Month: March 2011

Zaid Ali Alsagoff shared his discovery of schoology.com at last week’s Wednesday presentation on #CCK11 so I’ve posted the link in a blog post “You’ve got an “Ology”? on the Swansea Learning Lab community blog. We also discussed lecture capture at a pan-Wales meeting today, and I included a postscript about the CCK11 model of meeting capture with Elluminate.

Brits of a certain age, will need no explanation for the title of this post. By way of explanation, for my younger and oversees readers, I include this video, a classic TV ad starring Maureen Lipmann, from before British Telecom became BT,

Don Knuth, another of my heroes, recently gave the 2011 Turing Lecture at the IET in Savoy Place using an interesting approach: “Ask me Anything!”. I wish I’d been there.

Turing Lecture 2011: An evening with Don Knuth – all questions answered Professor Don Knuth This years Turing Lecture is delivered by Donald E. Knuth, Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University.   2011-01-26 00:00:00.0 IT Channel >> go to webcast >> recommend to friend

In London, Don was struggling with a cough but manfully answered all the questions. A week later, he repeated the performance at Machester and seems much more relaxed — not only in his dress. So there is clearly some benefit to being up north (if on the wrong side of the Pennines).

I saw Downes’ commentary Networked Blogs ~ CCK11 on the CCK11 discussion page which talks about someone who suggested in the CCK11 Facebook group that NetworkedBlogs could syndicate from my Blog to the CCK11 group. So I thought I’d set it up as a trial. If it has worked, this post should appear on my Facebook wall, in my Twitter stream and in the CCK11 group.

This may not be so useful if the NetworkedBlogs app only works in the FB walled garden because, as Downes says in a comment to his original thread on getting RSS feeds out of Facebook for syndication into the CCK11 MOOC: “This is the major problem with Facebook – data goes in, but it never comes out.”

I’ve been gorging on new technology this week. It all started with Episode 6 of Doug Crockford’s “Crockford on JavaScript“, an excellent series of evening Yahoo! technical talks that on the history of programming and the JavaScript language that originally ran between January and March 2010. Episode 6, “Loopage”, recorded last August, is a sequel of sorts that covers the JavaScript event-loop, (one of my heros) Grace Murray Hopper, and the problems of concurrency and network latency.

The JavaScript even-loop is an important part of the web browser and it is now available on the server courtesy of Google’s open-source V8 JavaScript engine, developed for Chrome, and the new Node.js library. Following this I watched several other episodes of the collection of technical talks from the YUI Theatre collection, including interesting a couple of talks on the benefits of running JavaScript on the server and client, node.js itself, HTML5, and YUI3. There’s a nice retrospective of the YUI Theatre collection for 2010 in net.tuts+ and a good series of screencasts by Pedro Teixeira on a new site called NodeTuts.

Yahoo! may be suffering from an identity crisis at the top, but its team of web developers and JavaScript evangelists are second to none and the quality of their offerings on the Yahoo! Tech Dev web site and YUI theatre are excellent. Tech heads should go along and expect to spend a while there. Highly recommended.

My personal highlights (in some kind of thematic order are):

• Douglas Crockford — the whole of Crockford on JavaScript (so good it has its own website).
• Ryan Dahl — Node.js Roadmap.
• Douglas Crockford — Crockford on JavaScriptScene 6: Loopage.
• Dav Glass — Node.js + YUI 3.
• Matt Taylor — YUI 3 & Node.js for JavaScript View Rendering on Client or Server.
• Allen Rabinovich — The Many Hats of the Frontend Engineers.
• Tantek Çelik — HTML5: Right Here, Right Now.

There are so many more to watch that I’m in nerd heaven.