Reading

Created
Fri, 28/10/2016 - 00:47

[ This blog was crossposted on Software Freedom Conservancy's website. ]

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I had the privilege of attending Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELC EU) and the OpenWrt Summit in Berlin, Germany earlier this month. I gave a talk (for which the video is available below) at the OpenWrt Summit. I also had the opportunity to host the first of many conference sessions seeking feedback and input from the Linux developer community about Conservancy's GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers.

ELC EU has no “BoF Board” where you can post informal sessions. So, we scheduled the session by word of mouth over a lunch hour. We nevertheless got an good turnout (given that our session's main competition was eating food :) of about 15 people.

Created
Wed, 28/09/2016 - 01:58
September 27, 2016 The Bonus Effect One Kind of Interest that Rewards Don’t Kill By Alfie Kohn For nearly half a century, research has raised troubling questions about the practice of dangling rewards in front of people to get them to do what we want. It doesn’t matter whether the people in question are male or female, children or adults. ... Read More
Created
Sat, 17/09/2016 - 22:36
EDUCATION WEEK September 07, 2016 On Punishment for Bullying — and Punishment as Bullying By Alfie Kohn   Bullying at school has attracted an enormous amount of attention, spurring academic studies and popular books, regulations and training sessions for educators. By now its status as a serious problem is widely acknowledged, as it should be. We can never go back ... Read More
Created
Sun, 11/09/2016 - 17:21

I’ve been a registered nurse for a mere six months now and am very aware of my ignorance. University did not teach me about the paperwork and associated procedures to arrange things like outpatient xrays. However I know I’ll figure that stuff out with experience. In the meantime …

Created
Tue, 06/09/2016 - 22:14
September 6, 2016 Do Our Expectations of Kids Aim Too High or Too Low? By Alfie Kohn “Old-school” parenting and teaching are often distinguished by a failure to understand what children are capable of doing or understanding, or to provide the support they need and the respect they deserve. But does that mean kids are being underestimated — or overestimated? ... Read More
Created
Fri, 02/09/2016 - 22:00

There are plenty of mailing list threads to read, and I don't actually recommend the one that I'm talking about. I think it went on too long, was far too “ad hominem” rather than real policy. Somewhere beneath the surface there was a policy discussion being shouted down; if you look close, you can find find it underneath.

As he always does, Jon Corbet did an excellent job finding the real policy details in the “GPL defence” ksummit-discuss thread, and telling us all about it. I am very hard on tech journalism, but when it comes to reporting on Linux specifically, Jon and his colleagues at lwn.net have been, for nearly two decades, always been real, detailed, and balanced (and not in the Fox News way) tech journalism.

Created
Tue, 16/08/2016 - 22:00

Last Friday, I gave the first keynote at GUADEC 2016. I was delighted for the invitation from the GNOME Foundation to deliver this talk, which I entitled Confessions of a command line geek: why I don’t use GNOME but everyone else should.

The Chaos Computer Club assisted the GUADEC organizers in recording the talks, so you can see here a great recording of my talk here (and also, the slides). Whether the talk itself is great — that's for you to watch and judge, of course.

Created
Fri, 05/08/2016 - 04:00

[ This blog was crossposted on Software Freedom Conservancy's website. ]

Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don't mean that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend at FOSDEM 2016, where he and I co-organize the Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues, Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).

Created
Fri, 22/07/2016 - 07:09
July 21, 2016 Choice By Alfie Kohn Here are two ways to abuse an idea: You can invoke it to pursue your own objectives, shamelessly exploiting the favorable associations it has accumulated over many years. Or you can create a caricature of the idea and then pretend you’ve shown it to be flawed. This pair of strategies has been used ... Read More
Created
Fri, 24/06/2016 - 06:09
June 23, 2016 The Failure of Failure By Alfie Kohn A few years ago, two researchers in Singapore published a study that compared the effect of traditional and progressive instruction in middle-school math. The traditional approach consisted of having students listen to lectures and individually solve practice problems with clearly defined right answers. The progressive approach was defined by collaboration, ... Read More
Created
Sat, 14/05/2016 - 06:00

I've posted in the past about the Oracle vs. Google case. I'm for the moment sticking to my habit of only commenting when there is a clear court decision. Having been through litigation as the 30(b)(6) witness for Conservancy, I'm used to court testimony and why it often doesn't really matter in the long run. So much gets said by both parties in a court case that it's somewhat pointless to begin analyzing each individual move, unless it's for entertainment purposes only. (It's certainly as entertaining as most TV dramas, really, but I hope folks who are watching step-by-step admit to themselves that they're just engaged in entertainment, not actual work. :)

Created
Sun, 17/04/2016 - 22:28
BOSTON GLOBE April 17, 2016 Men Are Still Paying for Women on Dates? By Alfie Kohn [NOTE:  This is the complete version of an essay that was abridged for publication in the Boston Globe‘s Sunday Magazine.] Imagine that a committed feminist woke up last week from a decades-long coma. She looks around and finds that considerable consciousness-raising has taken place ... Read More
Created
Tue, 29/03/2016 - 04:27
SALON March 28, 2016 Trumped What You-Know-Who’s Success Says About Our Country’s Addiction to Competition By Alfie Kohn There is one overriding story this election season, and it concerns how Donald Trump has confounded pundits who assumed he was the kind of joke people would laugh at rather than vote for. It’s the story of how the media cover him ... Read More
Created
Sun, 13/03/2016 - 23:50

I'm finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using this this USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I've been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she's at work, and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did discover this bug after it had already been closed but had to pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn't moved to testing.

Created
Sun, 13/03/2016 - 00:21
March 12, 2016 The Overselling of Ed Tech By Alfie Kohn Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that the idea of using digital technology in the classroom tends to be either loved or hated. After all, anything that’s digital consists only of ones or zeroes. By contrast, my own position is somewhere in the middle, a location where I don’t often ... Read More