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Want to present your thesis? Please be compatible with Windows
Last week I had a weird experience. I went to the Department of Communications and Social Research of the Faculty of Communication Sciences of La Sapienza, the first and biggest University in Rome. The reason I went there was to attend the presentation of the Italian Manifesto for Open Government, on which I’ll report soon in another article. The promoters of the Manifesto spent the whole morning explaining in detail all its ten articles, including the fourth and fifth that strongly assert the importance of opening public data, that is publishing them without restrictions in open file formats. They explained this in a room whose entrance was right in front of a billboard on which the Faculty staff had pinned this notice (thanks to Flavia for taking the [picture):
Why can't Penguins enter Federica square?
In november 2010 I discovered the existence of Federica, the tridimensional virtual square" that should be the innovative web-learning system of the Federico II University in Naples. Out of curiosity, I decided to visit it and all I got was a black screen and some perplexities. Some of them, which I described in another page are on the very sense of a website like that, others are more specific. I got a black screen because I use Linux, while (quoting from the University website):
Proposal from OLPC Paraguay on how to manage Sugar or other educational software
The project to deliver One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) for educational purpose in developing countries is doing great in Paraguay. According to developer Bernie Innocenti, this success comes from a way to manage the development of the Sugar educational software that other countries (or any other similar projects, see for example the Teachermate or the italian JumpPC) could and should imitate.
OLPC in Paraguay educates both little kids and teenagers
Sugar is an educational graphical computer environment specifically developed for collaborative learning in primary school. Initially, Sugar was developed and only used within the famous One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC) launched by Nicholas Negroponte to make special laptop computers, called XO, available to the children of all developing countries. (follow the link to see an Example of the Sugar graphical interface.
Textbooks are too expensive, so Italian high school tries to produce them in house
Every year italian families must spend hundreds of Euros in textbooks for every child, while the cost limits set by the government are regularly violated in spite of denounces and warnings from consumer associations.