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Just a quick blog to note a couple of articles on effective note taking for students from [lifehack.org](http://lifehack.org): - [Taking notes that work](http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/advice-for-students-taking-notes-that-work.html) - [Using a wiki for note taking.](http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/advice-for-students-use-a-wiki-for-better-note-taking.html) Link from Wendy Boswell on [lifehacker](http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/156848762/how-to-take-killer-notes-299928.php). Powered by [ScribeFire](http://scribefire.com/).

I was at a “lunch and learn” session on Monday talking about Personalized Learning Environments and someone asked a question about custom searches for research and RSS feeds. I just found this [article](http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/09/06/creating-google-custom-search-engines.html) cited in [Lifehacker](http://lifehacker.com/software/google/step-by-step-guide-to-making-a-custom-search-engine-297785.php) which may answer those questions. Powered by [ScribeFire](http://scribefire.com/).

Renate and I watched the Red Arrows from Swansea Beach today. The display was part of a two day Air Display put on by the Royal Air Force (RAF) and Swansea City and County Council. I took a little bit of footage on my little Canon IXUS 50 and I edited the footage into a little movie which I uploaded to YouTube. I’ve also uploaded a few photos to Flickr. Enjoy!...

Howard Lewis-Ship has blogged about the [recommendation of Java as a First Language](http://tapestryjava.blogspot.com/2007/08/blindness-of-james-gosling-java-as.html). This is a topic that has been exercising me for a couple of years (although I no longer teach an introductory programming course). Howard is right when he states that: > Java is extremely monolithic: in order to understand how to run a simple Hello World program, you’ll be exposed to: > > > - Classes > - Java packages > - Static vs....

Discovered yesterday in my massive “first-day back” trawl of my RSS feeds was this interesting visualization of the most important web destinations shown as an underground or metro map (actually based on Tokyo’s I believe). One version is a clickable image (with pop-up snap shots of the sites themselves) that you can use as a browser start page which should provide hours of fun. You can also get PDFs that print the map in A3 size as well as the possibilty to buy A2 posters, use it as a desktop image or a screen saver (Mac OSX only!...