Interesting Links August 18 2009

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I hope I’m not the only one who sometimes pre-judges a link based on how sent it to them. I know better but still when I first viewed this link to a video about ordering pizza in the future I thought to myself “This is a polemic against Obama, the Democrats and the liberal “nanny state.”  because is came from someone who is not fan of the left. Then I took a close look at the URL. The video is from the ACLU – hardly a bastion of the far right. But of course the ACLU is noted for its defense of privacy and this is an area which can make from some strange bedfellows. Regards of who put it out I think it is an interesting take on data privacy. A very useful link for this discussion is also Kim Cameron’s Laws of Identity.

One of the younger and much hipper members of the Microsoft academic team, DeVaris Brown just opened a new blog called Tales From the Road. Besides technology he'll be blogging about what his life as a technology evangelist is about. I'm subscribed.

Have you run into teachers who say "I'm not very good at computers." And then they laugh and wave their hand as it if were cute and acceptable? Read this blog post by Scott McLeod (on Twitter @mcleod) for a take on this attitude. And perhaps send the link to your principal.

Speaking of Scott McLeod are you aware of  THE PUSH project?

Every single day for at least the next two weeks, we work together to identify excellent subject-specific blogs that are useful to P-12 teachers. Why? Several reasons…

  • To identify blogs that P-12 teachers can use to initially seed (or expand) their RSS readers
  • To create a single location where P-12 educators can go to see excellent subject-oriented educational blogging
  • To highlight excellent disciplinary blogging that deserves larger audiences
  • To learn from disciplines other than our own and get ideas about our own teaching and/or blogging

If you know of great subject matter blogs that should be added to these lists please add them to the Moving Forward wiki.

Matt MacLaurin (@mmaclaurin) from the Kodu team posted a roundup of some outstanding Kodu projects on youtube.

Just in time for back to school, Microsoft recently redesigned their student page. Know students? Are a student? Check it out.

From the Microsoft Teacher Tech team (@TeachTec) a couple of announcements:

Ken Royal's beginning of the year tech tips look very helpful for teachers with labs that were “cleaned” over the summer. My question when I read Ken’s post was “Should school tech teams be training custodial staff on connecting/disconnecting computers and other technology? What do you think? Does your computer lab get messed up over the summer?

Interesting post by Mark Guzdial (@guzdial) about how we make decisions about CS1 on the Communications of the ACM blog. Well worth a read.