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Learning Objects Campus Pack, used to provide for blogs, wikis and podcasts in Swansea University’s VLE, was updated at the same time as Blackboard. If you have one or more Learning Objects blog(s), wiki(s) or podcast(s) in your Blackboard (learning portal) module sites, they will be upgraded the first time you or your students visit them. If you have a large number of these installed in a module site, as I have for some of my modules, you may want to do the upgrade before your course is opened for new enrolments....

Today is the day when Blackboard 9.1 was rolled out at Swansea University as the new Learning Portal. I haven’t logged in to check my courses yet, but I’m sure they’ll be fine. Clive and his team promised to deliver the update on July 30th, and that’s what they’ve done. I know a lot of planing and work has gone into this and it’s been done with minimum fuss and negative impact....

I love this video from the first lecture of [CS 106A Programming Methodology](http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/) (Recorded in Fall 2008). Apart from the enthusiasm of the lecturer Mehran Sahami, which is infectious, it’s a great source of inspiration for learning and teaching: - Grading without numbers - The Stanford Honour Code (approach to Plagiarism) - Use of undergraduates for peer/mentor support (even grading!) - Use of sugary snacks as rewards for contribution - Use of continuous assessment with later work given more marks to encourage work to the end - Midterm tests - Personalized feedback via “interactive marking” - 2 Free days for late submission of coursework – avoids extensions....

This code snippet on calculating the first n Primes using the Python programming language fell into my RSS feed this morning. Very nice I thought, but then it occurred to me, what would be really fast would be to ask the internet. Or more specifically WolframAlpha. So I did: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=primes+less+than+1,000,000,000. The first 20 of 50,847,324 prime numbers less that 109 are displayed in the internet equivalent of a blink of an eye....

The O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON 2010) took place last week in Portland Oregon. Videos of the talks are being published on YouTube and Blip.TV. Taken with the convention site, the various related blog postings and twitter feed, there’s lots of useful information. What stood out for me in the video feed was Daniel Recordon’s talk “Today’s Lamp Stack” which describes how Facebook’s has been implemented on the LAMP stack. It’s a talk that will be useful as a learning resource for my course on Web Applications Technology....