Interesting:

ScriptKit is a touchable programming environment for building simple mobile prototypes on iPad using native iOS UI components and social media APIs, available via an intuitive drag and drop interface.

Free for trial with in-app purchases. Haven’t tried it yet.

The Smile plug is a $30 Linux-based micro-cloud computer, which students interact with using their smartphones. An interesting approach that could drastically reduce school spending for 1-1 computing.

Tim Owens, on “failing” Coursera courses:

For much of the course I felt like a bystander. Here I was watching a set of videos chosen by my professor. I may or may not have a quiz at the end of the week to gauge my learning. The videos were interesting, but I left feeling like I hadn’t participated. […] I can’t tell you the name of a single other person that was in this course and it started with over 40,000. I think that’s a shame and something they could improve on.

I’ve yet to pass a single Coursera course myself—I’ve failed Algorithms and HCI so far. However, I do feel like I’ve really learned something from the parts of the courses I’ve taken, and I appreciate how Coursera and other MOOCs (what a great name) have encouraged all these subject matter experts to curate and present all this useful information in brief, easily digestible chunks for teachers and students.

Khan Academy does Computer Science, courtesy of John Resig, creator of jQuery. His blog post goes into some detail about the pedagogy they’ve adopted and the technology behind it. Looks promising, and we’ll see if we can try this out with students at some point.

Previously required your school to register; now, any instructor can log in and use iTunes U Course Manager. Looking forward to trying this out.

(Mildly annoying feature: forces you to use Safari.)

A follow-up piece to “Please don’t learn to code” by Zed Shaw:

I’m going to give you a piece of advice when you’re trying to learn something new: Never listen to people who try to make beginners feel like losers.

Sure, Shaw has a vested interest in this subject—he runs Learn Code The Hard Way (which I’ve heard nothing but good things about, by the way)—but simplifying Jeff Atwood’s motivations to resentment seems a bit much. That said, good piece, and well worth a read for anyone who’s really interested in learning programming.

Mike Zamansky on the recent spate of online programming education offerings, specifically the more “vocational” ones such as Codecademy:

‘The premise seems to be that anyone can code and that everyone should code. I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I keep coming back to the question, “what’s the endgame?”’

This post articulates the fear I’ve been having about trying to make programming more accessible to everyone: to what end? For users, is there any value in this knowledge? (Conversely, though, what’s the value in learning basic science and humanities for “users”, i.e. people existing in the physical world and society?)

Using the AppleTV instead of a projector (or worse, interactive whiteboard):

Using my iPad and AirPlay, I can wirelessly mirror any content on my iPad to the screen at the front of the room. The real advantage is evident during collaborative activities. Students can use their own iOS devices to connect to the AppleTV to share their work with the rest of the class. I can be anywhere in the room and still run my lesson. I can pull up sound and video clips on my iPad and instantly share them with my class without being attached to any particular location in the room.

There’s so much potential here, especially with AirPlay support for Macs in Mountain Lion. TVs are cheaper and higher-resolution than most projectors, too.

“The biggest cost by far is the cost of training people to be able to build software – although fairly easy to pick up the basics it’s still a craft that requires knowledge of engineering principles and practical experience.

This is where the Raspberry Pi can save us: it’s now affordable for the government to equip any child in this country with a machine which they could take home with them and play with.”

Demand for the Raspberry Pi is still ridiculous, but we’re looking forward to getting our hands on one. (Their new price is S$58 with shipping to Singapore, but their store is down at time of posting.)