It’s the day when students who took A-levels in May find out what grades they got and whether they have gotten in to their first choice university. Every year, the number of students getting the top grade (A) goes up and every year the media reports this and speculates on whether or not standards are falling – because children can’t be more intelligent than their parents can they – after all their brains have been rotted by electronic games and social media!

I’ve just read Don Tapscott’s critique of the modern university (The Demise of the University, The Edge) and I’ve decided that I don’t want to be that lecturer who mainly broadcasts his lectures anymore. I know I’ve dabbled with all kinds of technology assisted media over the years: I’ve played with wikis, blogs, podcasts and Blackboard … but always as a source of information that is sent to students. There’s been little or no information exchange, it’s been largely a one-way, rarely a two-way conversation.

As reported in Mashable Google Reader Updates: Share News on Twitter, Facebook, and More is a feature that I’ve wanted in Google Reader for ever! Now you can have a send-to link in your Reader Page and send items you want to share to Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, delicious etc. Greeeaaaat!

“Four Office Applications will be on the web” according to to Abel Avram reporting for InfoQ. They will be Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote and they will run inside the Browser. Whether this is a reaction to Google’s Chrome O/S announcement or an extension to the general, slow, development of Windows Live, is unclear. What’s interesting is that they will be free, will use native web browser technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) rather than Silverlight and will presumably compete directly in the space currently occupied by Google and Zoho docs.

Today I installed Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” on my Acer Aspire One netbook. The version is the Netbook Remix version and it looks really nice, as the screenshot above will testify. Hopefully it will be easier to link to the University wireless network than the original Asper Aspire (based on Fedora I think) was. The most difficult part of the installation was getting the image file onto a USB data stick.

http://youtube.com/v/v_UyVmITiYQ I’m probably a few days late in bringing this to your attention, here goes anyway! In the Google IO Conference 2009, Google previewed a really interesting new, open-source, open-potocol platform for collaboration called Google Wave ([wave.google.com](http://wave.google.com)). This video recording of the keynote, published on the 28th May on YouTube, is well worth a look. The presentation takes about 90 minutes, but it’s worth watching it all because some of the more interesting possibilities (for example simultaneous translation) come later on in the presentation.

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.

I’m sure I’ll not be the only one, but let me add my congratulations to Sir Tim and his wonderful, annoying, ubiquitous invention. [Happy 20th Birthday, World Wide Web](http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/2009/03/happy-20th-birthday-world-wide-web.html) via [Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day](http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/) by Jane Hart on 3/13/09 Scientific American has a great feature on Tim Berners Lee and the Web. The reason? “CERN on March 13 celebrates the 20th anniversary of a proposal entitled, “Information Management: A Proposal,” by Tim Berners-Lee, which would become the blueprint for the World Wide Web”