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Today The Guardian published its 2010 University League table which it bases on the national student satisfaction survey (assessment and teaching), staff student-ratio, spend per student, graduate employment, and “value added”. On this basis, which is highly focussed on the Student’s learning experience, Swansea comes way down in the “conference league”, 95th out of 117 places, with a season score of 48.1 points out of the maximum 100. If we were in the football league, we’d be fighting relegation!...

As noted yesterday here and on the Learning Lab Community blog, yesterday was declared “Ada Lovelace Day” (ALD09) by Suw Charman-Anderson. Thousands of people blogged and tweeted about a woman (or women) in technology who they admire. Suw even interviewed Ada herself (at the Science Museum) and appeared on BBC News 24 and BBC Radio 5Live to promote women in technology. Albeit in a very small way, It was great to be part of this global celebration and the social networks that surrounded it....

Google Summer of Code 2009 is open for applications. I think that GSoC, which is an annual event in which Google pays students 4,500 USD to work on an open source project of their choice, is a great project and dream of the day when one of my students takes on this challenge. I try my hardest by ensuring, so far as is possible, that only open source software is used in my courses: so my students have experience as users of LAMP, Drupal, WordPress, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Netbeans and even the Google Code hosting service....

In honour of “Lady Lovelace Day” I had pledged to write a post on computing pioneer Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, one of first programmers of the Harvard Mark I Calculator and designers of the Cobol programming language. Grace is always remembered for finding a real bug in one of her computer programs (in the days when computers were made with thermionic valves and relays) and taped it into her log book along with the wry comment:...

Spring is sprung The grass is riz I wonder where the birdies is? – Original source unknown. Spring is springing up all over as this picture of a magpie (“one for sorrow”) on the Faraday Building lawn with the daffodils shows.