Report from Times Higher which covers recent announcements of Marc Prensky, due to speak in Bournemouth University next week, and Martin Hall, invited speaker at the ALT-C Conference this week. My summary … the “nouns are changing but the verbs remain the same”. See this Amp at http://bit.ly/d3hIF3

The 17th annual conference of the Association for Learning Technology ALT-C 2010 has just ended. And though I did not attend, I was fairly fully engaged with the keynote and invited sessions that were streamed via CrowdVine in Elluminate and will be made available on the ALT-C channel on YouTube. Reflection starts now and I thought that I would use my newest e-learning gadget, my [LiveScribe Echo](http://www.livescribe.com/uk/) pen, and trial copy of [MyScript for LiveScribe](http://www.

Geek heaven … ShowOff — a keynote/powerpoint alternative that’s a Sinatra web app with slide markup in Markdown and special effects in JavaScript. I’ve got to try this! From Scott Chacon, GitHubber and author of Pro Git. Mentioned during an interview on InfoQ. See this Amp at [http://bit.ly/aTNldj](http://bit.ly/aTNldj)

One advantage of not being at the ALT-C conference is that I can only attend the keynotes and invited speaker sessions on Eluminate. I therefore have a lot of time to watch the twitter stream and curate the links. Cloudworks has a “cloud” for all the talks at this year’s ALT-C gathering (in Nottingham) and I’ve been busy adding references and links to the cloud for Donald Clark’s keynote — a lecture on the evils of lectures that really got the attendees — present and remote — going!

Digital Planet from the BBC World Service was one of the earliest podcasts that I picked up when I got my first MP3 player — which wasn’t an iPod! I’ve been listening to it every week for several years and it’s never short of informative. It’s a technology podcast, similar to The Guardian’s TechWeekly (see POTW #2), so it covers the latest news from Google, Apple and Microsoft and the various technology shows and conferences.

Video of Steve Jobs revealing the new tools. My take: iPod — not interested; Ping — why not link to Facebook/Twitter rather than inventing something new? I’ll be sticking with Spotify and last.fm. Plus there are privacy/spam issues already! Apple TV … now that could be a winner!

It’s a repost, but I thought I’d remind my faithful readers that I’ll be taking part in the Gower Macmarathon in a week’s time. Renate and I have been doing some training in West Yorkshire (where coincidentally there where a number of excellent real-ale pubs) and both expect to be fit enough. The Gower Macmarathon is a sponsored 22 mile walk from Rhossilli to Mumbles in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support.

Git sounds like an insult, but it’s actually a distributed version control system which was originally invented by Linus Torvalds, the developer of the Linux kernel. GitHub is a phenomenally successful open-source code hosting site build around Git. GitHub is also a community and the unofficial voice of the GitHub community is The Changelog, a blog and weekly podcast which highlights developments in Open Source by monitoring GitHub. The podcast is hosted by Wynn Netherland and Adam Stokoviac who regularly get to speak to the developers whose code is being developed in the open on GitHub*.

Really liked this story that was a small item on Today’s Today programme. Students on A level computing course being let into The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park to programme the BBC micro (in BBC Basic) in order to learn how computers really work. Visit the link for a more detailed article, background to the BBC Micro, and video from BBC News team. See this Amp at http://bit.ly/aXRzxQ

I like this idea. Mainstream newspaper The Guardian takes the twitter feeds of its tech journalists to produce a daily snapshot of it’s tech coverage. Could easily adapt this idea for a University or a teaching module — although a monthly might be more useful in the latter context! See this Amp at http://bit.ly/bwZemj

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/cfsTTw

I was wandering aimlessly across the internet, as you do, when I came across an interesting SlideShare Presentation The Real Life Social Network from Paul Adams (@padday) who works as the user research lead for social on the User Experience (UX) team at Google. He works on projects like Buzz and YouTube (and maybe even Google Me). The [SlideShare is well worth going through in its entirety](http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2) as it brings forth some issues that all of us who are keen to maximise our use of social networks in our work and play.