Impressions Scholarcast

Having just forked out to upgrade to Camtasia version 5 I am somewhat miffed by the Lifehacker post about free, older versions of Camtasia and SnagIt becoming available.

Camtasia 3 and SnagIt 7.2.5 are older versions but are full-featured screencasting and screen capture applications respectively. In both cases you need to download a trial version and then follow the appropriate link to receive a product key to make it a full version:

• Camtasia
• SnagIt

Happy downloading.

Thanks to Peta Hopkins via Gulcin Cribb for the link to Pronetos that aims to be the social network for scholars. I signed up and added myself to the Web Science discipline which not surprisingly is the largest group on Pronetos so far.

According to the site an academic can:

These are useful features but simply duplicate those on many other collaborative sites such as Google Docs and Apps. There are only about 280 Pronetos users at the time of writing and critical mass is not in sight. I will watch progress with some interest.

I attended the first Mix on Campus event at QUT on Tuesday. For Microsoft this was the first event of its kind aimed at students and staff to introduce innovations taking place in web design and implementation. An old acquaintance of mine, Simon Kaplan, now Dean of the Faculty of IT at QUT provided the venue and opened the day. We had a quick chat about introductory programming languages.

Our opening speaker was Bryn Giles from QANTM and he took us on a whirlwind tour of Web 2.0 and some gaming developments. Just before lunch we had another academic, Ross Brown from QUT, who gave a detailed run through his research projects in his take on Games Development. Ross concentrates on the mechanics and economics of games software development, and the associated complex workflows. His ideas on digital asset manufacturing, a Henry Ford-like industrial production line for games audio, video and software components are worth following.

Most valuable to the assembled students though were the presentations from the Brisbane web building companies, Speedwell and JSA Digital, and the guys from provocative startup, Faraday Media, Ashley Angell and Chris Saad (the APML guy). Rather than designers the new descriptor seems to be front end developers – the world of design and development is coming together, and each end of the spectrum is expected to have at least some crossover skills.

The afternoon session was taken up by the inimitable Nick Hodge who showed the Silverlight-based cool Popfly mashup generator, and the indistinct Scott Barnes dived deeply into Silverlight, XAML, the Expressions suite and the world of rich Internet applications that will come and take over the web.

A big thank you should go out to Nick Ellery for creating and organising the event.

There were several Movember mos around as well.

Yesterday I had a brief conversation with Simon Kaplan who opened the Mix on Campus day organised by Microsoft at QUT. Amongst other things I asked how the teaching of Scheme as the introductory programming language was going. Simon informed me that they were just about to switch from Scheme to Python which I thought was noteworthy. He indicated he was influenced in this by the fact that Hal Abelson from MIT had just made the same switch. Also there are valuable, free online teaching materials from MIT that can be used in the lectures at QUT. Not a bad reason to switch.

We have been hearing about LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) for a couple of years now. With the launch of Visual Studio 2008 and C#/VB.NET 3.0 before year’s end it is now a reality. Normally LINQ is associated with databases and replacing SQL statements with compile-time checking and type safety. However LINQ can be used with any data that can be enumerated such as XML files and in-memory data of all kinds.

Imagine the ease of teaching programming to students with syntax like:

int[] nums = new int[] {0,4,2,6,3,8,3,1};   var result = from n in nums
             where n < 5
             orderby n
             select n;

I look forward to teaching this way.

We have another link gem from Fred Stutzman that points us to an impressive report from the OCLC entitled Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World. The report ‘explores [the] web of social participation and cooperation on the Internet and how it may impact the library’s role’. Prior to addressing this main issue the 280 pages of the report contains a fabulously rich collection of Internet usage stats for the 6 countries surveyed, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the US and UK.

One fragment of a chart is:

Overall the way the charts are drawn is superb in its variety and novelty. Sadly there is no executive summary and it is a long read. But a few words from the conclusion are:

Social Web sites have gone from obscurity to mass use in the last two years. Over a quarter of respondents (28%) use social networking sites. Five social spaces are in the Alexa top ten global Web sites, including MySpace, Wikipedia and YouTube. And, use of these social spaces is growing exponentially.YouTube had over 188 million visitors in June 2007, up over 280% in one year according to comScore.