Interesting Links July 27th 2009
Computers and vision – what’s up with that? Things we do with our eyes without out a seconds thought are difficult for computers. From Scott Lum (@scottlum) I learned about a page outlining Computer imaging & vision projects from Microsoft Research Fascinating stuff.
Paolo Barone (@pbarone) lives and works in the UK but he’s from Rome Italy so he finds stuff like this - The Gismondy model of Ancient Rome powered by Silverlight and Deepzoom Just fascinating. I see this as the sort of technology usage that has great potential for teaching and learning. Show it to your friends who teach history or who are interested in things Roman.
Paolo also recommended DeepMoon the biggest DeepZoom composition in the known universe for all you lunar explorers and astronomers.
Lots of people wonder about Windows 7 for education. With so many schools sticking with XP for so long they wonder what’s in Windows 7 for them. Scott Thompson (@K20_Education) recorded a video demo of Windows 7 for education as part of this blog post on the subject.
Are you bummed out about Popfly going away? So am I. The good news is that you can download and play Popfly Games Offline So check out this post on Coding 4 Fun and get your games while there is still time.
Most people who are interested in the intersection of robots, science fiction and ethics are familiar with Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics. According to this article in Wired magazine Robo-Ethicists Want to Revamp Asimov’s 3 Laws. What an interesting and relevant topic of discussion for a computer science class, computer scientists in general, and really anyone concerned about the future of human machine interactions.
Now I happen to believe there are other and more important reasons to pick a college degree or even a career than money. But if you are interested in money this article on the Best Undergrad College Degrees By Salary May be of interest to you. A lot of technology in those degrees but they all have a need for math. So pay attention in math class everyone!
The CSTA blog post titled Summer Learning for Teachers talked mainly about summer learning opportunities for teachers. But I found the comments on learning by doing not just by reading to be especially meaningful to me. Closely related was the articles on what it is like to be a student I linked to last week.
Speaking of CSTA, the Speaker Presentations from the 2009 CS&IT Symposium are up now available online. SO if you didn’t make it to the CS & IT Symposium, or you did but missed some talks or you did and you want links to what people talked about head on over.
New last week as the announcement of Microsoft education labs with projects to help educators. The first announcement was a Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle. Check out the site and the Microsoft Education Labs blog for more news on a regular basis. Seriously if you are into technology in education you’ll want to track what is going on here.
Now a blog for something I wrote in another blog I maintain. While I don’t post there as often I like to write about social networking and social computing at Live Spaces. Recently I posted something there about how Twitter is something I use for professional development and keeping up with education news and events. The post is called Twitter Is My Virtual Faculty Lounge. Please take a look and leave a comment if you have something to add or want to straighten me out.
Microsoft New England Research & Development (yes, Microsoft NERD) has a blog. Read about their summer high school interns. I’ve been hoping to see more intern opportunities for high school students outside the Redmond WA area for years. So I’ll be watching this summer closely. I’ve met these interns and they are really great kids. I hope they enjoy their internships and learn a lot.