So I got a lot of reality checks visiting OSU in Corvallis yesterday, a campus I've visited in other contexts, but this was my first time to more central campus buildings that I can recall, parked off Jefferson near Monroe, went to special collections in Valley Library for a visit to the Doug Strain reading room (more info in blogs).
The big flatscreen in the library shows study carrels (floor plan, like CubeSpace), and which have computers in use, vs. which are sitting idle, with icons by operating system: Windows, OSX, OSX-music, OSX-video, i.e three flavors of Apple, one of Microsoft (Windows icon). Zero Penguins. Gotta bring those in on laptops, use 'em with wifi, which is what I'd planned for (lugged my Dell in Razz (my Subaru)). The icon for your study carrel turns red or pinkish if you've stayed over two hours. I couldn't tell if this was a badge of honor, shame or neutral, as in "I study really hard" vs "I hog more than my share" vs "who the hell knows what it means" (more my attitude). Of course there's no way to tell, from the flatscreen, which of these cubes was running any Python. That'd be kind of invasive (of privacy), though sometimes a sysop might poll processes for anonymous summarizing i.e. OSU would be able to register upticks in Python usage if it wanted, without naming names, kind of like O'Reilly does around book titles (i.e. what's hot and what's not) etc. I liked how these students looked really interested in learning stuff, and very believably that's what they were there for (to actually study -- not everyone in a toga, no evidence of kegs (this was the library, after all)). My daughter Tara (freshman in high school) was impressed, and with more than just the library. She got to hold a Nobel prize even, one of two in the exhibit chamber. In the MVC design I'm working on, significant work gets performed by Python processes with no obligation to update a browser directly, i.e. the visualization process is on a whole different machine potentially, and works against SQL tables directly. A good analogy might be a closed source archive: you have access to the reference desk (as a browser) but the nuts and bolts application, controlled by way of a web interface, isn't directly talking to any web framework, even if Django's a front end. To "control" is to submit to a jobs queue in SQL, not to chat directly with aliens (other Pythons). This way of implementing MVC means the core controller maintainers don't need to know jack about AJAX or talking to web clients. Just make sure all the relevant info gets out there in MySQL or what have you (sqlite for prototyping maybe), and let geeks doing visualizers work independently, in other cities even, no sharing of source code necessary, just table schemas. I'm not coding solo in this picture, have svn credentials is all. There's possibly an open source angle in that a lot of code gets wasted making up for the fact that your average XHTML isn't designed to be searched (as a namespace, it inherits a lot of visualization concerns as attributes), whereas some flavors of XML are designed entirely around making different ontologies more accessible. So a stripped down version of the parser could be released that just assumes a customized, search-friendly playground, where people post their political views, other thoughts, with the very deliberate intent to guide scoring and polling at the XML level. These are politicians or pundits, opinion shapers, not shy about expressing themselves. In other news, Pycon is suggesting Steve Holden and I rent a blimp to flash ads about a Flying Circus event: him and me doing an experimental prototype curriculum of tomorrow as a twosome, me the futurist Portlander, hot off the jet, and he the focused interlocutor, keeping me on task and on target, in terms of preaching relevantly to the actually present choir. Given the somewhat mathy content of the proposal (wanna do some RSA, fractals in PIL, vectors in VPython), the idea of the blimp was to attract local high school teachers from around Chicago, maybe shifting to an evening time slot on the weekend so they might come after work (a generous concession). My response has been to defend the content as private sector relevant even though it's in the guise of a futuristic high school curriculum (drawing from personal experience actually teaching this content to high school aged students here in Portland, as chronicled in this very edu-sig archive). The goal is to impart skills around core Python plus some important libraries and strategies for using 'em (same as most tutorials, so not so unusual, no blimp need apply (sounds expensive!)). Plus this duo workshop leader format might demonstrate a good way for project leaders in all walks of life to manage teams of peer coders i.e. set up some semi-Socratic Bob asking Alice or Alice asking Bob, with Eve the lurking learner, gradually picking up clues as to where the team has been, is headed, starting to more ask better questions as the picture becomes clear (unlike in cryptography, Eve is on our side in this picture, just might not speak our language yet, i.e. Python). Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
