Interesting Links 21 June 2010
By rough count I went through 160 Tweets to cull out the interesting links for today’s post. It makes me wonder if I tweet too much. Of course for me Twitter is a lot about the conversation which explains a lot of that number. I hope for conversations here in the comments of this blog as well. So I hope if you read something here or in another post that you disagree with, find interesting, or disturbing, or which needs amplification or clarification you will leave a comment or two.
While I’m taking care of house keeping, the URL of this blog has changed to https://blogs.msdn.com /b/ AlfredTh The new piece is the /b in the middle. There are redirects in place so people will hopefully get to the right place using old links. But if you have a link to this blog (and I really appreciate those of you who do) if you get a few minutes could you update the link there? It makes life easier for the search engines. Thanks!
Kathleen Weaver @kathweaver) gave a mini-talk about XNA Programming during a teacher workshop she was attending. On her blog she listed the handout matterials she talked about. Good links there
From Alec Couros (@courosa) a list of the "Best and Free Programming Ebooks with Open Source Licenses" Some interesting looking C# and PowerShell books there among others.
Hilary Pike (@HilaryP) Twittered that NerdGirls has put out a casting call. What is a Nerd Girl? YOU are. Check them out: https://www.nerdgirls.com Apply now with your eng + awesome
Matt MacLaurin (@mmaclaurin) tweeted about a wonderful Kodu storytelling class in England https://sites.google.com/site/koduxperts/
Small Basic has been reviewed in Engadget Microsoft Small Basic gets a stable release, aims to inspire a new generation of programmers
From the Imagine Cup US twitter account (@imaginecupus) Video – View the top 5 features in MS PowerPoint 2010 (via @Ch9)
I run some occasional post in the Educators Royal Treatment blog. This week I wrote a post about getting the most from ISTE. Do you have any suggestions to add in the comments? And don’t forget that Microsoft has a lot going on at ISTE. Check out my ISTE preview post for more information.
Have you ever wondered about the people who work behind the scenes to get features into products? You may find this article interesting then - Professor’s Laser Focus Gets Mathematics into Office 2010
Lynn Langit has been working with an after school program to teach programming using Small Basic. Her recap post is at - Teaching Kids Programming – After School Class Lessons Learned
Explaining why we reinvent software is a blog post by Mark Guzdial that is the single best job of explaining why we have students write code to solve problems that have been solved and for which libraries exist. IF a student has ever asked “why are you making us write sorts when there are functions to do that already?” this post will help you prepare your answer. Don’t miss it.