This week I returned from the UAE only to head down to London and then immediately back up to Doncaster for the Open Source Schools Think Tank (#osschools) and TeachMeet Yorkshire & Humber 2010 (#tmyh2010), respectively. They were both great events and I was very kindly put up by Dughall McCormick (@dughall) on Friday night, allowing me to attend the TeachMeet. 😀
I’m delighted to have seen references on other blogs to this series of weekly posts and I’m glad people find them so useful!
Tech.
Tuesday 24th March was Ada Lovelace day. Whilst I knew a bit about her and her role as the first ‘computer programmer’ I found this BrainPOP video very useful. 🙂
MeBeam allows you to have up to 16 people in a Skype videoconference. Handy!
I don’t often disagree with the conclusions Lifehacker comes to, but saying that “[Google] Chrome for OS X is still much too young for full-time adoption” whereas Firefox is great is not true in my opinion. One of the reasons I switched to Chrome (whilst still in Alpha!) was not only because of its speed but because Firefox was crashing several times a day, despite reinstalling, etc.
Turns out money is only a factor in happiness if you’re earning significantly more than your friends/acquaintances. Time to start focusing on other stuff, methinks… 😉
Seth Godin asks, ‘What’s a lot?’ and ‘What’s enough?’ Important questions both.
Ben Grey and Angela Maiers presented this week on Literacy in a Digital Age. Wish I could have been there as I respect both of them hugely (and it’s very, very related to my Ed.D. thesis!)
According to a 1984 paper cited by Nathan Yau at FlowingData, scatter charts are the easiest to decode in terms of representations of quantitative data. Bar charts and pie charts come next. Although probably not 3D ones produced by M$ PowerPoint… 😉
It turns out, somewhat unsurprisingly, that if you’re a kid you don’t want the misfortune to have been born in Afghanistan. It kind of affects your life chances:
Online dating is not only bigger than porn, but involves more lies and involves shorter courtships. Wow!
Right, I want you to recite Pi to 100 places. Oh, and balance 15 books on your head. Whilst solving a Rubik’s cube. What do you mean, No problem?! (my wife asked if she’s got a boyfriend – probably a fair observation…)
I’m delighted to announce on behalf of EdTechRoundUp that we’ll be having a (completely online) ‘TeachMeet’ on Sunday 6th December 2009. It’s called TeachMeet ETRU edition 09 and will hopefully be the first of many!
If you’re not too sure what a TeachMeet is, watch the excellent explanatory video by the BrainPOP team below:
Please do sign up to do a 7-minute ‘micro’ presentation, a 2-minute ‘nano’ presentation or to be an ‘enthusiastic lurker’. The idea is that we’ll be using Adobe Connect Pro for the TeachMeet. Presentations can be done live, but I for one will be pre-recording mine! 🙂
I noticed that TeachMeet Falkirk had a QR code* to make life a bit easier for those publicising the event. Here’s one containing the URL of TeachMeet ETRU edition 09
Finally, please remember to include the tag TMETRU09 when discussing the TeachMeet on Twitter, uploading Flickr photos, YouTube videos or blogging about it! 😀
* A QR code, for those who don’t know, is kind of a barcode that stores information – in this case the URL of the wiki page (more at Wikipedia). Try it by downloading the software from qrcode.kaywa.com.