“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” — Albert EinsteinScience should be taught as a verb, not only as a noun. Doing science is a compelling and effective way to learn. It is through the process of exploration, creation, and invention th…
“We have become quantum mechanics — engineering and exploring the properties of quantum states. We’re paving the way for the future nanotechnicians.” — Donald M. Eigler, IBM FellowUnderstanding how things work in the microscopic world is fundament…
It looks as if our open letter to President Obama isn’t alone. A recent post on Ars Technica kindly points us to another open letter from a group of open source vendors and advocates calling for the new administration to consider open source software in government IT initiatives and infrastructure. Of course, we’ve been thinking […]
Ruby is a powerful and dynamic open-source object-oriented language we have been using extensively at CC in the last few years for the web applications that manage and coordinate authoring and deployment of activities based on the SAIL/OTrunk framework. The standard Ruby VM is written in C and we’ve been using version 1.8.6, the latest […]
Welcome back. As we at the Concord Consortium begin to make more regular posts to our blog, I’m not exactly certain whom I’m welcoming back more: you as our readers, or ourselves as bloggers. Either way, we’re pleased to have you as part of the conversation. And we have plenty to talk about, as our […]
The next version of Java being developed is v1.7.0 and the OpenJDK version is being released as open source under the GPL license. I’ve written a wiki page describing how to build and install this new version of Java on Mac OS 10.5.6. Build OpenJDK Java 1.7.0 on Mac OS X 10.5
Moore’s Law has been the golden rule in predicting the increasing of personal computing power for more than a decade, but change has arrived. A couple of years ago, Amdahl’s Law became the governing law (without an inauguration). Multicore computing is…
Photonics is a difficult subject because it involves electromagnetism that is basically an invisible and unintuitive world to many students. Yet this is a promising and thriving technical field where many jobs are being created.Computer simulation of l…
SecondLife has drawn extensive interest among educators. It is an attractive immersive environment for multiple users to interact with each other through navigating in an interesting 3D landscape. SecondLife represents the latest effort of developing 3…
The basic concepts of evolutionary theory are contained in the National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, Washington, DC, 1966) as well as those of the various states. For example, in the table below we show the alignment between the “big ideas” of evolution and the science standards for three states: Massachusetts, Missouri, and Texas. […]