Those that have read my blog know that I do get on my soapbox from time to time about the state of education in the United States.  I can't help but be concerned about the future for America's young adults.  Too many students are not opting to stay in school to continue their education. If U.S. students continue their lack of motivation in pursuing an education, I can't help but be gloomy on America's place in the 21st century as a world leader.

Taking a different viewpoint, BusinessWeek recently posted an article on academics in the United States stating that U.S. schools are not doing that bad.  The schools could be doing better, but they're not terrible.  The article uses the Two Million Minutes documentary as its backdrop.  The BusinessWeek author points out that academic performance doesn't always dictate the sucess a person may have in the world of business.

But things aren't as dire for U.S. students as they might appear in the documentary. As an academic, I have been researching engineering education and have taught many graduates of Indian, Chinese, and American universities. It can take longer for Indians and Chinese to develop crucial real-world skills that come more easily for some Americans. Yes, U.S. teens work part-time, socialize, and party. But the independence and social skills they develop give them a big advantage when they join the workforce. They learn to experiment, challenge norms, and take risks.

Google Code: "Google Summer of Code 2008 is on! Over the past three years, the program has brought together over 1500 students and 2000 mentors from 90 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. This year, we're welcoming 1125 student contributors and 175 Free and Open Source projects into the program. You can find out more about each participating organization and abstracts of their accepted students' proposals by visiting each organization's page, below. We'll be posting regular news about the program to the Google Open Source Blog."

Complete Story

The Google Highly Open Participation Contest ended after a hive of stunning work over two months. SilverStripe begun with 60 tasks, and because students get paid for each successfully completed task, SilverStripe had to seek numerous times for Google to increase the funding to enlarge the contest based on unanticipated student demand. In the end, about 180 tasks were completed, three times the initial expectation.

In the few weeks since CMSReport wrote about the launch of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, open source CMS projects SilverStipe, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone have been having a field day.

SilverStripe has been working hard to teach, mentor and review work by students, resulting in batch of new themes and drag-n-drop widgets available for download. A new release came out today with CMS administration translated in a variety of new languages contributed by students. They've had to double the number of challenges for students because the uptake has been so great that tasks have been completed much quicker than anticipated.

Drupal has recieved a dozen of code patches, improvements, videos and other completed tasks, and much like SilverStripe, has also been adding lots of new tasks to keep up with a real thirst for work by the students.