Recent Posts

A popular subject on Flickr is the so called 365 pictures project in which individuals or groups take and upload a picture a day. I’ve decided to have a go myself, but couldn’t add the snaps taken at the 30th Pontardawe Festival last Sunday, because that would have left two days without a photo! However, the Sunday night headliners, Transglobal Underground, were just too good to ignore, so here’s a mosaic from Flickr which you can click on to go to the Album. There are/will be more pictures from Pontardawe 2008 on Flickr and Picasa.

Nat Torkington lives in New Zealand and has spent the last couple of years volunteering as a sysadmin, computer club organizer, and teacher at his local primary school. He shares his experiences of teaching programming to 8-12 year olds in his blog (and also on O’Reilly Radar) as well as in this inspirational talk from OSCON 2008. His conclusion, a call to arms for geeks everywhere to help their local schools, is inspirational. But I was struck in particular by his observation that girls in this age group are better than boys in most skills required to be successful programmers: what happens between primary school and University that so drastically reduces their interest in ICT and, by extension, the other sciences?

A video of Nat’s keynote, hosted at blip.tv is syndicated here:[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/AcXjb4T3Pg]

Today was first day back “at work” and I’ve spent much of it catching up on OSCON 2008, O’Reilly’s annual open source conference, which was this year held in Portland Oregon between July 21-25. Greg Pollack of the RailsEnvy Podcast has made a nice video introduction to the conference (OSCON in 37 minutes) in which he gets various luminaries and speakers to introduce their talks and so provide a nice lead-in to the presentations, most of which are on-line, and the keynotes which were video-recorded and made available for syndication via blip.tv.

This video, from the YouTube series “Simon’s Cat” was featured on last week’s Culture Show on BBC 2 [in the UK]. There are two others, equally great and hopefully more to come. All cat lovers will get a shiver of recognition when watching this!

http://widgets.vodpod.com/w/video_embed/Groupvideo.1409152

more about “Simon’s Cat ‘TV Dinner’“, posted with vodpod

In an new post from the Swansea Learning Lab we are pointed to some videos from Blackboard which showcase new features in the planned 2009-2010 release of Blackboard. I watched the videos, and in a comment on the videos, I noted a trend within Blackboard that reminds me of the famous 1994 memo “Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet” sent by J Allard to Microsoft executives. This memo was a call to embrace, extend, and innovate [the Internet] in order to make Windows the platform of choice in the newly visible “wired up” world. It was later alleged by the U.S. Department of Justice, that within Microsoft, this mantra became embrace, extend, and destroy.

Blackboard seems to have a similar strategy in the e-learning space. Innovations from Web 2.0 are embraced, extended and, if not destroyed, at least assimilated. Even the title of of the new Blackboard product Blackboard NG [NG = next generation] brings to mind those other great assimilators, the Borg. Resistance is futile?

Pictured L-R: Matt Smith BSc, Mark Davies BSc, Mark Ireland BSc, Russell Morris BSc.

Today was graduation day for the students in the Information, Computing and Communcations Technology discipline at the School of Engineering at Swansea University. Congratulations to the new Bachelors of Science Matt, Mark, Mark and Russell. Russell was also presented with the W.G. Isaacs Prize for best project. Congratulations and good look to you all! More pictures from the day will be posted on Facebook and Flickr.

As reported yesterday, I’ve been catching up with a number of presentations from the Google I/O 2008 conference. However, I just had to draw particular attention to one of the highlights which is this recording of a very entertaining presentation from Chris di Bona who is Open Source Programs Manager at Google. In an engaging, anecdotal style, Chris covers the history and philosophy of Open Source (which includes a name check for Swansea’s very own Alan Cox) and how Google relies on it, promotes it and develops some of its own. The video is on and the original link to the talk includes the slides (which I assume are re-usable).

Technorati Tags: self, video, google, io2008, open source software, google

Today, I discovered Blog Networks after reading Sarah Parez’s posting “Blog Networks like MyBlogLog for Facebook” on ReadWriteWeb. Blog Networks is a new Facebook application that allows you to embed your favourite blogs (including your own) into your Facebook profile so that your friends can read and rate your thoughts and the thoughts of others that you value. An interesting feature is that the easiest way to claim ownership of your own blog is to get your friends to verify that you own it which is both a social and viral way of getting the word out.

The picture illustrates my set up with ReadWriteWeb, O’Reilly Radar, Technology in Teaching, Lifehacker and of course Fresh and Crispy. Blog Feeds comes with a set of popular widely read blogs to choose from and you can easily add your own or other people’s. Presumably, friends see and can comment on the latest articles in your minifeed. If nothing else, it’s be a useful way to share RSS feeds without mentioning RSS!

Last month Google hosted the first of its Google I/O conferences in San Francisco. I’d like to report that I was there, but I wasn’t (although I did watch the keynote the day after it was given). The video recordings of the speakers (hosted on YouTube) and their slides (mostly shared on Google Docs) that have been on-line for a few weeks now. With term finally over, I can become a virtual conference delegate and today was my first chance to catch up with some of the more interesting talks. If you’ve been following me on Twitter you’ll note that I watched/will be watching:

• Steve Yegge’s presentation on Server-Side Scripting with Rhino [more philosophy than technology]
• Guido van Rossum’s demonstration of the Google App Engine
• Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman (Google) telling the world about Google’s open source project hosting platform
• Aaron Boodman’s and Chris Prince’s talks about [Google] Gears and its potential for implementing parts of HTML 5 and extending the web browser
• John Skidgel and Lindsey Simon on engaging web app users [with Google App Engine, but I’m sure that the lessons are universal] and
• Josh Bloch on the new Effective Java book.

There are lots more talks to view and lessons to be learnt, and it’d be great if more big companies and conference organizers did this sort of thing.

More travels with my bike … this time a swift 15 minute ride to Verdi’s at Mumbles for an espresso after dinner. Sunny day (not many of those this June) and lovely views over the Bay towards the University, Swansea and Port Talbot.