
The vision behind free and open source is software that serves all people on this planet of ours. The project to produce Shendy takes that…
Free Code Camp is an organization that teaches people to code. As part of this free training, student coders produce free code needed by nonprofit…
Resinger figures that by using free and open source platforms such as Moodle and WordPress instead of proprietary options, his school district is saving something like $40,000 a year. As the clickbait headline might read, what he said next will amaze you.
The FOSS Force Video Interview
This is what Charlie Reisinger’s Amazon author bio says:
“Charlie serves as the Technology Director for Penn Manor School District in Lancaster County Pennsylvania. A member of the senior leadership team, he directs instructional technology programs and technical infrastructure and operations. A passionate advocate and speaker on open source values in education, Charlie and his team implemented the largest classroom desktop Linux program in Pennsylvania.
“Under his leadership, Penn Manor School District received the 2011 School of Excellence in Technology Award from the Pennsylvania School Boards Association (PSBA). In 2016, Penn Manor was recognized with the Districts of Distinction Award for the Open Source one-to-one Laptop Program.”
The book’s title is The Open Schoolhouse: Building a Technology Program to Transform Learning and Empower Students. The Kindle version is only $4.99. I’ve read it. You should read it, too, if you’re a teacher, school administrator, student, parent, uncle or aunt or have friends or family with kids in school — or even if you’re a taxpayer someplace where they have public school or you’re connected in some way with a charter school or private school.
Robin “Roblimo” Miller is a freelance writer and former editor-in-chief at Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned SourceForge, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, ThinkGeek and Slashdot, and until recently served as a video editor at Slashdot. Now he’s mostly retired, but still works part-time as an editorial consultant for Grid Dynamics, and (obviously) writes for FOSS Force.
It’s easy for those of us in the US to become chauvinistic about our language. Our country is geographically huge, making it easy to think…
It’s getting harder and harder to scam little old ladies these days. They’ll just up and switch to Linux on you.
The Heart of Linux
We are going into our third year of living in the Gardens of Taylor. When you come off of the city street and onto this property, you can sometimes get a creepy feeling, like this is familiar in an unpleasant sort of way. It can feel like you’ve just stepped into Stepford Village. Every yard has been manicured to match the ones on either side of it. The edging along all driveways and sidewalks is a perfect two inches across and if a weed or mushroom happens to grow within that etched space, it is gone the next time you look for it.
Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue
Also included: Debian developer Kristoffer H. Rose passes, two new distro releases, Apricity OS adds 32-bit, Canonical gets Kubernetes, Snapcraft gets a new release and getting ready for All Things Open.
FOSS Week in Review
Yikes! Remember last weekend when I was so happy that the dog days of summer had left us behind to be replaced with more comfortable autumnal temps? While that’s true, with nights getting chilly enough that I’m going to have to dig out my comforter, I forgot that this time of year is also the peak of the hurricane season. This means that for much of the next week I’m keeping a wary eye to the south, where Hurricane Matthew may or may not have my part of the Carolinas directly in its sights. It looks as if we’ll know better about what it has in mind by Tuesday afternoon.
Tux Paint needs a Mac maintainer: Everybody’s favorite FOSS paint tool is having a little trouble running on Macs these days — specifically on OS X 10.11 El Capitan. Designed with kids in mind, the app is used extensively at schools, with many school systems now upgrading to El Capitan, which was released a year ago.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
We hope you enjoy and are inspired by this short video celebrating Preeti Murthy and Jessica McKellar, the winners of this year’s Red Hat Women in Open Source Awards.
The Video Screening Room
This short video packs a lot of punch. Inspiring and hopeful.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW0dwL6JzTU?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]
“Learning how to program does this really important, weird thing in your brain and you realize you have this power now. This mindset that if you see something that could be better, you have the power to change it, is a mindset that I want as many people as possible to have on this planet. It can start with open source, but the really exciting part for me is when you can apply that mindset to other domains.” – Jessica McKellar, Director of Engineering at Dropbox
For the past 10 years, Phil has been working at a public library in the Washington D.C.-area, helping youth and adults use the 28 public Linux stations the library offers seven days a week. He also writes for MAKE magazine, Opensource.com and TechSoup Libraries. Suggest videos by contacting Phil on Twitter or at pshapiro@his.com.