Global Learning Group

How Standardized Tests Are Affecting Public Schools

Valerie Strauss is an education writer who blogs as The Answer Sheet. She came to The Washington Post in 1988 as the assistant foreign editor for Asia just before the Soviet Empire fell and Tiananmen Square exploded (which seems like ancient history to her two teenage daughters). After six years she moved to Metro and covered various education beats (D.C. schools and too many superintendents to count on one hand; higher education, etc.), started the Schools & Learning Page with Jay Mathews, and then agreed to try blogging (despite, at the time, hating the word “blog”)

Florida’s standardized testing program is being misused and has “severely impacted student learning,” according to a new white paper that says that school districts in the state are required to give as many as 62 tests a year to students. The white paper, called “The Ramifications of Standardized Testing on our Public Schools,” was just [...]

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What’s Next After GPL And Apache?

Open Sources blogger Simon Phipps is a well-known and respected leader in the free software community, having been involved at a strategic level in some of the world’s leading technology companies.

At the end of April, I wrote about the idea that usage of the GNU General Public License (GPL) is declining and concluded that although new, commercially initiated open source projects were indeed tending to adopt other licenses, the use of the GPL itself is still growing — especially among projects in its core community [...]

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Cloud Meets Hardware: The Iinevitable Merger

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.

Nvidia this week outlined what it dubbed a revolutionary plan to change the graphic processing game by offloading some computing to the cloud. For Nvidia, the cloud meets GPU effort would enable things like better online gaming and data crunching for supercomputing. In a statement, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang outlined the company’s Nvidia VGX platform, [...]

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Being Open Could Close The Door On Android

Dan joins the BGR team as the Android Editor, covering all things relating to Google’s premiere operating system.

While I may recommend the iPhone to the majority of people who ask, Android is still my mobile operating system of choice. Google has created a truly amazing and innovative platform, and because it is open-source anyone can tweak it and customize it. Even devices that weren’t meant for Android, such as my HP TouchPad, [...]

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An Open Source Arsenal For Photographers

Sam Dean is the editor of the OStatic blog, where he provides news, news analysis, reviews, interviews and much more on the thriving world of open source technology.

There has never been a better time to be interested in digital photography. Not only do inexpensive digital cameras offer great high-resolution photos, but they come with very advanced feature sets. Over the years on OStatic, we've also covered a huge number of open source applications that can make editing, organizing and adding effects to [...]

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What’s Next After GPL And Apache?

Open Sources blogger Simon Phipps is a well-known and respected leader in the free software community, having been involved at a strategic level in some of the world’s leading technology companies.

At the end of April, I wrote about the idea that usage of the GNU General Public License (GPL) is declining and concluded that although new, commercially initiated open source projects were indeed tending to adopt other licenses, the use of the GPL itself is still growing — especially among projects in its core community [...]

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Rethinking IT For The Cloud Era

Arthur Cole covers networking and the data center for IT Business Edge. He has served as editor of numerous publications covering everything from audio/video production and distribution, multimedia and the Internet to video gaming.

It seems that the private vs. public cloud debate has gone the way of PC vs. Mac or Ginger vs. Mary Ann. Recognition is growing that most organizations will utilize a mix of public, private and hybrid infrastructure in the quest toward maximum efficiency and flexibility. But now that the question of what to do [...]

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Cloud Meets Hardware: The Inevitable Merger

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.

Nvidia this week outlined what it dubbed a revolutionary plan to change the graphic processing game by offloading some computing to the cloud.   For Nvidia, the cloud meets GPU effort would enable things like better online gaming and data crunching for supercomputing.   In a statement, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang outlined the company’s Nvidia [...]

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The Trouble With Differentiating Differentiation

Dan Ross is a former middle school social studies teacher.

It's that time of year again, those two weeks in May during which high school students around the nation are sitting their Advanced Placement exams. And this year we mark the 30th anniversary of the most celebrated AP class of all time: in 1982 a triumphant 14 of Jaime Escalante's 15 calculus students passed the [...]

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The Morning Download: Speak Cybersecurity Truth To Power

Good morning. Boards of directors are clueless when it comes to cybersecurity — and that’s a great opportunity for CIOs to prove their worth. John Halamka, the highly regarded CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, tells CIO Journal that “cybersecurity is a great way to stay in touch with the board because there’s [...]

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Public Cloud Execs Dish Out Top 10 Tips For Enterprises Building Hybrid Clouds

Paula Rooney has covered the technology industry for more than 15 years.

Service providers once looked to enterprises to figure out how to build their data centers. In the cloud era, the opposite is true. “In the first seven years, we were always looking to the enterprise and trying to mimic what they were doing. Nowadays, enterprises are looking at us and they do look at things [...]

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