http://www.egovos.org/ has some material for open source advocacy for governments. Link from Thad on penguinista@yahoogroups.com, a Slackware-centric mailing list of Filipino geeks.

Nikolay V. Shilov and Kwangkeun Yi

http://ropas.kaist.ac.kr/~kwang/paper/02-cacm-shyi.pdf

"Training sessions are good opportunities to present students with

challenging programming problems that cannot be solved without theoretical background in spite of simple formulation. The trainers should provide students with background theory as soon as students realize the programming complexity of these problems."

Related link:

- Kwangkeun Yi's site has a lot of papers on formal methods. Puzzles for Learning Model Checking, Model Checking for Programming Puzzles, Puzzles for Testing Model Checkers seems interesting.

Andrea Beth Campbell and Roy P. Pargas

http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~pargas/projects/recentPapers/Laptops.pdf

This paper is about mandatory laptop use in the classroom, but since our labs are one-computer-one-student, the insights are useful. Here were the uses they observed:

- posting instructional material online - animating and demonstrating concepts - collaborative learning exercises - instant feedback - automatic program execution and visualization - evaluation and testing - communication

The instant feedback thing looks particularly useful, and I will certainly try to write an online system for that - or adapt http://www.moodle.org, which greatly impressed me when I last checked it.

Amanda Miller, Judy Kay

I can't find a free online URL for this, but it's in the ACM Digital Library.

Maybe it might be a good idea to have compulsory group mentoring for freshmen computer science students...

http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~judy/CSERP/ is the course page for a class that deals with computer science education research. This is the sort of stuff I want to get into. If you come across anything related, please tell me - sacha@sachachua.com . Thanks! =)

There's a fairly large chance that I will be taking a masteral degree in Education at the Ateneo de Manila University. I need to have at least half-time load in order to be eligible.

The Department of Information Systems and Computer Science (http://discs.ateneo.net) can be reached at +632 426 6001 loc 5660 or 5661.

Catastrophix the kitten is alive and well, although somewhat fishy-smelling (we've been feeding her solid kitten food). She still hasn't figured out the litter box or the water dish, but she makes up for it with quite an appetite.

Some confusion about her age. I'll go with the vet's guess placing her at around a month old. My sister contends that she's far younger. At any rate, Catastrophix can walk around (albeit unsteadily), purr (quite delightfully), and snuggle (rather contentedly).

It's been hard to type with one hand, but it's worth it for that little furball.

Thomas has been patiently helping me figure out how to become a better maintainer, with loads of useful comments, patches, and tips on maintaining better changelogs. Thanks also to people like Jody Klymak and David Forrest for the recent burst of feature additions and bugfixes. =)

Aadisht Khanna's recent W-Fillet is right. Plain T-shirts are useful. I can write trendy political messages on them (geek code alert!), advertise my website, and generally have fun.

Unfortunately I will probably have to more or less dress like a teacher next semester, and I feel an urge to be somewhat dressier than the T-shirt and shorts/pants guys at the CS department.

In other clothes news, my mom (in a fit of indulgence, no doubt) got me a red leather dress. Ooooooooh, goodie... =)