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An excellent and informative lightning talk by Gary Bernhardt of Destroy All Software.

Joel Spolsky, who’s on the board:

This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream of Mike Zamansky, the highly-regarded CS teacher at New York’s elite Stuyvesant public high school.

Prove them wrong, use them in your next mockup, and confuse everybody. FUN! PROFIT! Well, maybe not profit.

A follow-up piece to the previous link, which argues for digital literacy over coding skills:

Digital literacy means the the skills and confidence to take an active role in engaging in networks, and in shaping and creating opportunities - social, political, cultural, civic, and economic, and we shouldn’t be collapsing these broader rights into the relatively narrow concerns of computing science as a curriculum area.

Article via Fraser Speirs. Mildly surprising, to me at least, is his strong support for the argument raised in the link article, given that he’s a programmer and Computer Science teacher. This piece of his on “technology for subjects not traditionally well-served by technology” may serve to explain why, but I’m still trying to digest all of this.

From September, England’s schools will offer computer science classes instead of ICT (a.k.a. IT ‘skills’ such as PowerPoint and Excel):

The current programme of information and communications technology (ICT) study in England’s schools will be scrapped from September, the education secretary will announce later.

The subject will be replaced by compulsory lessons in more rigorous computer science and programming.

Not sure how they’ll start this up so quickly, given this glaring problem:

“There are, of course, significant challenges to overcome, specifically with the immediate shortage of computer science teachers.”

See also this Guardian article: “Out of 28,000 teachers who qualified in 2010, just three individuals had a computer-related degree.” Similarly the case here, although the return of A-level Computing should imply that NIE will be doing something about training CS teachers.

I’m still on the fence about whether CS absolutely needs to be taught at a pre-tertiary level. There was some interesting discussion on this recently between a couple of Mac developers — see this blog post by Guy English on “Scripting is the New Literacy”, a response to this piece by Daniel Jalkut encouraging everyone to “Learn to Code”.

(News via Matt Johnston.)

My favourite new lorem ipsum generator, emulating the writing style of The Verge:

If you want an Android phone, this might just be your best bet, for this reason suits your needs so we would recommend this phone if you wanted this sort of thing nevertheless possibly, so as to it can’t hold a candle when is might be better than the iPhone, once only time will tell if it will be successful.
Just pips the iPhone at the post, soon battery life isn’t great but not too bad either, whatever could be the best Android phone, overall better than most of its competitors as soon as just about the best in the main depends.

This, together with image placeholder generator PlaceKitten, makes you all set for some client-confusing design greatness.

Quote of the day by Anideo (emphasis ours):

Most businesses just aren’t structured this way. Usually, business are profit-first, not product-first. They’re usually run by people who want to build their bank accounts, not amazing products. Usually, the head of design isn’t a damn knight.

We forgot to link to this when everyone did last week, but it’s worth mentioning:

Make your New Year’s resolution learning to code. Sign up on Code Year to get a new interactive programming lesson sent to you each week and you’ll be building apps and web sites before you know it.

Another great product from the Codecademy folks.

In-browser runtimes for Ruby, Python and JavaScript, by the same folks who are bringing us browser-based programming courses.

Looks perfect for intro programming, albeit only on the console. Looking forward to see how it deals with exercises that are more graphical, and those which make use of external libraries.

(Repost — last one wasn’t a link, oops)