Jellybean Schooling

 General  2 Responses »
Apr 302006
 

Schools have changed since I went to school — not sur­pris­ing, although maybe it’s just that I can­’t remem­ber much about my early child­hood. Our son came home with a note the oth­er day, telling us about some pro­gram he’s doing, and giv­ing us the inform­a­tion slip. This con­tained the sen­tence This year we will be doing a mini cre­at­ive think­ing unit around jelly­beans. We will incor­por­ate Bloom’s Tax­onomy and the Mul­tiple Intel­li­gences as much as possible.

Tim searched for those terms and came across num­bers of links that did­n’t make us any wiser as to what they’re actu­ally doing — espe­cially giv­en that our son is 6, and in Grade 1 (2nd year at school, and first full-time year). Ask­ing our son what they’re doing in the pro­gram does­n’t eli­cit any use­ful inform­a­tion; we’ll have to ask the teach­er. Still, he seems to enjoy it, and they get to eat the jelly­beans afterwards. 

BCNet Liberty

 Conference, Identity and Privacy  No Responses »
Apr 272006
 

Yes­ter­day I gave a talk at the (for­tu­nately) loc­al BCNET/Netera Con­ver­ging Minds Con­fer­ence. BCNet builds net­works for the BC research and edu­ca­tion com­munity, and the con­fer­ence was aimed at the admin­is­trat­ors, deans, and IT man­agers who need to know what tools their research­ers and stu­dents would find use­ful. The con­fer­ence agenda had talks on lots of sub­jects rel­ev­ant to that audi­ence, ran­ging from high per­form­ance com­put­ing, net­work­ing, and secur­ity and iden­tity man­age­ment to advanced media and collaboration.

My talk was about Liberty spe­cific­a­tions, of course. Since I was slot­ted for a 1.5 hour talk, I asked Alex Acton from the Sun Van­couver office to help out. I presen­ted the slides, Alex drove the demos, we got lots of great ques­tions, went 15 minutes over­time and still only got through 29 of the 41 slides. It was prob­ably more use­ful to the audi­ence that way, of course! I like hav­ing a small enough audi­ence that more free-form talk­ing and listen­ing ses­sions are viable. Here are the slides (in PDF format) for pos­ter­ity, includ­ing those I did­n’t get a chance to present.

I had lots of help on cre­at­ing these from Eve, I used demos from Pat and Hubert (Hubert also cre­ated good slides for the recent Liberty web­cast that I could reuse), Scott Can­tor sent me slide decks on Shib­boleth to crib inform­a­tion from, and most of the deploy­ment inform­a­tion comes from Yvonne Wilson’s excel­lent talk at XML 2005. I also used some inform­a­tion from the Liberty tech­no­logy tutori­al. Thanks, everyone!

More Coffee

 Food and Wine  No Responses »
Apr 272006
 

Not that I’m actu­ally addicted (in fact at the moment I’m not drink­ing much cof­fee at all, the occa­sion­al latte is about it for now), but I came across anoth­er cof­fee-related link for Van­couver. This one proves just what sort of cof­fee-lov­ing area I live in — accord­ing to Delo­c­at­or there are 69 “non-cor­por­ate” (their defin­i­tion) places to get cof­fee with­in 3 km of where I live, and 19 Star­bucks loc­a­tions. Some of the places are lis­ted more than once, but oth­ers aren’t lis­ted at all, so it’s prob­ably a reas­on­able estimate. 

Delo­c­at­or itself is an inter­est­ing web­site and inter­est­ing idea; worth pok­ing around the site a little. Delo­c­at­or link spot­ted at Met­rob­log­ging Van­couver.

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