I’m glad I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed from the Educause blogs. It’ll help me keep on top of exciting things like two I note here.
I recently go into NetNewsWire Lite for aggregating RSS feeds. Think of RSS as MPR’s hourly headlines for websites you frequent. With people visiting so many sites just to see what’s new, there’s a need to see what’s new and get an abstract of news items to see if you want the full story. Note this blog has an RSS feed on the right. Typically your RSS program checks for updates in the background so you don’t have to visit each site. New browsers like Firefox and the next version of Safari have RSS support built into them.
Anyway, one item noted a new search engine, koders.com, that indexes code from open source repositories. That could really change the nature of programming assignments. It seems similar to the plagiarism problem with writing. Even though the code is open, it should be cited as not your own work. The various licenses might address this but I’ve never bothered to actually read the open source licenses. But writing and programming are similar to me — a good instructor can tell if a given student wrote something based on their style.
Another plug for Mozilla/Firefox, a toolbar add-on for your web browser allows quick access to bioinfomatic databases. Pretty cool. Get it at http://biobar.mozdev.org/.
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