While this might be good for the student’s self-esteem, I worry that the technology gap between teachers and students is getting wider and wider. Five years ago I was teaching IT at a University in Japan. I took a really, I mean REALLY hard line on plagiarism. You see I was not the average Professor who had a ‘consumers’ view of the web. I’d been working with the Web since 1992, and I have a pretty good grasp of the technology. Using various tools, some free and some not, I pushed all my students assignments through various hoops to detect the plagiarists. The results were staggering, if not downright depressing. Over 50% of submissions contained some form of unreferenced uplift of content, from single paragraphs, to entire essays in some cases.

This was an International University with students from around the globe, the papers and assignments were not overly difficult, and certainly all the course material, if consumed, would enable any student to make a worthy submission. Despite this, half the students chose to use the web as an unreferenced source – the easy way out.
I wondered how many students, with less technically motivated teachers were picking up their Degrees following three years of a copy-and-paste approach to higher education.

I don’t have the answers, but I do know we need our teachers, whether primary, secondary, or tertiary to recognise that they have a responsibility to our students to make them think. In a traditional sense, I am certain most teachers do an admirable job, but in general the level of IT skills amongst the teachers I have seen at various levels are sorely lacking.

If the teachers don’t know how to make use of IT, and in particular the web, there is a real danger of students continuing to consume knowledge, rather than create it.

The ministries behind education, need to make a real effort to ensure that their educators understand their responsibility to embrace and learn about the technologies that are shaping our society, and at the very least, be ‘nearly’ as good at consuming knowledge as our youngsters, not ‘no-where-near’. Not giving up, not being a luddite, not being embarrassed about saying, “Look! I need help to learn this stuff!”. We can’t stand by and allow teachers to glibly say, “Those kids, it’s wonderful how much they know about these things”. We need kids who not only understand how to consume, but also how to create. [rant ends]
BTW – Naughton points to an interesting spin related to this… http://bit.ly/seMwoN

**John Naughton has a lovely tribute here.

He did, and he will be missed.

Thank you Steve.

It’s staggering stuff, with some real serious social implications. If you want to understand more about how the big search engines are using your data, and how it is effecting you directly, then this is a must read.

If you don’t have the time, check out the TED talk (http://www.thefilterbubble.com/ted-talk), I guarantee it is worth 18 minutes of your time.

Check it out at the Book Depository:
The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You
(Free World Wide Shipping – You know I am a fan!)

Having been involved in a few start-ups or young companies over the years, a lot of the lessons that I’ve learned have been learned the hard way.

You know the old saying:

experience is often gained the moment after you needed it most.

With time, some of those lessons become embedded in your psyche, but many of them got lost in corners of the brain. Jason and David, and in fact many of the team at the little company 37Signals have put together a stunning little book of gems about getting into business, and doing the right things, the important things, and they raise lots of red flags to help stop you running down blind alleys. Or as an old friend of mine used to say, running down the rabbit-hole.

I wish this kind of thing was out there 10 years ago when I really could have used it, but not to worry, now Rework is part of my arsenal, and I reckon it should be in yours too.

Check it out on Amazon: Rework: Change The Way You Work Forever

Image (c) Fried, Heinemeier Hansson (37Signals.com)

Even though the servers were big grunty enterprise boxes from Sun Microsystems, loaded with RAM, and with Apache and the backend Oracle database highly tuned, it just could not handle to spike in demand. It was one of those few times that Microsoft came to the rescue with a bridgehead load balancing server that directed requests back to the farm of webservers, and spread the load evenly.

I was reminded of this recently while learning a bit more about Scala, a not so-often heard programming language that is behind some of the biggest Web Infrastructures out there today. Ever wondered how Twitter is able to cope with the staggering volume of tweets that are broadcast every second?

Yes. Key parts of Twitter are written in Scala.

Ruby was just not cutting it, and a rewrite in Scala solved a lot of problems.

There is an interesting conversation over on www.artima.com about it, and you’ll learn a lot more about Scala too. Anyone with a Unix admin background will smile as they learn about the pattern matching side of the language – remember awk. Love it. I’m guessing we will be hearing more about scala in the next year – full .Net support as well as JVM. Could this be the next big thing?

There is a fun little overview slideshow by a Twitter Developer Alex Payne here too: http://www.slideshare.net/al3x/why-scala-presentation

Few things are truly awesome. To be filled with awe, to be awe-inspired, that is something that should truly make your day and then-some!

If you are blessed with a large screen on your MAC or PC. Turn off the lights, turn up the volume, and watch this incredible time-lapse by Terje Sørgjerd, aka TSO.

Filmed between 29th April and 10th May this year, in the Arctic Circle, on the archipelago of Lofoten, Norway.
The stunning geography, and equally stunning light of the northern sky is captured in truly awe-inspiring style.
This is awesome, and this did make my day, and then-some.

Check out more of TSO’s work: The Mountain, and The Aurora.

He sat, as happy as can be, in the bulkhead compartment, complete with spray-deck, and had, a whale of a time.
Later he wanted a go up front in Mummy’s seat, so Dad had to do all the work.

Day’s like this remind me why I live here.

For some time now I have been using the Blueprint CSS Framework as the building blocks of technical layout of web pages, and integrating blueprint into content management systems like WordPress has been a breeze, and I can’t thank the team behind it enough. However, there were some things I didn’t like, in particular the non-semantic layout, and while I know you can run the ruby script to get around that, but it just didn’t fit in with my work-flow very well.
Thanks to Chris Eppstein and the many contributors to Compass, the blueprint framework is now tightly integrated into my development environment, and with compass there is so much more than just Blueprint.
If you have used Blueprint for CSS in the past, and you are not using Compass, then check it out, I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

Chartwell is a family that explores the use of OpenType to interpret and visualize data. The font format is highly portable and can be used in most applications that support ligatures. The data also remains editable allowing for easy updates.

I’m putting this one in my toy chest, as I know one day it will come in very handy. Check out the pie charts, bar and line graphs. Really neat stuff.