Some of you may have been peeking at my blogs, where I'm packing in details re DjangoCon, ongoing in Portland.
I'm getting a lot of validation for this idea of bringing GIS / GPS closer to the core curriculum (talking high school servers) with all these local data sources about real world concerns. On the math side, it's all great circles and polyhedra i.e. the bridge from geometry to geography is gonna be central (anticipated in Vilnius slides, linked in my last post). GeoDjango is part of what's exciting me here, and the Postgres back end. Those of you on divers...@python.org will have seen a lot of traffic twixt python-dev management e.g. Aahz and one of the top Postgres community organizers, Selena. We're also on great terms with Admirers of JavaScript here in Portland (lots of overlapping attendance -- the we did better with Cubespace as a grand central though, a step back to have these separate office towers with locked doors and guards). The reason I bring up JavaScript is we're seeing a lot of robustness in that language, as the guts of the browsers. V8 in Chrome. HTML5.... So picture more control panel or cockpit type GUIs with low level JSON chatter over the wire, with Django type stacks on the server (Rails type...). Anyway, it's all way cool and math related. GIS is all about polygons. If you're a math teacher looking for applications, here they are. But then a school needs strong IT to move into these areas. Who on faculty wants to take this on? This is knowledge to pass directly to students, not hide behind curtains. If you use computers, you need to learn how to control them. That's part of what the new literacy entails, per R0ml, so if the math teachers refuse, maybe the language teachers will take it on. Django culture is very Kansas-meets-UK flavored, which feels a little like Clint Eastwood meets Dumbledore. I was snake bearer for PSF, helping bring the two totems together **, more like a Vulcan mind meld than a Klingon mating ritual, although they're both at the hotel now... (I'm local, so at home). Kirby ** http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2009/09/ppug-200998.html ( @psf_snake at PPUG last night ) http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2009/09/djangocon-day-2.html ( @psf_snake and @djangopony with totem bearers) _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
