Useful Links June 8 2009

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I was on jury duty for most of this week. That took up quite a bit of my time and I didn’t have much time for blogging, Twittering or much else of what I usually do during my work days. I did manage to collect a few good links though. Some came from Twitter (follow me @AlfredTwo), come came from email, some from blogs and some from my own browsing of the Internet. Here are the best of them. I hope you find something useful here.

A couple of things showed up around Expression products I found this Lap Around Microsoft Expression Blend

This video presentation demonstrates the Expression Blend tool and its different features. The presenter talks about items such as data binding, control templates and animations.

From @pbarone and @dFate I found a link to these Free Expression Web Video Tutorials For Beginners

I ran into two different sites for teaching copyright and Intellectual Property issues. One is from Microsoft and one for the Electronic Freedom Foundation

NCWIT (@NCWIT) Had a number of good career related links:

Microsoft’s demo of Natal was a big hit at the E3 conference last week. I found several interesting links related to that:

  • Here is the first demo of  Microsoft's Project Natal motion-sensing technology in action.  Controller? Who needs a controller?
  • The Milo demo with Natal shows a person interacting with a character in a game through the game reading body language and things the person says. Really cool computer person interaction

Mark Guzdial (@guzdial) Had an interesting post which stirred some controversy and had some fairly upset replies in the comments. The provocative title was The Responsibility of APCS for the Decline of Enrollment in Undergraduate Computer Science It is really worth the read including the replies in the comments.

Last week Blake Handler  "The Road to Know Where" emailed me a link to a set of templates for use in teacher to parent communications. I think many teachers will find them quite useful.

The Computer Science teachers Association sent out an email  this week asking for teachers to participate in a survey about teaching computing concepts using "toys."

In this survey, the term “toy” is used very loosely. A “toy” might be an actual toy, but it could also be a story or poem, paper and pencil activity, food item, an object found around the house, or any one of an endless list of possibilities. The students themselves could be the objects

Clint Rutkas (@ClintRutkas) Twittered breaking into the game industry - bungie tools engineer talks about getting into the business. Note that  he says  "have something to show." Students can use tools like XNA to create a portfolio of games to show what they can do.

Clint also Twittered a link to this article called Dawn of the Personal Computer: From Altair to the IBM PC that lists a lot of the early  PCs and shows some of the history behind  them.

Microsoft Research (@MSFTResearch) Provides a link to an article titled: Microsoft’s DigiGirlz Day Helps Girls Tackle Tech