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February 2008 - Posts
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My colleagues all have their headphones on and are glued to their screens watching the demo of this new technology. It takes a lot to impress these technology-savvy folk but this demo is causing wows and gasps around our office. Richard Scoble even admits that it made him cry. See the demo for yourself on the TED talks website; a site devoted to great talks on ideas that are worth spreading, so please take time to look around it while you are there. Claire 
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Those of you coming along to our free Silverlight for Academics day on March 12th might want to take a look at the series of tutorials produced by Scott "lives in Seattle and builds a few products for Microsoft" Guthrie.
If you have used WPF before the UI concepts he discusses in the tutorial series will all be very familiar. If you haven't used WPF before, the tutorials should provide a good overview of the fundamental programming concepts in it, and hopefully provide you with the basic knowledge necessary to start building Silverlight 2 applications with VS 2008 when Beta1 comes out.
Claire
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I was looking at the University of Brighton's website this morning and spotted a link to a recruitment video for their Library and Information Management MSC courses. The video features staff, students and the facilities and went straight into the top 20 section of the educational videos section on You Tube. What a great idea! Claire Technorati Tags: Teaching, recruitment
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It's been quite a week for announcements. First there was Dreamspark, then XNA 3.0 and now 5GB of Skydrive storage space. As Ray Fleming points out on the Higher Education blog, "Anybody can get a SkyDrive, as it's free - just sign up for it using your Windows Live/Passport ID, and you too can have 5GB of file storage online, with file storage areas for private, shared and public files. Gone are the days of moving files between home and work with a USB drive (which inevitably got lost somewhere between the two places). Imagine - all of your students currently carrying their data around on a USB memory stick (and busily plugging them into USB ports all around your campus), could be using this. What would it cost you to give every one of your students 5GB of Internet-accessible storage on your network? We include SkyDrive in our Live @ Edu service, which means that you could automatically provide accounts to all of your students, linked to their university email address." 
Share files with the world Some ideas are too good to keep to yourself. Share them in a public folder that only you can update. Store files for yourself Using multiple computers? No problem. Store and access your personal files from anywhere online. Share files with friends Sharing with friends, co-workers, or family is easy when you all add and update files in a shared folder. Claire
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This interesting talk covers several topics that are of interest including Dreamspark, Students and the Imagine Cup. You and your students can find it on Channel 8. If your students don't know about Channel 8 yet then here is the spiel. Channel 8 is THE place to be for STUDENTS who want to code, connect and create technology. Stay plugged into tech news and share in the experience with students around the world just like you who want to see their creations come to life. This is also a back door directly into Microsoft just like Channel 9 but from a student point of view. This means access to the inside scoop about our products and life working inside Microsoft and information on cool things coming out. This is your community – a place for you to share your tips and tricks and even your problems. Go check out what others are doing and talk about what you think is cool. Claire 
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Last week we held our first Imagine Cup event at our offices in Reading during which our Academic Developer Evangelist, Ed Dunhill had opportunity to chat with Steve Cox from CM Group (Content Master). In Ed's own words. "CM create training, e-learning courses, hands on labs, reference applications, conference presentations and books that are published worldwide. They work very closely with Microsoft to create learning materials for our products recently having created the official Microsoft curriculum around Silverlight. Last year they hired a couple of graduates and it was such a great success that this year they are looking for another 6 grads. The role involves being trained to have a depth knowledge of specific technologies and how to create learning content to support them and then working on real life projects producing content that will be viewed by millions of people. If you are interested and would like to find out more then visit their Web site or email them at Vacancies@contentmaster.com, deadline for applications is the 30th March 2008 to start in the summer." Claire 
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We are excited to announce the impending release of XNA Games Studio 3.0 this summer giving (among other things) the ability for all XNA authors to publish games to Xbox Live Marketplace and in the process, to earn reputation, fame and even income. This represents a huge opportunity for your students. You can read all about this on the XNA Team Blog and also FAQ on the XNA forums.
 To compliment this new development we have opened out access to the XNA Creators' Club via DreamSpark. This new programme gives access to key developer tools for all students (and academics). In addition, the XNA Creators Club website is going to get a bunch of new features too.
 Finally, start saving up, XNA Game Studio 3.0 will also enable multiplayer gaming on the Zune over a wireless link. The Zune has not yet hit the UK market but we know you will want one when they arrive.
Claire
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.gif) The Architect Insight Conference is a two day residential event aimed at senior architects in forward thinking companies and universities. There is an early bird discount which provides a saving of £229.13 for all those who register before leap day this year (Feb 29th 2008). To find out who is speaking and how to register please visit the AIC site and please do so soon as places go fast.
Claire 
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What's this? Free developer software for every student in the UK? Ed Dunhill has all the details on his blog. 
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I learned on the Higher Education blog that our Colleagues in the Higher Education team are holding a Live Meeting: "On Tuesday 26th February at 9.30am we will be running a Live Meeting presentation to discuss the Microsoft Collaborative Campus as a way to connect students in a way that provides access to a vast breadth of online services such as mail, file storage and social networking capability. The presentation will be relevant to technical decision makers who are currently responsible for providing these sorts of services to students, and to business decision makers who are interested in understanding how technology can underpin these scenarios for students and staff. To request details for the meeting, and a URL to join the presentation, please email Ceri Morriss in our HE team." If you would like your students / department/ campus to have these kind of facilities then please encourage the people who make the technical and financial decisions to join in. Claire 
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 The academic team has enjoyed working with Rare over the past 18 months and it seems they have enjoyed it too, so much so that Nick Burton has put pen to paper (OK, type to screen) to bring our attention to some great facts.
You might be surprised to learn that 90% of roles at Rare go to graduates. You might have forgotten that Rare offer free lectures to games students. Read the article here in Gamasutra, to find out why. Claire PS Don't forget to share this with your students!
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