Dale Dougherty
Dale Dougherty is founder and executive chairman of Maker Media, founder and publisher of Make: magazine, and co-founder of Maker Faire. Dale has been honored by the White House as a "Champion of Change." He's been instrumental in many of O'Reilly's most important efforts, including founding O'Reilly Media, Inc. with Tim O'Reilly. Prior to Make, he was the developer of Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first commercial website, launched in 1993 and sold to America Online in 1995. He was also developer and publisher of Web Review, the online magazine for Web designers from 1995-1999. Dale was publisher of the O'Reilly Network and he developed the Hacks series of books. He is the author of sed & awk.
The manufacturing future
Can the United States become more competitive as a maker of things?
Dale Dougherty weaves together recent commentary and his own first-hand observations from the manufacturing world. In this piece, he asks: What can we learn from China? Can the U.S. become more competitive as a maker of things?
Fast-tracking: Alternatives to college
How Zoho's internal program finds talent outside universities.
Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu discusses his company's internal "university," which brings in kids unlikely to attend college and uses self-learning to prep them for IT careers. Could the U.S. benefit from a similar model?
Make-offs: DIY indie innovations
How low-cost, open-source tools are energizing DIY.
With Maker Faire Bay Area scheduled for this weekend, we take a look at makers who are using low-cost, open-source tools to create sophisticated projects and experiments. The DIY movement in science and technology is demonstrating that it can do inexpensively what large companies and even Big Science have spent millions doing. I call them "make-offs," low-budget knock-offs of scientific and industrial technology built with off-the-shelf components.
What would technology do best for learning?
An evolving set of best practices would help educational technology projects
An evolving set of best practices could offer a big lift for educational technology projects. Established best practices could define standards of quality and help others avoid pitfalls. Toward that end, here's a collection of thoughts intended to help those developing their own projects.
A hunger for good learning
Take a few minutes to watch Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) talk about a makeover of the math curriculum in this TedxNYED session. Dan does a brilliant job of explaining why textbooks fail, why they don't help kids learn, why they should do less. I particularly like Dan's deconstruction of textbooks and teaching: be less helpful. His key insight is not to…
The iPad needs its HyperCard
Easy to use content creation tools are key to the iPad's long-term success.
Dale Dougherty says that for the iPad to be something different, it must not be just a delivery platform but a creative one. It needs to offer professionals and amateurs an opportunity to create a unique experience with interactive media.
The Lessons We Don't Learn
In my Twitter stream today, Sylvia Martinez (@smartinez) retweeted a link to Seymour Papert’s 1980 paper written for a Presidential commission that proposed that we provide a computer for every child in America. Long before One Laptop Per Child, Papert saw that computers should not be an “auxiliary” aid to learning but “fundamental” to changing how we learn. He understood that the computer by changing education could change our culture for the better. After thirty years, Papert’s call for action is still fresh today.
George Dyson's "Among the Machines" in Mountain View
Science historian, author and Make columnist George Dyson will give a lecture tonight on the "Evolution of Technology: Darwin Among the Machines." The talk will be at 7 p.m. at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Mountain View. The talk is part of a series hosted by NASA Ames centered around the concept of evolution in…
A More Public Role for Public Broadcasting: Education
Imagine a broadcast network in America that was dedicated to education, where the best educators had the opportunity to produce its programming, and where individuals as well as institutions could develop a new genre of wide-ranging educational programs? Educational programming could elevate the role of teaching in our culture and promote the value of lifelong learning. This blog post explores…