Joshua Allen Holm

A few years back, I wrote a paper, for a graduate class on the foundations of education, about women in CS education, so I'm not surprised by what happened to that high schooler. It is far too common in CS education. The mother's advice was pretty good, I thought. I'm not going to read the comments, my blood pressure couldn't take it. Based on the updates, I'm sure there are plenty of charming folks trying to justify what the teacher & principal did (well, didn't do) and blaming the victim.

<a href="http://findingada.com/">Ada Lovelace Day</a> is next month (October 15th). I hope people take the opportunity to make things better for women in the STEM disciplines.

I look forward to seeing how the University of Maryland's pilot program for open source textbooks turns out. As a student, I've had mixed experiences with 'textbooks' compiled from online sources. Some classes have been very good, while others were terrible. The good classes were good because the instructor made sure to check to make sure all the online material was still available. I've, unfortunately, taken classes where the 'textbook' was nothing more than a collection of broken hyperlinks. One poorly thought out class had the instructor tell us that we didn't need to buy the print versions of the textbook because the texts were all available online for free. Then test time came and we needed the paper versions of the books to take the test! It was a language class, so the texts in question were a grammar and dictionary, and electronic versions couldn't be used to take the test. Fair enough, but don't tell the students they can save money by using the online stuff only to end up requiring the printed textbooks.

BTW, your link to the open textbook article is broken. It is linking to opensource.com instead of diamondbackonline.com because there is no domain name in the link. Here is a <a href="http://www.diamondbackonline.com/article_220ab632-1415-11e3-8930-0019bb30f31a.html">working link</a> for anyone interested.