Those that have read my blog know that I do get on my soapbox from time to time about the state of education in the United States.  I can't help but be concerned about the future for America's young adults.  Too many students are not opting to stay in school to continue their education. If U.S. students continue their lack of motivation in pursuing an education, I can't help but be gloomy on America's place in the 21st century as a world leader.

Taking a different viewpoint, BusinessWeek recently posted an article on academics in the United States stating that U.S. schools are not doing that bad.  The schools could be doing better, but they're not terrible.  The article uses the Two Million Minutes documentary as its backdrop.  The BusinessWeek author points out that academic performance doesn't always dictate the sucess a person may have in the world of business.

BlogHerald: "Part of our task as bloggers is to educate our readers on the subject
of blogging. Do you? Many do and aren’t even aware they are. Let’s look
at some of the ways you may be teaching your readers about blogging."

Complete Story

eWeek has an interesting article regarding women working in IT, or rather, women not working in IT.  The article is, Where Did All the Girl Geeks Go?

A professor says he has only one girl in a computer science major class in 2008, down from 40 percent in 2000. What happened? eWEEK gets field experts to weigh in.

While women hold 51 percent of professional jobs in the United States, they make up only 26 percent of the IT work force, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology. Furthermore, fewer women worked in IT in 2008 than in 2000.

The article later discusses about the need to put more effort into convincing women that working with technology can be cool.  This argument and others the article makes for how to get more women involved in IT and computer science is a problem.  I don't know a single geek, whether male or female, that had to be convinced that technology is cool.

Recieved an e-mail a couple days ago from ATutor.ca that that there is a new version of ATutor available, version 1.6. ATutor is an open source learning content management system (LCMS or sometimes just LMS). As the project describest, with Atutor "educators can quickly assemble, package, and redistribute Web-based instructional content, easily import prepackaged content, and conduct their courses online. Students learn in an adaptive learning environment."

The two most significant changes with Atutor 1.6 include:

• Adoption of a single character set, UTF-8, which provides universal language support.
• A new look-and-feel changes and updates to the default themes

You can visit the ATutor 1.6 Demo to try out new features in 1.6 and download ATutor 1.6 to install a version of your own.

Baseline reports that demand continues to increase for qualified people in the information technology field.  This demand is in part due to the number of the baby boomer generation retiring within the next 10 years.  Also, the decrease in students choosing a major in computer science, engineering, or mathematics isn't helping either.

In the article, Demand for IT Admins Hits Five Year High , a survey found strong needs and increasing salaries for IT professionals for the following computer administration work:

This is very cool, HarvardScience has chosen Drupal for their CMS.  I'm looking at Drupal for a science oriented server on the Intranet side.  Hmmm...ideas from Harvard...

Choosing a CMS

During the six months before I began building the HarvardScience site, the Harvard News Office had been working with designer Claudio luís Vera of Studio Module. The result was 28 beautiful templates, which had been chiseled, filed, and polished to the client's adoration. Unfortunately, during this time the News Office had still not made up its mind about what CMS to use. In fact there was still some muttering about how a custom CMS was the way to go.

So approximately six months ago, I built the first draft of HarvardScience using Drupal over the course of a weekend. The result was exactly what I had hoped for - the news office was so excited by the speed at which the site could be built they decided to go with Drupal. The rapid development of a prototype or draft site can be built using Drupal made the CMS issue a fait accompli strategy.

Complete Story via Drupal.org

"...what's more important is that Moodle is every bit as good as any other CMS/LMS product on the market -- and better than many. Just being available, supported and free is not enough to be compelling; being all of those things and being better than the alternatives is."

Complete Story

Link found via Open Source Community

I just can't believe the year Drupal is having.  There has been an explosion of Drupal sites almost everywhere you turn.  Drupal is very popular with the masses in 2007.  So popular in fact, that I wonder as with all things popular if we'll be seeing 2008 as the backlash year against Drupal as it has quickly evolves as a litmus test for open source CMS (one of my predictions for 2008).


The latest Drupal-based site to flash on the screen of my browser is the portal (currently in beta) for the European Commission sponsored Science, Education and Learning in Freedom (SELF ) project.  The site aims to be a community-driven platform for the production and distribution of educational materials. Its sustainability depends on the building of a strong community of users and participants of the platform.  The site may actually be live by the time you read this post.