League for Innovation, Reno, NV
15 March 2009
http://www.league.org/i2009/

Sunday morning at 8:30, I led a workshop called "How to get your students to think for themselves." Surprisingly, 30 people showed up, many of them early! It was a very involved group, and I believe that a lot of learning took place.

I also went to a talk about nuResume, a new networking website for college students, faculty, and industry employers to post their profiles and communicate about jobs. I want to create a profile for myself there, so that I might be able to use it to help students find jobs. Foothill career center co-presented this workshop, so there are already a number of Foothill people and employers on nuResume.

A workshop on "Team-based Learning" gave some valuable tips on student teams. The 5 stages are: forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning. They broke us up into teams immediately and had us do a short team activity to help us get to know each other and gel as a team. I should do that with my students at the start of a project. They recommended a book called "Successful Teamwork" by Peter Levin.

Software Development Expo, Santa Clara
12 March 2009
http://www.sdexpo.com/

1) EvergyNet - The Next Boom in Software
This analyst says that we need to create a smart web for electricity generation and use. All of our devices (cars, dishwashers, etc) will be able to send and receive information about the current price of energy, and make decisions to use energy or not depending on the price. For example, your car will not recharge itself from the web during peak hours, but instead wait until off peak. The speaker said that the current grid is failing right now, and a new one must be built anyway, so the new one should have intelligence like this built in. The intelligence is all enabled by software, so all new software development jobs will be in this industry soon.

2) Successful Software Management: 17 Lessons Learned
Johanna Rothman said that capable management can result in a 65% improvement in productivity for the team. New technology can result in 55% improvement, reusing code can give you 350% improvement, and good processes can give you 35% improvement. She recommends the book "Successful Software Management" by Rothman.

3) Safari Books Online had a booth there
This is a subscription service which gives you the ability to read most textbooks online. This would make it easier for me to travel around without lugging my textbooks with me. It would also make it easier for me to evaluate new textbooks, or refer to other books beside the ones I own or adopt for my class. For $19.50 per month, I could read up to 10 books online each month. I just started a 15 day free trial.

Meeting with IBM Academic Alliance and MPICT, San Mateo
26 Feb 2009
http://www.mpict.org/
http://www-304.ibm.com/jct01005c/university/scholars/academicinitiative

The Mid Pacific ICT Center is the new center to coordinate, promote and improve the quality of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) education in this region. They organized a meeting with a group inside IBM, the "Academic Initiative", that promotes open standards, open source, and IBM resources for academia. We were looking for ways that we could work together to help our students.

IBM has a website that outlines their academic initiative, which includes curriculum maps, courseware, free access to IBM's expensive software development tools, and more. See link above.

I am hoping I can find resources to help me teach students how to work in teams, manage projects, collaborate online, facilitate discussion. I would also like to make a videotape of some IBMers stating tha they value these soft skills.