Archive for August, 2009
Monday, August 31st, 2009
Jason Cohen's latest post, titled "You're a little company, now act like one", points out that a startup's first customers are going to be early adopters who like living on the edge, not big corporations that expect marketing doublespeak in web sites. He ends by saying, "Be human. Stop hiding. ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Monday, August 31st, 2009
More resources for students interested in doing projects with Toronto's data this fall:
GeoGratis: a portal provided by the Earth Sciences Sector (ESS) of Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) which provides geospatial data at no cost and without restrictions via your Web browser.
The Cyclist Who Drew Toronto: five years of bike rides ...
Posted in Government 2.0 | No Comments »
Monday, August 31st, 2009
Adam Goucher was at Agile 2009 last week, and has been blogging the highlights. Two that particularly caught my eye were Arin Sime's talk "How to sell a traditional client on an Agile project plan" (which I've had to do from time to time to justify non-waterfall processes in software ...
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Monday, August 31st, 2009
In my experience, people often come to different conclusions not because they disagree on fundamentals, but because they weight the factors in play differently. Mark Guzdial's recent post about instructors backing away from his media-based approach to teaching computing is a case in point: as he says, "None of the ...
Posted in Teaching | No Comments »
Monday, August 31st, 2009
Andrew Petersen (a lecturer in computer science at the University of Toronto at Mississauga) has written a very good post about deciding whether or not to attend grad school. If you're starting your final lap as an undergrad, now's the time to start weighing your options, and Andrew's post is ...
Posted in Teaching | No Comments »
Sunday, August 30th, 2009
MarkUs, a Rails-based tool for marking student programming assignments, just released Version 0.5. MarkUs aims to provide the convenience and flexibility of pen-and-paper marking over the web; it will be deployed this fall at the University of Toronto, and is one of the eight cross-country open source projects we'll be ...
Posted in Basie, Student Projects, Teaching | No Comments »
Sunday, August 30th, 2009
I accumulated a few links this summer about gender equity in computing, particularly in open source. The two that bear re-reading are:
Robert Kaye reports on Kirrily Robert's OSCON keynote "Standing Out in the Crowd". Five years after Michelle Levesque and I looked at gender ratios in open source, the average ...
Posted in Equity | 2 Comments »
Sunday, August 30th, 2009
I'm planning to give my aging MacBook to my mother-in-law as a couch-top email machine, and am looking for a replacement. I don't do much programming any more (and when I do, I need more oomph than any truly portable machine can give me), so yesterday I checked out some ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »
Friday, August 28th, 2009
New article in NOW Magazine about Toronto being stuck in "version 1.0" when it comes to all things web. On the bright side, that means there's plenty of scope for our students to improve things...
Posted in Government 2.0 | No Comments »
Friday, August 28th, 2009
I had a good discussion yesterday with Jon Udell about goals for the students working with him this fall. He has since posted two very cool things:
Using FriendFeed to manage a loosely-coupled team. Jon admits he's an outlier, but I expect I'm going to learn a lot watching him work ...
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