In RE: My quick hacks to tax cache Larry (another of my ex-students) describes how the knowledge of cache he gleaned from my computer architecture and design class has been used to good effect in optimising the performance of the game he's currently working on.

It was nice to hear from you Larry. Good luck with the latest game.

via Hiring Technical People - How to Interview a Programmer by Bill Venners:

"Recognizing good programmers among job applicants is not easy. This article contains interview techniques, garnered from a recent summit on writing better code, that can help you can find the most qualified programmers for your project.

Scott Meyers and Bruce Eckel organised the Writing Better Code summit and on the final morning 'hijacked' the meeting to compare notes on recognizing a good programmer in an interview. Insight +4.

Incidentally, readers of Duncan's Jotter should not read anything into these links to job interview blogs, etc. I only thought they might be of interest to some of my students who will be graduating soon ;-)

Light blogging week, first look at Longhorn fonts:

"...Today we're gonna take a hike around campus with Bill Hill. He was our first interview on Channel 9 (and still one of our most popular). His bit about why you should put only a single space after a period is still one of my favorites."

...

(Via Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger.)

I was struck by Bill Hill's strong Scottish accent. Later on in the interview Bill mentions that he worked for the Scotsman newspaper as an editor and reporter. Funnily enough the Scotsman is basically my local national paper and the one I read every day. It's a small world.

BTW, I am convinced that I should put only a single space after a full-stop but it's going to be difficult to wean myself off the double-space habit!

XFN - XHTML Friends Network :

"XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a 'rel' attribute to their <a href> tags

On November 30, 2004 Stephen Downes' Understanding PISA wrote an extremely good critique of this study:

"The headline was dramatic enough to cause a ripple in the reading public. "Students who use computers a lot at school have worse maths and reading performance," noted the BBC news article, citing a 2004 study by Ludger Woessmann and Thomas Fuchs (Fuchs and Woessman, 2004)."...

Not only that but today's Stephen's Web [see OLDaily] links to the article I read in the Scotsman this morning - Scotsman.com News - Sci-Tech - Computers 'can harm learning' and I agree with the closing paragraphs of that article:

Nick Clayton, a technology writer and former IT teacher, said it was not the number of computers that was important but how they were used.

He said: "A computer is a tool and can be used across all subjects particularly now you have the internet. But it has to be a natural part of teaching in the same way as books and other tools. And teachers need training in order to use them effectively."

The Register - How computers make kids dumb:

"A study of 100,000 pupils in 31 countries around the world has concluded that using computers makes kids dumb. Avoiding PCs in the classroom and at home improved the literacy and numeracy of the children studied. The UK's Royal Economic Society finds no ground for the correlation that politicans make between IT use and education."...

It's no surprise that computers at home are used by kids more for their entertainment value than their educational value. I suspect that if the researchers had used, say, the TV as their technology focus that they would have concluded that TV makes kids dumb!

It's my belief that - mainly - politicians consider computers in teaching to be a panacea and a cost saving when compared to the level investment they would need to bring class sizes down to a level that would allow teachers to really interact with, and inspire, the kids.

Of course those of us in the business of educating students using a computer as the actual subject of study are bound to suffer backlash from others that cannot distinguish between the use of computers and the discipline of Computer Science. Sigh!