Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Latest Interesting Links September 1 2009

August was something else for me. I had some travel. I had a lot of work. And I did some things around the house. That’s what August is for right? You may or may not have noticed but blogging was a little lighter than usual for me in August. Only the third time in the last close to four years that I posted fewer than 20 posts in a month. I’m trying to work on quality over quantity. Judging by the large numbers of comments it may be that I am improving. I hope so. I want to provide value, provoke discussion, and ideally build a little bit of community. It’s a work in progress.

Community leads me to my first link of the week entry. Scott McLeod is continuing his PUSH to get links to top blogs in PK-12 education. Last week one item he was looking for was excellent PK-12 business and computer science education blogs. Mine is there as are several I have listed on the side of my blog. We could use many more though so I hope if you know some you will contribute. They are looking for a lot of other subject matter blogs as well so jump on in. Thanks!

Are you still running Internet Explorer 6 at your school or on your home computer? Time to upgrade. Microsoft is donating 16 meals to Feeding America for everyone who upgrades from IE 6 to IE 8. They are donating 8 meals if you upgrade something else. If nothing else this should be an incentive to at least give IE 8 a try. I’m using it and have been since early beta.

I get the occasional question about people who want to teach and/or learn something of the more important, key features of Silverlight 3. Well a number of hands on labs were developed for and with the National University of Singapore and they are available now. in a hands-on manner I am hopeful that well see more soon so keep looking here for news.

I love the Computer History Museum and recently came across a small Photo Gallery showing some of the  weird, fascinating objects including a giant Cray super computer and a 60Kg hard drive that they have on display. You can’t see it in any of those pictures but some of the early military computers actually had ashtrays and cigarette lighters built into the console tables. My how things have changed!

WIPTE.ORG is running an educational video contest. $3000 for 3 Minutes: Tablet PC in Edu Video Contest from WIPTE.ORG Check it out if you use Tablet PCs in your school or classroom.

Well Popfly is not mostly gone which makes me very sad. But the Popfly Game Engine Code has been released on Codeplex under the MS-PL.

Also last week I found http://robotevents.com/ "The community portal for robotics and education" Looks like some good links.

Foundations of Digital Games conference calls for papers are out. It will not be on a ship this year which is good for people who could not convince deans and principals and business manager that it was a real conference. Some of us will miss the ship venue however.

BTW Microsoft has opened a new higher education portal for faculty, students and administrators at http://www.microsoft.com/education/highered/

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