newly ancient

In yet another stroke (of luck) for open source, Google has announced that they will be financing and supporting an initiative to bring open source to high school students. Google Highly Open Participation Contest is an opportunity for “pre-university” students to work on one of ten top open source projects and get paid for it. For every 3 tasks completed, students will get receive $100 USD. In addition, every participant receives a free TV shirt and certification of their experience. Tasks range from documenting Moodle to programming Joomla, so everyone can join in. This has great potential for raising a whole new generation of open source developers. Here’s the scoop:

The Google Summer of Code program has been a joint labor of love between Google and the open source community for the past three years, and the results have been spectacular: hundreds of college students have been introduced to open source software, thousands of people across the globe have begun development together and millions of lines of open code have been produced, 4 million last year alone. We’ve been particularly proud of this program and how much it has helped the community and we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about ways we can continue helping open source projects find even more contributors. Today, we’re pleased to announce the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, our new effort to get pre-university students involved in all aspects of open source development, from fixing bugs to writing documentation and doing user experience research.

This is certainly a great step forward in open source education. So far, the response has been great. (Many of the tasks are already claimed) In particular, I think this helps to teach students what is really going into the tools they use. Maybe your school will end up using the Moodle module created; or you’ll contribute some key documentation to Apache. I believe basic programming skills are at least as useful as basic art understanding, and thus should be taught in schools. I’m glad to see Google agrees and is putting their formidable financial and technical bulk behind such a worthy cause.

However, I would like to see a little more variety in projects for the future. All the projects this year relate to web development. While I understand why Google would want to focus on the web as a medium, I think most students are more apt to become engaged if they directly use the end project. For instance, I imagine many (smart) students would love the opportunity to improve OpenOffice or Azureus, product commonly used by teens.

No matter what class you teach or take in school, there’s something you can do for open source. Love art? Make a logo. Teach English? Have your students write some documentation. Everyone can participate in open source, and GHOP is teaching a whole new generation of programmers to perpetuate a culture of transparency and openness. Now, I’m off to finish up my database preset for Moodle.

My host will be moving my server and this blog will be down from 6:00 GMT to approximately 14:00 GMT.

In a dramatic move, the pioneer of the (new) way we get reading material has stepped up the game in how we read. Amazon has announced a revolutionary e-book reader, called Kindle. Though many have tried to revolutionize reading before, I think Amazon has a far greater chance of doing so. After all, Amazon does run the best book store in the world. There’s all the great features you would expect from an electronic book, including mobile purchasing, search, and annotating. (Video) Most important of all, Kindle is just plain readable. By using E Ink, which actually manipulates chemicals to reduce eye strain, one can sit down and read through the entirety of War and Peace without having to get glasses. (Especially since text size is resizable for you aging baby boomers and you can get about 30 hours of battery life to a charge).

Newsweek does a very good job of summarizing what is amazing & scary about Kindle. I think the most important thing to see is that the loop is finally completed - every step of the writing/publishing/reading process can now be done digitally (easily):

Computers may have taken over every other stage of the process—the tools of research, composition and production—but that final mile of the process, where the reader mind-melds with the author in an exquisite asynchronous tango, would always be sacrosanct, said the holdouts.

However, the article does lead into some ideas which I don’t necessarily agree with - that writing will become a collaborative, wikized effort.

“The possibility of interaction will redefine authorship,” says Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, an association of libraries and institutions. Unlike some writing-in-public advocates, he doesn’t spare the novelists. “Michael Chabon will have to rethink how he writes for this medium,” he says. Brantley envisions wiki-style collaborations where the author, instead of being the sole authority, is a “superuser,” the lead wolf of a creative pack.

The reason that I buy books is that they are blatantly one person’s thoughts upon a subject or one person’s story-one lone person’s perspective. I enjoy curling up with a book and reading what a lone crusader has written. However, I do see lots of potential in the annotation of our reading - contrasting/additional thoughts clearly marked as contrasting/additional thoughts:

Jim Gerber, Google’s content-partnerships director, suggests that it might be an interesting idea, for example, for someone on the liberal side of the fence to annotate an Ann Coulter book, providing refuting links for every contention that the critic thought was an inaccurate representation. That commentary, perhaps bolstered and updated by anyone who wants to chime in, could be woven into the book itself, if you chose to include it.

Despite all this, I don’t believe that Kindle will be the device to truly revolutionize reading. Instead, I think a more all-around device will prove to be the future of reading. Perhaps the XO? (Especially/already in Africa) What do you think? Will the Kindle become the “iPod of reading?”