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Sugar on a Stick is a Fedora-based operating system featuring the award-winning Sugar Learning Platform and designed to fit on an ordinary USB thumbdrive ("stick"). Originally developed for the One Laptop Per Child Project and designed specifically as a 1-to-1 computing environment for K-8 students to collaborate with others in exploring the world around them, Sugar is used every day by over one and a half million students in classrooms throughout the world. It is now deployable for the cost of a stick rather than a laptop; students can take their Sugar on a Stick thumbdrive to any machine - at school, at home, at a library or community center - and boot their customized computing environment without touching the host machine’s hard disk or existing system at all.
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A cure for the common troll | opensource.com
Our bridge into the 21st Century presently houses a nasty creature who demands a toll from the best and brightest in our community. The dreaded troll is a regular denizen of our current system of patent enforcement and he poses serious problems for technology companies. Despite the great expense of patent litigation, trolls are filing increasing numbers of patent suits aimed at technology companies, and particularly aimed at software and related areas of commerce. Their club of choice is the broad, complex, and vague patent claim. There are several means at our disposal, most of which are based on known mechanisms from other areas of the law, for dealing with these trolls, or more diplomatically, these "non-practicing entities."
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When professors try a learning-management system that promises to improve teaching, it "really encloses space, and it encloses the possibility of the Web," he says. Mr. Groom charges so-called open-learning management tools with co-opting the spirit of EduPunk, a term he coined to express the do-it-yourself ethos he champions. These days he avoids the word because he fears people were preoccupied with the label rather than its goals. He uses a new creative outlet instead. It's ds106, a digital-storytelling course he teaches with a group of colleagues. His team shunned the learning-management market and built its own virtual classroom by cobbling together free open-source tools. The class blossomed into a "family" of students from five universities. Hundreds more play along online. Mr. Groom said a vendor's learning-software tool could never sustain the community, because most limit access to those with an account at that university.
THE INNOVATOR: Jim Groom, University of Mary Washington
THE BIG IDEA: Colleges should use free Web tools for course discussions and projects to better prepare students for jobs after college.
It's ds106, a digital-storytelling course he teaches with a group of colleagues. His team shunned the learning-management market and built its own virtual classroom by cobbling together free open-source tools. The class blossomed into a "family" of students from five universities. Hundreds more play along online. Mr. Groom said a vendor's learning-software tool could never sustain the community, because most limit access to those with an account at that university.
Noise-Canceling Tech Lets You Quietly Dine in Noisy Restaurants [VIDEO]
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How many times have you gone out for a fancy evening of food and revelry,
and ended up spending the evening yelling into the ear of your dinner compa…
5 minutes ago