“Beyond the Blog” screencast

Brian Lamb of abject learning put together this screencast on educational blogging. His words on what the quicktime movie is about:

I ended up reviewing a few of the cooler educational weblogs we are hosting at UBC, briefly demonstrating supplementary technologies such as RSS and social bookmarks, and pointing toward all too few peers out in the ed tech weblog community. The minutes and the megabytes just flew by. Of course, once I was done I thought of all sorts of things I should have added — like referring people to Stephen Downes’s definitive treatise on Educational Blogging, but such is the nature of these things…

Interested to view, grab the movie from the original source or the local mirror. Enjoy 🙂

Klik & Play – create your own games

Klik and Play is an object oriented programming environment, free for use in school activities. Simple games can be easily created by absolute beginners. With more experience and by devoting some time to studying the manual, quite elaborate shoot-the-badguys or destroy-the-aliens type of games can be created. [extracted from Introduction@Klik & Play Home.
The developer’s home page (Clickteam) goes here, and for comprehensive user guides, visit the Klik & Play Home.
Download your own copy and create some interactive games today 🙂

Numbers of No Escape

Off-topic. We are into maths for this post. Gotten this URL from Weisiong. Extracting the interesting beginning:

Start with any natural number, such as 69534891. Count the number of even digits, the number of odd digits, and the total number of digits. In this case, there are three evens, five odds, and a total of eight digits. Use these three numbers as digits to form a new number: 358.
Repeat the steps with the new number, counting evens, odds, and the total number of digits. You get 123. If you perform the same set of operations on 123, you get 123 again.
Try another number: 141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974. Counting 0 as even, there are 24 evens, 33 odds, and 57 digits in total. Applying the process to 243357 gives 246, then 303, then 123.
In fact, no matter what number you start with, this iterative process always leads to 123.
Michael W. Ecker describes the number 123 as a “mathemagical black hole” with respect to this particular process. “Once you hit 123, you never get out,” he says, “just as reaching a black hole of physics implies no escape.”

The full article goes here, enjoy 🙂