Pedagogue blog

This tool could prove useful for non-confidential office-hours or group discussion projects: Launch the Userplane Webchat. It’s free, but ad-supported.

Here’s a guide to teaching turing by actually programing your own Turing machines.

A very useful
Download.

This looks like an interesting study:

U.C. Berkeley, birthplace of early search highflier Inktomi and the school where Google CEO Eric Schmidt got his computer science doctoral degree, is bringing together roughly 20 faculty members from various departments to cross-pollinate work on search technology, said Robert Wilensky, the center’s director. The principal areas of focus: privacy, fraud, multimedia search and personalization.

It’s difficult in a classroom setting to deal with issues of search when teaching students how to partake in academic research. Many of them gravitate towards Google or Yahoo! immediately, without really evaluating the sources in any way. Google Scholar seems to be an interesting movement to a better way of doing this, by limiting these searches to a source pool that is better evaluated, but it’s not very useful because of the way it is limited.

Here’s a good overview article from PC Mag focusing on wikis as collaboration tools:

If your project team needs to develop a proposal together, or your school friends want to jointly create a reunion Web site, you don’t need to purchase expensive collaboration software. Instead, you can create a wiki. Anyone who has spent time at Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org ) or other wikis (the name is derived from a Hawaiian word for “quick”) knows them as sites where users can both add content, using any Web browser, and edit other people’s content. Most wiki engines provide basic features such as creating and deleting pages, bullet lists, headings, emphasis, indentation, and horizontal lines. And you can find plenty of information on the Web about text formatting rules and wiki style and structure guides.

Note to self: when that bewildered look appears on a person’s face when I say wiki, direct that person here.

Read the entirety of this post. Here’s an excerpt:

In 2004, they required the HP Compaq Business Notebook nw8000 of all incoming Freshman, at a pricetag of over $3200 each. Doesn’t matter if it’s the best price, or the most suitable machine, or what the student is familiar with: they all have to have identical machines.

Why? Because it makes life easier on them.

Easier isn’t always better.

Tech question for everyone out there: I know how to nicely grab a list of all settings and installed applications in OS X by going to System Profiler and Save As…, choosing to save in either rich text format, XML, or text. Is there a similar way in Windows XP to grab this info? Right now I am simply going to the Programs folder, selecting all, and pasting into a text document, but this lacks all the preferences and system information. Any ideas?

This InfoWorld group of articles on Open Source in Business may prove to be a useful resource for educators looking to work Open Source into the classroom. I know several years ago, there was a strong feeling that Open Source was the wrong way to go in an academic setting, as outside support wasn’t easily available, and usually only one person on staff specialized in learning the software, so if that person quit or was out sick all kinds of managerial problems arose. I think the winds are changing now, however, and that this needs to be revisited.

This is pretty cool:

It comes from this site, which I found via peering at the code of this page.

If I had access to editing the template here, I would add this ticker somewhere other than the body of this post. In any case, this looks to be a good resource for educational RSS feeds.

I keep getting this error after editing the last post:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/edublogs/public_html/wp-inst/wp-includes/comment-functions.php:515) in /home/edublogs/public_html/wp-inst/wp-admin/post.php on line 110

Any ideas?