A new report that was prepared for the United States Department of Education says "...on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction." The report goes on to state that there isn't much actual research based evidence in the k-12 arena to support this statement, but that with adults and students in higher education this is the case.

In my first post today, Why not OpenOffice, I asked the question; "Why would a company riff staff rather than look at open source solutions that could potentially save a few jobs?" Just over an hour after the post I received a comment from someone who very succinctly pointed out what they felt were the reasons managers would riff staff before considering a move to open source. I replied back to this comment in a very long-winded fashion and said I would tackle the subject of support in a different post. Well, here is that post.

More and more schools are moving to content management systems (CMS) to more easily manage their websites. While many are going with propietary solutions like Schoolwires, my district decided to use Drupal.

I meant to post this a long time ago but just didn't get around to it. So, as usual, it is way too late to think, but I have the time and the energy to get it done. I have been using VLC (Video Lan Client) for years now. It is a media player that can play just about anything on any platform. What most people don't know about VLC is that it is a great application for streaming video or audio in a variety of formats. Better yet, it can stream multiple streams using different protocols at the same time.

Audacity is probably one of the most well known and most popular open source applications. I thought seriously about just not posting about it, but recently used it to do some fun things with capturing old vinyl records to my computer and thought I should at least put a plug in while I was thinking about it. Audacity is an audio editor and recorder that runs on the three major platforms, Windows, Macintosh and Linux. It is simple to use for basic things and can be as complex as you want it to be. In my most recent use of Audacity, I was digging through my many boxes of old vinyl LPs (records, or big black CDs as my children once called them) and found some old 78s from the early 1950s.