On 2/12/07, Rob Malouf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
To turn things in a more constructive direction, let me start what I hope will be a new discussion...
If I might be permitted to riff off your queries re our snake and computational linguistics, I want to mention that Jason Cunliffe and I, both contributors to this list, plus we met in New York that time, were (still are?) enamoured of 'Who Is Fourier?' by the LEX Institute, a language teaching academy, with an interesting philosophy we needn't go into too much in this post. Flash forward: have you seen O'Reilly's 'Head First' series and its use of icons, sidebars, jokes, diagrams, different type faces, more icons? Way more "right brained" than traditional CS books, by a long shot, but just as technical and deep (into Java mostly). We've asked Tim about a "Head First" about Python, but the word back, at least then, was we had too small a footprint as a nation (he has these publisher maps he projects at OSCON) to merit such a sophisticated and expensive undertaking. We all still dream of it though. LEX Institute treats mathematics *as a language* and the "story" of this book is language students wanting to analyze the relative frequencies of certain vowel sounds in spoken Japanese, and needing to gather this information directly from sound waves if possible. That led them to Fourier Analysis and a need to teach themselves about it, using human language learning principles, applied to learning maths. In my view, using visuals, including screencasts (OK, so we're getting beyond print media here), we should be able to communicate the gist of Python's *grammar* in mere minutes, with no threat of a follow-up test if such content is non-germane to the course. Maybe a future Ubuntu distro will simply include some of these Python teaching clips on the DVD? Makes sense to me. *We* will make the OO paradigm seem easy, using trivial-to-get cartoons. To me, that's a kind of a minimalist way of explaining the "everything is an object" slogan, a way to get a sense of Python's "algebra" (its design). I have no problem with students not "majoring" in Python, or any computer language. But skating through these grammar sections could be fun, engaging, non-threatening, and take only minutes. For example, my 'classes and subclasses' clip, only 6 minutes 41 seconds, in my Python for Math Teachers series (a collection of roughly 10 clips so far). Such clips by others could be projected to a computational linguistics class for like a total of 20 minutes one random day, as a token nod, if nothing else, to one of many languages you're looking at and computing with (Python). Show 'Warriors of the Net' as well while you're at it (??) to make sure your students know the basics of TCP/IP? Even those who live and breath it, probably won't mind an 8 minute cartoon on TCP/IP (OK, maybe it's 15, I forget). It's a language that computes too, no? Not properly a topic? Kirby Book highlighted: Who Is Fourier?: http://www.amazon.com/Who-Fourier-Transnational-College-Tokyo/dp/0964350408 Jason waxing eloquent thereon: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/2001-October/001788.html LEX Institute: http://www.lexhippo.gr.jp/english/organization/index.html References in my Blogs: Python for Math Teachers: http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2007/01/python-for-math-teachers.html Brainstorming about Pedagogy: http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2005/01/brainstorming-about-pedagogy.html TCP/IP: http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2006/06/tcpip-for-gnubees.html Background Reading: Computational Linguistics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_linguistics
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