15 ways to empower students with open source tools

Recently I read the fascinating book Empower: What Happens When Students Own Their Own Learning, by John Spencer and A.J. Juliani. The book led me to think more deeply about my teaching methods and how I like to learn. I think learning should be exciting, and I'm happiest when I'm actively engaged in what I'm doing. Why wouldn't students in our schools want anything different than that? And why aren't we doing more to give that experience to them? While many schools today have a 1:1 ratio of computers/tablets to students, most of them use platforms and software that allow little (if any) modification. Students can't tinker with the software or hardware. Yet tinkering and experimenting are at the heart of learning. The authors of Empower say that students in environments that foster "making" take ownership of their learning more readily and tend to be deeper thinkers who are more at home with frustration. Ultimately, they wrote, "makers are better equipped for life."

Red Hat Upgrade and Insider Selling

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Upgraded to “Buy” by Stifel Nicolaus

• Insider Selling: Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) Director Sells 10,994 Shares of Stock

• Stock Analyst Price Target Update on Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

OSS: Yandex, The Open Source Way, Machine Learning, and BSD

• In Other API Economy News: Yandex Open Source Machine Learning Library and More

  We start your weekend off with a review of the stories we couldn’t cover with a look at what what going on in the world of APIs. We start off with news that Yandex, the Russian search engine company, has announced that they are open-sourcing CatBoost, a machine learning library. The library is based on gradient boosting, a machine learning technique described by TechCrunch as being “designed to help “teach” systems when you have a very sparse amount of data, and especially when the data may not all be sensorial (such as audio, text or imagery), but includes transactional or historical data, too.” Yandex is freely releasing CatBoost for anyone to use under an Apache License. This move is similar to what we saw from Google when they open sourced TensorFlow in late 2015. As the demand for artificial intelligence solutions backed by machine learning platforms continues to grow, moves like this serve to help a wide range of developers take advantage of the technology.

• CatBoost: Yandex's machine learning algorithm is available free of charge

• The Open Source Way

  "Open source", in the world of IT, is program code that is meant for collaboration and open contribution. Intended to be modified and shared, because by design and spirit, it is meant for the public at large. It’s been said that “"open source" intimates a broader set of values—what we call "the open source way." Open source projects, products, or initiatives embrace and celebrate principles of open exchange, collaborative participation, rapid prototyping, transparency, meritocracy, and community-oriented development.” So it is a natural conclusion that in this age of open and transparent government, that the government IT manager or technician would be one of the first to want to embrace this new role of collaborative team member within a larger community. Additionally, as organizations, especially government, continue to emerge from the technology funding embargo of the Great (2008) Recession - an economic force that froze IT purchases and programs and forced many into strict “keep the lights on” operational mode, IT managers and CIO’s are carefully expending their still relatively measly budgets. [...] For IT organizations, especially government, with limited budgets and long procurement processes, time and increased experience with open source products will lead to a growing understanding and acceptance. And as this understanding progresses and becomes more accepted, open source will become a “go to” option to keep up with the fast moving technical environment, and perhaps eventually, as a standard first option, realizing the broader set of open source values by relying on the collective work and minds of a virtual community of IT “hackers”, “geeks” and “nerds”, working globally, 24x7/365 to explore, develop and showcase whatever tech that sparks their individual interest.

• Top 5 open-source tools for machine learning

  Given the paradigmatic shifts that a true revolution in machine learning could bring, it’s important to maintain tech’s devotion to open-source. These kinds of scientific advancement don’t belong to any one company or corporation, but to the whole world. Making ML open and evenly distributed means everyone can join in this revolution.

• Release of TinySegmenter 0.3

  Today I released version 0.3 of TinySegmenter, a Japanese Tokenizer in pure Python (released in New BSD license), with a single minor fix for proper install on systems not-using UTF-8 (apparently that still exists! :P). Thanks to Mišo Belica for the patch. Apparently some of his Japanese users are using it for Sumy, his software to extract summary from texts.

• BSDTW 2017 CFP

   

  BSDTW 2017 will be held on the 11th and 12th of November 2017 (Sat/Sun), in Taipei. We are now requesting proposals for talks. We do not require academic or formal papers. If you wish to submit a formal paper, you are welcome to, but it is not required.

  The talks should be written with strong technical content. Presentations on the use of BSD in products and companies are strongly encouraged but marketing proposals are not appropriate for this venue.

GNOME and Other Software

• Dash to Panel – A Cool Icon Taskbar for the GNOME Shell

  Dash to Panel is a customizable open source extension for the GNOME Shell that moves the dash into GNOME’s main panel; combining app launchers and the system tray into one panel like that of KDE Plasma and Windows 7+.

• GNOME's Mutter Window Manager Now Supports Tablet Wheel Events on Wayland

  The Mutter composite and window manager of the widely-used GNOME desktop environment was updated recently both on the stable and devel channels with a bunch of new features and improvements. Mutter 3.24.4 is now the latest stable build of the application, and it's here to add a few important changes for tablets, including improved stability of tablet plugs and unplugs, working window moving and resizing via tablet tools, as well as the implementation of tablet rings/strips configuration. In addition, Mutter now no longer throttles motion events on tablet tools, it's capable of handling the left-handed mode on pen/eraser devices, and adds support for tablet wheel events when running under the Wayland display server. Talking about Wayland, the Wacom cursor offset should now work as expected in Mutter 3.24.4.

• Terminus: A Great Modern And Highly Cutomizable Terminal For Linux

  Are you tired of your default terminal or looking for an alternative which can look cool as well as perform operation in your system? If yes, Terminus is for you which is modern terminal designed to be highly customizable, it will let you enjoy CLI. If you are using Linux since there were CRT monitors with Linux then check out Cool-Retro-Term, which is another great looking terminal application. Terminus is built using web technologies based on Electron, it is cross-platform modern age terminal available for (Linux, Windows and Mac), on Linux it is a full terminal which can spawn with a global hotkey, tabs persist after restart, Auto-dock to anyside of any screen, full Unicode and double-width character support. On Windows it supports Classic CMD, PowerShell and Bash on Windows. On Mac it just works. Multiple app themes and a myriad of community color schemes for the terminal. Color scheme editor included. Install plugins from the NPM repository, or create your own with Typescript and Angular framework.

• Some Useful Indicators: Ayatana, Clipboard-Autoedit, Diskstat, Files, Bulletin and Udisks

  Panel Indicators always comes in handy when you have to do some productive work on your desktop computer, to access quick functions of different applications these indicators saves you a lot of time, some indicator give you information you want to receive, it all depends on your needs. Today presenting you some useful indicators which may help you and makes your desktop experience much better. Following all the indicators are developed by just one guy and available through his PPA.