Canada is losing the environmental fight. It joins the ever-growing ranks of wealthy countries unable to meet their Kyoto Protocol goals. Between 1990 and 2004, Canada increased green house gas (GHG) emissions by 22%, sparking this comment in 2006 from Environment Minister Rona Ambrose: “it is impossible for Canada to reach its Kyoto targets.” » Read more
This is actually the second summer we’ve run Red Hat High. We learned a lot of lessons in our first year. The biggest lesson: We’re a technology company, not a summer camp company. It took the truly heroic efforts of many Red Hat employees to make the camp happen last time, and it was clear that we wouldn’t be able to duplicate those feats. Thus, our partnership with Science House at N. C. State.
They run summer science camps for a living, and they know their business. In preparation for this week, the nice folks at Science House arranged the counselors, the dorm rooms, the meals, the off-hours entertainment, the access to student health, the transportation, and lots of other details that we wouldn’t have even considered. Which has allowed us to focus on the part that we can feel like we can be good at: introducing technology to kids.
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Today, Sunday, is the first day of Red Hat High, and I’m expecting 47 kids. It’s 4:00 in the afternoon, and orientation starts at 4:30. Of those 47 kids, how many have arrived so far? Three, that’s how many. Three anxious middle-schoolers and their families, all milling around the huge, empty meeting hall at Red Hat headquarters. The parents mostly make small talk about the weather outside, which is incredibly hot. Maybe it’s global warming, they say — as if the fact that it’s Raleigh in July isn’t enough to explain the 95 degree temperature outside. I check my watch again: now it’s 4:02 pm.
Here in the States, Independence Day is tomorrow. No better time, we thought, to question the systems we trust to tally and track our votes come election season. If you missed the Red Hat Summit, you missed Alan Dechert of the Open Voting Consortium. Dechert contends that voter confidence is crucial to encouraging voter participation–a hot issue in America where voter apathy is bad and seems to be getting worse. And if you can’t see how your votes are counted, how can you trust they’re counted accurately?
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Video by Brad Boll and Jim Haverkamp
Produced by Julie Bryce
Ever heard of Blackboard? Or if you’re young enough, remember online assignments using WebAssign or Maple? Moodle is a content management system with similar capabilities, but it’s open source and completely free. Free as in beer. (They do gratefully accept donations.)
The line between learning in the classroom and learning independently has been forever blurred. Thanks to the resources of the web, kids as young as nine can learn the way college students do. Completing online assignments at home, reviewing lessons from the previous day at their own pace, and communicating with instructors and peers without picking up a phone.
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It all started when I took an engineering class in Tamilnadu, India. In my native home, the Andaman islands, I had many friends who were experts in Windows. I, too, was a typical Windows user. But to tell you the truth, I hated Windows. It hanged. It crashed. It invited viruses and forever needed troubleshooting. To me, Windows continues to be a headache.
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