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