Nice video about “connected learning” — the latest incarnation of the idea that teachers should teach students how to find and evaluate information, so that students can find and connect ideas on the web themselves to create a customized learning experience. I’m sure it works well if everyone involved is honest, committed, energetic, and altruistic, but then, so would communism 
As with any social innovation, the key question is how it will perform in the hands of people who aren’t fired up about it. Sadly, that one’s left unanswered…
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Or should I say, what can SE do to help us stop (or at least mitigate) climate change? Jon Pipitone has posted a summary of a brainstorming session from a couple of weeks ago, and would welcome your thoughts.
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I’m very pleased to pass on Adam Goucher’s announcement that he and Tim Riley (of Mozilla) will be helming a sequel to Beautiful Code called Beautiful Testing. Proceeds will go to Nothing But Nets, which provides mosquito nets to malaria-infested regions in Africa. BT will be the third “sequel”, joining Beautiful Architecture (due out any day now) and Beautiful Data (which is just getting rolling). Congratulations!
Beautiful Code
Regular readers will know that I cheered this one…
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Turns out logging companies in Brazil have attempted to subvert quotas on how much they’re allowed to cut by hiring hackers to break into government computers and increase their numbers. *sigh*
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Great post from Carl Zimmer: after writing an article about the evolution of the human face, he received a slew of letters of letters from creationists in Tennessee (pretty clearly coordinated by someone). His reply is an excellent summary of the evidence for evolution, and an even better example of how to speak truth to nonsense.
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BoingBoing finally noticed the “camel has two humps” study, in which Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat claimed that a simple test could tell whether someone would be a good programmer or not before they’d ever written a single line of code. They mention at the bottom that Jonathan Lung, Jorge Aranda, Steve Easterbrook, and I were unable to replicate the original study’s results. I suppose that’s fame of a sort…
(Footnote: the title of the BoingBoing article comes from the claim in Dehnadi and Bornat’s work that good programmers are people who are comfortable with programs being intrinsically meaningless. Even if their test doesn’t work, it’s a useful point…)
Research
InfoQ has an article on “Writing a Textual DSL (Domain Specific Language) Using Oslo“, which is Microsoft’s whiffy new sort-of-extensible programming system. It makes Scheme (and even Ruby) look pretty…
Extensible Programming
Via DDJ, the results of uTest’s first bug battle: over 1,330 uTesters from 68 countries competed to see who could find bugs in IE8, Firefox 3.1 beta and Google Chrome. They found a total of 672 bugs, 101 of which were showstoppers; top honors go to Prashanti G. Bharathwaj (pro) and Pranshu Pushpam (novice).
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The Science and Entertainment Exchange hopes to bring a little scientific reality to Hollywood. I wonder if it’ll be more effective than science lessons for MPs…
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