At 04:58 PM 3/3/2009 -0800, kirby urner wrote: >I also invite visitors to my Oregon Curriculum Network site: > >http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/cp4e.html > >The Pythonic Math at this site is better than anything else on the Web >as of March, 2009, bar none.
We're looking for something more interactive. The storyboard stuff is cool. Videos take too much bandwidth. I've always thought lectures are a terrible way to teach technical subjects, but I can see the advantage of having audio to supplement a sequence of slides, and avoid taking your eyes off where they should be focused. Bruce Eckel's Thinking in (Java, C++, Python) series is excellent, but he never finished the Python version http://www.mindview.net/Books/TIPython. There is a great opportunity here for a good teacher. Some thoughts on how we might expand on this: We need a complete online course in Python, including PyWhip, Lectures in Python (slides with audio), and a forum where students could get questions answered, like comp.lang.python, but something more private, where students won't feel shy about asking dumb questions, and more focused, where we can have a lot of discussion on a narrow topic. The topic this week is strings. This could be a "service course" for non-CS technical professionals or students who could take it as a pre-requisite for engineering and science classes. The costs of production and delivery would be very low, mainly paying teachers to participate in regularly scheduled online "classes". I can imagine a class of 200 students with two or three teachers, so questions could be answered typically within a few hours. I tried to do this with a class in C, but we had to use the University's cumbersome, officially-approved teacher-support software - no email notifications when a question is posted. That was a real problem leading to sometimes a day of delay before I could check to see if there were any questions. The login procedure was a pain. Google forums are all we need. -- Dave _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
