BCS Oxfordshire
Page includes: next meeting - AGM - What's Hot?' - Virtual Worlds - BCS Blogs, latest jobs and other newsfeeds - Webcomp update - parking
This year's branch visit was a guided tour including the Tank Shed and the Aviation Shed at the Defence Academy in Shrivenham.
The tour of the military vehicles and hardware has always been one of the highlights at the prizegiving for our Oxfordshire
Schools Web Competition, so we were delighted that branch members have had a chance to see it for themselves.
details and photos
After light refreshments and the formal business of the AGM, Mark Chamberlain, RM's learning platform business manager, will
discuss the challenges for schools in the internet age to embrace IT and provide services to all involved: teachers, school
staff, pupils and parents.
 Agenda for 2008 AGM (16KB)
Three speakers presented their ideas for new technology applications: an easy to use web presence for takeaway restaurants,
a communications gadget for tour groups, and an advertising-funded service providing email and web calendaring for local clubs
and societies.
Presenters were questioned by the audience and by our distinguished expert panellists, Dr Jan Hruska, co-founder and Director
of Sophos, Eileen Modral, who manages the Oxford Investment Opportunity Network (OION), Jeff Barr, Senior Manager of Web Services Evangelism with Amazon, and branch webmaster Adrian Walmsley.
When the audience voted at the end of the evening, only two votes separated the three contenders. The winner was David Langer
for groupspaces.
photos
For our February meeting, we took a look at virtual worlds and, in particular, Second Life.
IBM has long been recognised as an interested player in virtual worlds. Roo Reynolds (right) told us how a handful of brave IBMers first began a foray into Second Life and other virtual worlds, and how this
grass-roots interest became widespread adoption within the company.
See also the article by Karen Price, chief executive of e-skills UK, in the January 31 edition of Computing, on how they have been using Second Life to run events
such as virtual careers fairs.
The recently published April 2008 issue of PCPro carries an article entitled "Real Trouble in Virtual Worlds".
photos
 Personalise your newsfeed here: BCS News and Blogs, other industry newsfeeds and latest jobs
Click "show" below to reveal a form where you can choose which industry newsfeed to display in the right sidebar (default:
BCS News).
BCS Oxfordshire Schools 2007 Web Competition - winners announced
The results of this year's competition were announced at
the grand prizegiving event, once again kindly hosted by Cranfield University at their Shrivenham campus, on 20 June 2007.
With more teams from more schools entering than ever before, and a higher standard than ever before, we congratulate all the
students for their websites.
Congratulations particularly to Faringdon College, winnners of the Silver Challenge Cup, to the Abingdon School J3 team who were awarded the Senior Shield, to Rush Common Primary who won the Junior Shield, and team Silver Star from Didcot Girls'
School for the best Individual Site.
For full details of all the awards, links to the winning entries, and the judges' citations see the results page.
Press Release
We were delighted that BCS Oxfordshire branch obtained funds for the third year in a row to sponsor student prizes at the
universities of Oxford, Oxford Brookes and Cranfield (Shrivenham).
The first prize to be awarded this year goes to Vera Szabo for her performance in the first year of the Diploma in Computing
at Oxford University Department of Continuing Education.
Read about winners and what they thought
Are you a member of BCS?
Did you know that member benefits now include the BCS Online library, with a good selection of online books and Forrester reports?
It's never been easier to join BCS and gain access to all the member services and benefits. You can apply online.
hide
 The online library, provided through an agreement with Books 24x7, gives members access to a periodically updated selection of 200 business and technical publications. You can search the
library and read the full text of the books online.
hideIn our survey, several of you said you were worried about coming to meetings because of the problems of parking in Oxford.
Although Oxford can be very difficult in daytime, until recently in the evenings when we hold our meetings there were usually
plenty of spaces in Keble Road.
As at November 2006, the parking situation Keble Road in the evenings has got worse, possibly as a result of overflow from
St Giles where evening parking is now free.
We now advise you to arrive in good time for the meetings to give yourself a better chance of finding a parking place in Keble Road, or to allow time park somewhere
like Norham Gardens and walk back.
...details.
 Limited Offer - branch mugs and coasters
hide  To help remind you of the branch, its website and its activities, we're giving away these mugs and coasters when you come
to one of our events. See a committee member after the meeting.
Limit - one per person.
hide The experimental branch wiki has a default theme with a slightly less overpowering shade of blue! Wikis are becoming popular for collaborative projects
because, unlike traditional bulletin boards, they don't impose rigid threaded structures. You are welcome to visit our wiki, register and see what you think of it. Use the wiki itself to share your thoughts.
Probably the best known wiki is the collaborative encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, which has grown to nearly half a million articles.
So you think you can recognise "phishing" attempts?
hideTry the SonicWALL Phishing IQ Test.
Note this is a link to an external site not connected to BCS and no endorsement of their products is necessarily implied.
YPG: Are you a member of BCS and under 35?
If so, you are automatically a member of the Young Professionals Group(YPG), dedicated to providing representation, services and a support network to all BCS members under the age of 35. For, example
student and
career guidance information.
Log of major site changes
hide
September 2007: The java-based method of generating the site from XML source using SAXON, which had already been proved to
work on Windows and Linux, has now been ported to Mac OS X, facilitating cross-browser compatibility testing on Safari as
well as Firefox, Opera, IE and Konqueror.
November 2006: Google Analytics hooks removed
June 2006: Google Analytics added. See the privacy page for more details.
May 2006: the old website at www.bcsoxon.org is decommissioned and no longer available.
November 2005: show/hide functionality added
May 2005: Default font changed to Trebuchet; the RSS feed fixed so that it works with Firefox (previously it worked with
FeedReader and Opera but not Firefox)
August 2004: Details of the 2004/5 meeting programme
May 2004: Displays of latest updates to the wiki and personalised newsfeed.
May 2004: Site running in parallel on old and new hosts, with reminders to update your bookmarks if you use pages on the
old host.
April 2004: "Contact Us" page processing rewritten in php.
March 2004: amend the stylesheets to allow generation of pages with PHP extension.
March 2004: the RSS feed is now (optionally) dynamically generated from our prototype events database.
March 2004: form processing for the May 2004 trip implemented in PHP using the new BCS Member Group Hosting service.
December 2003: high contrast pages now generated by BETSIE
December 2003: XML/RSS events feed added
November 2003: Front page tidied up, live news feed added in an iframe
November 2003: iCal calendar entries supplied to help you add meetings to your calendar
October 2003: Added high contrast versions of the pages which we hope may be helpful to partially sighted users.
October 2003: XSL was modified to generate code referencing external CSS stylesheets rather than littering the HTML pages
with the now deprecated <FONT> tags. If you are using Netscape 4.x and have problems with the formatting, you might like to
upgrade to Netscape 7.1.
August 2003: updated to use XSLT 2.0 and XInclude.
If you have any comments or suggestions about this site please drop us a note using the Contact form
...more details
|
Latest meeting: Thursday 24 April (afternoon): Branch visit to the Defence Academy, Shrivenham
Thursday 21 February: How Big Business learned to love Virtual Worlds
Update on Parking and Access
BCS and other Oxfordshire events