From kirby.urner at gmail.com Tue May 1 20:31:59 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Tue, 1 May 2007 11:31:59 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC vs. CP4E Message-ID: Just to clear up what might have seemed confusing, this editorial by John Dix in NetworkWorld (4.30.07 pg 26), other public sources, clears up a few things. === Cheap laptops: OLPC XO laptop: 433 MHz AMD Geode LX-700 x86 Processor, 256 MB RAM, 1GB NAND Flash storage, 3 USB Ports, 2w power usage during nominal load, 802.11b/g-based WiFi Mesh networking, Dual Mode Display 800X600 in color and 1200X900 in monochrome mode. Intel Classmate laptop: Celeron M processor at 900MHz, 7" 800 x 480 display, 256MB of DDR2 memory, 1GB of flash memory, 802.11b/g, GM915 graphics === According to John, Negroponte says 5000 X0s have been made, with a production rate of ~1 million/mo targeted for December of this year. Both models will run Windows, though XO's native platform is Sugar on Matchbox window manager on Linux. FORTH gets mentioned as a teaching language, not just Python. Some kids'll have Google accounts that back up everything centrally. As I've tried to make clear: my CP4E roadshow and teaching gigs aren't premised on any particular model of laptop and/or desktop, though I heartily welcome their advent, especially in the developing world. If an XO and/or Classmate shows up on my doorstep, I'll add it to my show and tell.[1] Until then, all I need is Python on any OS (IDLE works fine) plus some essential add-ons, such as VPython for OpenGL, PIL for stills, a few other bells and whistles (POV-Ray always a favorite), with Internet connectivity an obvious plus. But mostly what I need is access to a rich tradition of mathematics, which of course I've got [2], thanks to so many who've come before me in so many walks of life. I hope this clears up any lingering confusions about my recent postings. Kirby 4dsolutions.net/ocn myspace.com/4dstudios [1] example of a current rap: http://tinyurl.com/2elppl [2] http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/cp4e.html From andre.roberge at gmail.com Tue May 1 20:47:25 2007 From: andre.roberge at gmail.com (Andre Roberge) Date: Tue, 1 May 2007 15:47:25 -0300 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC (and a p.s. about Crunchy) Message-ID: <7528bcdd0705011147h7e94f406n2c3b1a015cbb3e7f@mail.gmail.com> Some of you may remember my post http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/2007-February/007771.html about the OLPC talk at Pycon. I seem to remember at the time that some people on this list expressed their desire to see this talk. A very similar talk is now available here: http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-4285568518538296189&q=olpc+google+tech @Ivan K: if you are reading this message: great job!!! Andr? ========== P.S. In my February post, I mentioned ** One open issue (as I understand it) is that of finding the "best practice" for plugins. The idea is that the core programs should be as small as possible but easy to extend via plugins.** Following this, and an email discussion with Johannes Woolard, I am glad to be able to say that "We" (read "Johannes") have now redesigned Crunchy so that it uses a plugin architecture, making it much easier to add new capabilities. A new release with this new architecture (and exciting new capabilities) should be available by the end of the month. From krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu Tue May 1 20:55:24 2007 From: krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu (=?UTF-8?B?SXZhbiBLcnN0acSH?=) Date: Tue, 01 May 2007 14:55:24 -0400 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC vs. CP4E In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <46378D1C.4090605@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> kirby urner wrote: > FORTH gets mentioned as a teaching > language, not just Python. Yeah, that's crack. Our firmware is written in Forth -- the 'teaching language' bit is someone's colorful invention. As far as language environments go, we're shipping Python as core, and then Squeak and a TBD Logo variant; Javascript is present through the browser. > Some kids'll have Google accounts that > back up everything centrally. All kids will have Google accounts, though they will not be required in any sense for the laptop's functionality. Before someone jumps in with terrifying privacy concerns, I should say that the security platform treats (almost) all backup servers as untrusted and generally only deals with encrypted blobs. -- Ivan Krsti? | GPG: 0x147C722D From krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu Tue May 1 20:57:34 2007 From: krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu (=?UTF-8?B?SXZhbiBLcnN0acSH?=) Date: Tue, 01 May 2007 14:57:34 -0400 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC (and a p.s. about Crunchy) In-Reply-To: <7528bcdd0705011147h7e94f406n2c3b1a015cbb3e7f@mail.gmail.com> References: <7528bcdd0705011147h7e94f406n2c3b1a015cbb3e7f@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <46378D9E.4050304@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> Andre Roberge wrote: > A very similar talk is now available here: > http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-4285568518538296189&q=olpc+google+tech > > @Ivan K: if you are reading this message: great job!!! Thanks. I should point out that the Google talk is rather more technical than the PyCon talk, cuts the educational part somewhat short, and doesn't spend as much time on Python itself. Cheers, -- Ivan Krsti? | GPG: 0x147C722D From lac at openend.se Wed May 2 08:46:03 2007 From: lac at openend.se (Laura Creighton) Date: Wed, 2 May 2007 08:46:03 +0200 Subject: [Edu-sig] interesting article about the future of user platforms Message-ID: <200705020646.l426k31H011881@theraft.openend.se> http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/ I rather like the site name, too. :-) Laura Creighton From kirby.urner at gmail.com Wed May 2 17:24:38 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Wed, 2 May 2007 08:24:38 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC vs. CP4E In-Reply-To: <46378D1C.4090605@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> References: <46378D1C.4090605@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> Message-ID: > > Some kids'll have Google accounts that > > back up everything centrally. > > All kids will have Google accounts, though they will not be required in > any sense for the laptop's functionality. Before someone jumps in with > terrifying privacy concerns, I should say that the security platform > treats (almost) all backup servers as untrusted and generally only deals > with encrypted blobs. > > -- > Ivan Krsti? | GPG: 0x147C722D We'll be wanting an opt out option vis-a-vis Google -- and it's Google's integrity I'm moving to protect, not worried about the integrity of innocent children. Kirby From kirby.urner at gmail.com Wed May 2 18:04:42 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Wed, 2 May 2007 09:04:42 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] Viztoyz Vid (high rez) Message-ID: If you can spare the bandwidth, to the tune of a 35 meg .swf (Flash), I've published a version of the VizToyz vid that greatly exceeds the Google Video version in quality. And quality is what you need, when eyeballing source code. A lot of the Python screencasts on Youtube or whatever (including my own) are somewhat painful to watch, because the resolution is too low. And it's not the physical size of the screen that matters so much, e.g. iPods are rather easy on the eyes, even with Python source. Plus now there're new projectors, like we have for laptops, that'll take iPods in a slot (PJ258D ViewDock by ViewSonic). Looking forward to testing. So, the new CP4E resource: http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/python/viztoyz1/viztoyz1.html Kirby From krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu Wed May 2 18:53:18 2007 From: krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu (=?UTF-8?B?SXZhbiBLcnN0acSH?=) Date: Wed, 02 May 2007 12:53:18 -0400 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC vs. CP4E In-Reply-To: References: <46378D1C.4090605@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> Message-ID: <4638C1FE.7020508@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> kirby urner wrote: > We'll be wanting an opt out option vis-a-vis Google It's not an opt-in/opt-out kind of feature. Google is just the default backup sink; you can swap it out for an Amazon S3 sink, your favorite backup service sink, or no sink at all. -- Ivan Krsti? | GPG: 0x147C722D From kirby.urner at gmail.com Wed May 2 20:13:26 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Wed, 2 May 2007 11:13:26 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC vs. CP4E In-Reply-To: <4638C1FE.7020508@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> References: <46378D1C.4090605@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> <4638C1FE.7020508@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> Message-ID: On 5/2/07, Ivan Krsti? wrote: > kirby urner wrote: > > We'll be wanting an opt out option vis-a-vis Google > > It's not an opt-in/opt-out kind of feature. Google is just the default > backup sink; you can swap it out for an Amazon S3 sink, your favorite > backup service sink, or no sink at all. > > -- > Ivan Krsti? | GPG: 0x147C722D OK, sounds feasible. Google is being pressured by some of its shareholders to actually withhold service from downstream establishments practicing censorship over search results, as a way of protecting the brand from any kind of dumbing down. http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/05/02/google-urges-censorship_1.html Technically, such service denials would probably be as ineffective as trying to police every counterfeit use of the Google name and logo on a search page, but the advantage of publicly stating you're blocking certain IP numbers (while doing so) is to protect one's own reputation in the eyes of one's other clients and backers. Anyway, given the above scenario (which I'm not saying will ever play out), certain spoiled brat spawn of elite government officials, among the first to get an XO, yet angry about the bad press their ruling cadre is getting, might grow to hate Google and what it stands for. No reason to make OLPC a monkey in the middle, should such antipathies develop among some global youth. They can simply switch over and synch with their dictatorship's service, if that's what they prefer (or their parents demand). http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2006/01/memo-re-google-in-china.html Kirby From jeff at taupro.com Fri May 4 11:00:02 2007 From: jeff at taupro.com (Jeff Rush) Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 04:00:02 -0500 Subject: [Edu-sig] interesting article about the future of user platforms In-Reply-To: <200705020646.l426k31H011881@theraft.openend.se> References: <200705020646.l426k31H011881@theraft.openend.se> Message-ID: <463AF612.8040708@taupro.com> Laura Creighton wrote: > http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/ > > I rather like the site name, too. :-) Laura, thanks for this link. The (long) article/presentation is quite thought provoking re using layout instead of interaction to effectively communicate information. The contrasting used, showing a "before" and "after" view of a page is neat -- I've seen a lot of those "before" pages around the net. ;-) I struggle to master graphic design and presentation, being more of a programmer and engineer in mindset than an artist, but I keep at it because of the leverage it gives in communicating. Some of the ideas in the article would be useful on our www.python.org site, if we could figure out how to apply them effectively. And certainly they are valuable in designing educational activities for the XO/OLPC laptop. -Jeff From christian.mascher at gmx.de Fri May 4 18:03:49 2007 From: christian.mascher at gmx.de (Christian Mascher) Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 18:03:49 +0200 Subject: [Edu-sig] interesting article about the future of user platforms Message-ID: <463B5965.6060109@gmx.de> -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Christian Mascher Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] interesting article about the future of user platforms Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 17:21:23 +0200 Size: 1042 Url: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/attachments/20070504/e37b75c8/attachment.mht From kirby.urner at gmail.com Fri May 4 18:44:57 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 09:44:57 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] interesting article about the future of user platforms In-Reply-To: <463B5965.6060109@gmx.de> References: <463B5965.6060109@gmx.de> Message-ID: Yeah, interesting, shades of Tufte's 'Envisioning Information' which sits here on my desk. Re the taxonomy of human activities, all those physical ones *may* have an intellectual component as well -- which maybe explains the asterisk? On another front, New York Times just came out with an article talking about USA school districts already disillusioned with one laptop per child (lowercase cuz it's not official OLPC, just each kid has a laptop). Teachers found the technology too difficult to control, with kids turning "inward" (i.e. into cyberspace) for their information (including lotsa porn). Plus the prison-like atmosphere of USA schools made teachers feel more than ever like prison guards, trying to keep their students from hacking through poorly designed security systems. A lot of traditionalists over on the Math Forum are crowing with this news as to them it's a vindication of their anti-computer philosophy of education. In my view, it's more proof that the old lesson plans and standards are way out of synch with the new technology. Unlike the traditionalists, I say it's the computers that should stay, the old curriculum we don't need. But I believe in freedom of choice. Dark agers should still have access to their antediluvian courses if that's really what they want to have. Just don't punish *all* students because of the druthers (desires) of the anti-computer ethnicities. Those who want laptop-based education should maybe link up with gnu math teachers, other geeks (many of them Python-savvy) and the soon-to-be larger numbers of XO-based youth around the world. http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=1566320&tstart=0 Kirby From kirby.urner at gmail.com Sat May 5 05:11:36 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 20:11:36 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] Tomorrow's Python Class Message-ID: My course is taking on a "how it works" aspect, looking at two topics of interest to most teenagers: computer games and animated movies. I'm explaining how the games need real time computations to keep the frame rate high, while the movies render frame by frame, taking hours if need be, only to give a real time, non-interactive experience at runtime. My technologies for illustrating these two different approaches to computer graphics: VPython for real time with a frame rate; POV-Ray for rendering animations. Python sits in the driver's seat vis-a-vis both of these engines. More mathematically speaking, I'm finding a lot to recommend a Vector class as a kind of anchoring concept, a foot in the door if you will. Having explored Dog and Monkey, maybe Human, as subclasses of Mammal, with attention to dot notation and special names such as __init__ and __repr__, I think they're ready for something more abstract that nevertheless has a visual representation. My default background color for the VPython window is cyan, which looks a little like sea water in a coral lagoon. So I talk about "the fish tank" or "the aquarium" quite a bit (which might invoke images of 'Shark Tale' in some of our savvy viewers). That gives the feeling of volume or space. It's not a flat window, but a tank. My Vector class includes the following simplification, which you can actually find in some linear algebra texts: vectors always tail-originate at the origin. If you want an edge that connects any two points, neither of them (0,0,0), well, that's what we call an Edge, and two vector tips define it. So how do we define polyhedra i.e. shapes in general then? I go with a wireframe view to start, and require two data structures: a dictionary of vectors (tails at (0,0,0)), and a list of face tuples, each element going around a face, either clockwise or counter-clockwise. So, for example, a Tetrahedron (subclass of Polyhedron) requires a dictionary of four vertices {'a':Vector((x0,y0,z0)), 'b':Vector((x1,y1,z1)), 'c':Vector((x2,y2,z2)), 'd':Vector((x3,y3,z3))} and a list of four face tuples: [('a','b','c'), ('a','c','d'), ('a','d','b'),('b','c','d')] Those of you already into computation geometry (CG) will recognize that I'm not doing anything very original here. The widely used OFF format, plus VRML, are quite similar, in giving a list of points (what I'm calling vectors) and a list of faces consisting of points, going around each face. Exactly my approach as well. Back to the Vector class, my approach with VPython has been to wrap the native visual.vector in a class of my own design. I implement __add__ and __mul__ for vector addition and scalar multiplication respectively. __neg__ returns a vector 180 degrees from the current one (e.g. newv = - oldv). Then I have dot product and cross product, which I wouldn't insist on using initially. __sub__ may be defined as "adding the additive inverse of" i.e. __add__ the __neg__ of some other vector to this one... I'm going in to such detail because I don't think these will just be the idiosyncratic choices of a lone wolf independently operating gnu math teacher. Other gnu math teachers will likely find this is just the right mix of newfangled and traditional. We've been teaching Gibbs-style vectors for several decades to high schoolers (it's a part of the IB curriculum as well as most slightly accelerated USA/UK maths). Now that computers are in the picture, and uncluttered agiles like Python, I think we're ready to rethink this whole segment, and do something that's fun for a change (not to mention more job relevant than ever). Sample IDLE session: IDLE 1.2 >>> from stickworks import Vector, Edge >>> thevector = Vector((1,1,1)) >>> othervector = Vector((2,-1,1)) >>> thevector + othervector Vector @ (3.0,0.0,2.0) >>> 3 * thevector Vector @ (3.0,3.0,3.0) >>> - thevector Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in - thevector TypeError: bad operand type for unary -: 'Vector' >>> thevector - othervector Vector @ (-1.0,2.0,0.0) Well well well, I see I haven't implemented vector negation. Time to pop the code and add it then... class Vector (object): """ A wrapper for visual.vector that expresses a cylinder via draw(), always pegged to the origin """ radius = 0.03 def __init__(self, xyz, color=(0,0,1)): self.v = vector(*xyz) self.xyz = xyz self.color = color self.cyl = None def draw(self): """define and render the cylinder""" self.cyl = cylinder(pos = (0,0,0), axis = self.v, radius = self.radius, color = self.color) def erase(self): """toss the cylinder""" if self.cyl: self.cyl.visible = 0 self.cyl = None def __repr__(self): return 'Vector @ (%s,%s,%s)' % self.xyz # some vector ops, including scalar multiplication def diff_angle(self, other): return self.v.diff_angle(other.v) def cross(self, other): temp = cross(self.v, other.v) return Vector((temp.x, temp.y, temp.z)) def dot(self, other): return dot(self.v, other.v) def __sub__(self, other): temp = self.v - other.v return Vector((temp.x, temp.y, temp.z)) def __add__(self, other): temp = self.v + other.v return Vector((temp.x, temp.y, temp.z)) def __mul__(self, scalar): temp = self.v * scalar return Vector((temp.x, temp.y, temp.z)) __rmul__ = __mul__ def __neg__(self): return Vector((-self.v.x, -self.v.y, -self.v.v)) >>> import stickworks >>> reload(stickworks) >>> from stickworks import Vector, Edge >>> thevector = Vector((1,1,1)) >>> othervector = Vector((2,-1,1)) >>> -thevector Vector @ (-1.0,-1.0,-1.0) >>> -othervector Vector @ (-2.0,1.0,-1.0) Now maybe a teacher'd rather not *start* by wrapping a visual.vector inside this a class (like a candy wrapper). I could see doing a more generic Vector first, and just using it lexically, not graphically. VPython doesn't link the cylinder object to its vector in any tight way, and yet the cylinder makes the most sense as a visual representation. I add in a draw method such that thevector.draw() sticks a cylinder into the fish tank, with its tail at the origin. Until you explicitly *ask* for this graphical mode. If you look at my polyhedra.py, you'll see I wire up the Icosahedron based on three golden rectangles with sides phi and 1. That's explained more visually in my Feb 2000 'Getting Inventive with Vectors' piece, part of a 4 part numeracy + computer literacy series ( http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/numeracy1.html ). I actually keep these 3 mutually orthogonal golden rectangles available for VPython viewing, as a part of the Icosahedron class: class Icosahedron (Polyhedron): def __init__(self, verts = dict( # 12 vertices at the corners of 3 mutually # orthogonal golden rectangles xya=Vector(( phi/2, 0.5, 0.0)), # phi rectangle in xy xyb=Vector(( phi/2,-0.5, 0.0)), xyc=Vector((-phi/2,-0.5, 0.0)), xyd=Vector((-phi/2, 0.5, 0.0)), #----------------------------- xza=Vector((-0.5, 0.0, phi/2)), # Phi rectangle in xz xzb=Vector(( 0.5, 0.0, phi/2)), xzc=Vector(( 0.5, 0.0,-phi/2)), xzd=Vector((-0.5, 0.0,-phi/2)), #----------------------------- yza=Vector(( 0.0, phi/2, 0.5)), # Phi rectangle in yz yzb=Vector(( 0.0, phi/2,-0.5)), yzc=Vector(( 0.0,-phi/2,-0.5)), yzd=Vector(( 0.0,-phi/2, 0.5)), )): # 12 vertices self.vertices = verts # 20 equiangular triangles self.faces = ( ('xza','xzb','yza'), ('xza','xzb','yzd'), ('yza','yzb','xyd'), ('yza','yzb','xya'), ('xzc','xzd','yzb'), ('xzc','xzd','yzc'), ('xya','xyb','xzb'), ('xya','xyb','xzc'), ('xyd','xyc','xza'), ('xyd','xyc','xzd'), ('yzd','yzc','xyb'), ('yzd','yzc','xyc')) self.edges = self._distill() self.rectangles = ( ('xya','xyb','xyc','xyd'), ('xza','xzb','xzc','xzd'), ('yza','yzb','yzc','yzd')) def goldrects(self): Edge.color = green for r in self.rectangles: c0,c1,c2,c3 = [self.vertices[i] for i in r] Edge(c0,c1).draw() Edge(c1,c2).draw() Edge(c2,c3).draw() Edge(c3,c0).draw() [ http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/python/polyhedra.py ] Kirby From mtobis at gmail.com Mon May 7 17:56:38 2007 From: mtobis at gmail.com (Michael Tobis) Date: Mon, 7 May 2007 10:56:38 -0500 Subject: [Edu-sig] laptop backlash Message-ID: The NY Times had an article last week about schools backing off the idea of laptops for students. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html a snippet: ==> So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty ? and worse. Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not. "After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement ? none," said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students' hands. "The teachers were telling us when there's a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It's a distraction to the educational process." <== It's not surprising, really, but the timing is not good. Hoping the OLPC folks are at least aware of this trend. mt From kirby.urner at gmail.com Tue May 8 00:50:31 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Mon, 7 May 2007 15:50:31 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] laptop backlash In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > It's not surprising, really, but the timing is not good. Hoping the > OLPC folks are at least aware of this trend. > > mt Lots of public discussion @ Math Forum hosted by Drexel University, I'm sure many other places as well. Kirby From winstonw at stratolab.com Tue May 8 03:50:10 2007 From: winstonw at stratolab.com (Winston Wolff) Date: Mon, 7 May 2007 21:50:10 -0400 Subject: [Edu-sig] laptop backlash In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <58F49D1D-E967-40C6-9801-A672B660AC1C@stratolab.com> It's a good article. The problem is that if teachers teach the traditional stuff in the traditional ways, then the traditional tools work very well, with low overhead and cost. But if you want to change the curriculum and add a lot of problem solving, project based work, some computer programming, and so forth, then laptops can be a help. But most traditional teachers are not trying to teach this stuff. -Winston ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Stratolab - video game courses for kids in new york - http:// stratolab.com On May 7, 2007, at 11:56 AM, Michael Tobis wrote: > The NY Times had an article last week about schools backing off the > idea of laptops for students. > > http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html > > a snippet: > > ==> > So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has > decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of > other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing > programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty ? and > worse. > > Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a > technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between > students who had computers at home and those who did not. > > "After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact > on student achievement ? none," said Mark Lawson, the school board > president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York > State to experiment with putting technology directly into students' > hands. "The teachers were telling us when there's a one-to-one > relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the > way. It's a distraction to the educational process." > <== > > It's not surprising, really, but the timing is not good. Hoping the > OLPC folks are at least aware of this trend. > > mt > _______________________________________________ > Edu-sig mailing list > Edu-sig at python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig From lac at openend.se Tue May 8 15:58:41 2007 From: lac at openend.se (Laura Creighton) Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 15:58:41 +0200 Subject: [Edu-sig] interesting article about the future of user platforms In-Reply-To: Message from Jeff Rush of "Fri, 04 May 2007 04:00:02 CDT." <463AF612.8040708@taupro.com> References: <200705020646.l426k31H011881@theraft.openend.se> <463AF612.8040708@taupro.com> Message-ID: <200705081358.l48Dwgd7024596@theraft.openend.se> Thank you very much for the kind words. If you haven're read Tufte, you will likely enjoy reading him. I also recommend the lesser known _The Theory and Aesthetic of Design_ and _The Theory and Art of Workmanship_, both by David Pye. David Pye was an architect and a professor of furniture design, as well as a wood worker. So his books are for anybody who has ever designed _anything_ and who has built anything. While Chris Alexander's Pattern Language for architects has had an effect on software development, directly influencing Design Patterns, David Pye is still virtually unknown. I think that this is very sad, because the book on workmanship in particular I think is vital to understanding what it is that we are doing. I think that these days it is fashionable to believe that the 'good things' we see in the created world are good because they were _designed_ well. And they may well have been. But what was crucial, often, was not the design but the workmanship. I see things like the XP and agile movement as significant attempts to improve the quality of the workmanship in our profession. If you get the chance, read David Pye, and see what you think. By the way, I am most heartily impressed with the amount of work you have accomplished on the python-advocacy front. Those of us who have fought the monsters of 'we like things just the way they are' in the Python community have accumulated an impressive list of burn-outs. But looks like you fought the fight -- and won. Some day I would like it if you taught me _how_ you managed it. Like all good magicians, you make it look effortless, when I know it is anything but. You take care, Laura Creighton From tk at dydimustk.com Tue May 8 16:00:22 2007 From: tk at dydimustk.com (thomas knoll) Date: Tue, 8 May 2007 09:00:22 -0500 Subject: [Edu-sig] laptop backlash In-Reply-To: <58F49D1D-E967-40C6-9801-A672B660AC1C@stratolab.com> References: <58F49D1D-E967-40C6-9801-A672B660AC1C@stratolab.com> Message-ID: <59a26bd90705080700j7b3688d2ub91abf1a606a0113@mail.gmail.com> I understand the goal of OLPC is to get the technology into the hand of kids for self directed learning, not to get them into schools. Unfortunately, it will be years and years before schools focus on interactive education, and students will be the driving force. Eventually they will demand it, and teachers will have to learn from the students how to interact with them. I deeply appreciate OLPC's focus on getting the laptops into the hands of kids, rather than heading down the bureaucratic path of trying to get them into schools. gratia vobis et pax, TK + .:dydimustk.com:. | Freelance Apostle ________________________________________ Thomas Knoll 651.210.2321 tk at dydimustk.com skype:dydimustk From kirby.urner at gmail.com Tue May 8 17:55:21 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Tue, 8 May 2007 08:55:21 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] laptop backlash In-Reply-To: <59a26bd90705080700j7b3688d2ub91abf1a606a0113@mail.gmail.com> References: <58F49D1D-E967-40C6-9801-A672B660AC1C@stratolab.com> <59a26bd90705080700j7b3688d2ub91abf1a606a0113@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Somes schools will voluntarily affiliate with NGOs trafficing in laptops by the palette, and the NGOs won't mind if they see the hardware going to intelligent uses. So it's not an adversarial relationship with the schools in all necks of the woods. But it is in some. We live in a diverse world. What's going on in the so-called Empire State on the Atlantic side of North America is one National Geographic story among many. I don't set my own personal watch by the New York Times, that much is certain. Kirby On 5/8/07, thomas knoll wrote: > I understand the goal of OLPC is to get the technology into the hand > of kids for self directed learning, not to get them into schools. > Unfortunately, it will be years and years before schools focus on > interactive education, and students will be the driving force. > Eventually they will demand it, and teachers will have to learn from > the students how to interact with them. I deeply appreciate OLPC's > focus on getting the laptops into the hands of kids, rather than > heading down the bureaucratic path of trying to get them into schools. > > > gratia vobis et pax, > TK > > + .:dydimustk.com:. | Freelance Apostle > > ________________________________________ > Thomas Knoll 651.210.2321 tk at dydimustk.com > skype:dydimustk > _______________________________________________ > Edu-sig mailing list > Edu-sig at python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig > From kirby.urner at gmail.com Wed May 9 07:52:20 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Tue, 8 May 2007 22:52:20 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] Portland Python Group Regalvanized Message-ID: Event: http://python.meetup.com/183/ PORPIG (Portland Python Interest Group) has restarted thanks to ZeOmega's Brad Allen, visiting from Dallas on a wxPython job involving document handling (Word -> OpenOffice -> PDF -> TIFF). He's working on the thick client for inhouse users, with others doing the Zope web server component. Jason cued me to SQLalchemy and Bar Camp: http://www.sqlalchemy.org/ http://barcamp.org/BarCampPortland Note: Freedom Toasters weren't the topic @ the London Summit, just they happened in South Africa, tend to be orange and black (pretty!): http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&gbv=2&q=%22freedom+toasters%22 I bet Allen Taylor, in the adult Python for Wanderers I'm doing at the Linus Pauling house on Thursdays, will be intrigued by SQL Alchemy, given we writes SQL for Dummies, plus this other one: http://www.amazon.com/All-One-Reference-Dummies-Computer/dp/0470119284/ref=sr_1_8/102-9659880-0725716 Finally I learned about this Python Advocacy group, different from python-marketing. I think I'll study the archive awhile. Chances are the ball is already rolling down the hill, gathering steam, plenty fast, doesn't really need more pushing from lil' me. Kirby -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/attachments/20070508/dececdbc/attachment.htm From gary.pajer at gmail.com Wed May 9 13:07:47 2007 From: gary.pajer at gmail.com (Gary Pajer) Date: Wed, 9 May 2007 07:07:47 -0400 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC on NPR ToTN Today Message-ID: <88fe22a0705090407y4053d82dt7f3417d5802dd6cb@mail.gmail.com> The subject for today's (Wednesday 9 May 07) edition of National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation". From lac at openend.se Wed May 9 14:51:07 2007 From: lac at openend.se (Laura Creighton) Date: Wed, 9 May 2007 14:51:07 +0200 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC game jam Message-ID: <200705091251.l49Cp7Nc024604@theraft.openend.se> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/GameJam Hope they have one closer to me, soon. Laura From mtobis at gmail.com Wed May 9 20:21:42 2007 From: mtobis at gmail.com (Michael Tobis) Date: Wed, 9 May 2007 13:21:42 -0500 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC on NPR ToTN Today In-Reply-To: <88fe22a0705090407y4053d82dt7f3417d5802dd6cb@mail.gmail.com> References: <88fe22a0705090407y4053d82dt7f3417d5802dd6cb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Thanks for the heads up. It's not the only story and that one doesn't appear to be OLPC centric. Alas, the spin is more or less as I suggested in my recent posting. See http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=5 which currently reads === Schools Reconsider Laptops as Educational Tools Educators and politicians have pushed the goal of a laptop for every student. But a number of early adapting schools say the laptops aren't helping, and critics argue that the computers are simply a distraction. === I'm listening to the stream on kut.org which you can do even if you are overseas. Right now they are blithering about Don Imus. There will also be a couple of stories about republican presidential contenders. http://kut2.streamguys.net/listen.pls mt On 5/9/07, Gary Pajer wrote: > The subject for today's (Wednesday 9 May 07) edition of National > Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation". > _______________________________________________ > Edu-sig mailing list > Edu-sig at python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig > From mtobis at gmail.com Wed May 9 23:58:52 2007 From: mtobis at gmail.com (Michael Tobis) Date: Wed, 9 May 2007 16:58:52 -0500 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC on NPR ToTN Today In-Reply-To: References: <88fe22a0705090407y4053d82dt7f3417d5802dd6cb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: They gave Negroponte a few minutes and he basically said the right things, but I'm afraid the idea of children as programmers might be threatening to several segments of the audience. Apparently he also wrote a letter in last Saturday's NY Times in response to the "no more laptops" story. If anyone has a copy I'd appreciate a scan or a transcription. mt On 5/9/07, Michael Tobis wrote: > Thanks for the heads up. > > It's not the only story and that one doesn't appear to be OLPC > centric. Alas, the spin is more or less as I suggested in my recent > posting. > > See > > http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=5 > > which currently reads > > === > Schools Reconsider Laptops as Educational Tools > > Educators and politicians have pushed the goal of a laptop for every > student. But a number of early adapting schools say the laptops aren't > helping, and critics argue that the computers are simply a > distraction. > === > > I'm listening to the stream on kut.org which you can do even if you > are overseas. Right now they are blithering about Don Imus. There will > also be a couple of stories about republican presidential contenders. > > http://kut2.streamguys.net/listen.pls > > mt > > On 5/9/07, Gary Pajer wrote: > > The subject for today's (Wednesday 9 May 07) edition of National > > Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation". > > _______________________________________________ > > Edu-sig mailing list > > Edu-sig at python.org > > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig > > > From krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu Thu May 10 02:02:52 2007 From: krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu (=?UTF-8?B?SXZhbiBLcnN0acSH?=) Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 20:02:52 -0400 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC on NPR ToTN Today In-Reply-To: References: <88fe22a0705090407y4053d82dt7f3417d5802dd6cb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4642612C.3050107@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> Michael Tobis wrote: > Apparently he also wrote a letter in last Saturday's NY Times in > response to the "no more laptops" story. If anyone has a copy I'd > appreciate a scan or a transcription. http://pastie.caboo.se/60303 -- Ivan Krsti? | GPG: 0x147C722D From varmaa at gmail.com Fri May 11 00:13:49 2007 From: varmaa at gmail.com (Atul Varma) Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 17:13:49 -0500 Subject: [Edu-sig] Some thoughts on the word "Laptop" Message-ID: <361b27370705101513w4d2f61a2v9e0fb6dcdfc6a949@mail.gmail.com> Hello, A few days ago, Michael Tobis brought up the New York Times article "Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops" [1] on the OLPC Chicago mailing list. Scott Van Den Plas then responded to it with the question, "How can OLPC focus on educational reform and avoid comparison to simply placing laptops into a traditional setting?" [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html I responded to his question on the OLPC mailing list and Michael thought it might be useful for me to post it here. On 5/8/07, Scott Van Den Plas wrote: > How can OLPC focus on educational reform and avoid comparison to simply placing > laptops into a traditional setting? Well, I imagine it's too late to change the name of the program, but to be honest the very name "one laptop per child" made me laugh out loud the first time I heard it. I think it's because of the connotations that the word "laptop" brings: it's something that, 10 years ago, was a yuppie status symbol, and I think that's significant. Imagine how ridiculous a program like "one cell phone per child" sounds--even if you try to emphasize that a cell phone can actually be incredibly useful for communication, especially for societies that don't even have land-line telephones, the fact is that the first thing that pops into people's heads (well, my head at least) when they hear the word "cell phone" is a Samsung advertisement about some new feature-loaded monstrosity that comes with downloadable ringtones. The word "laptop" comes with almost as much negative cultural baggage as "cell phone". When most people see the word "laptop", I'm guessing they usually think of Norton AntiVirus, Ad-Aware, Microsoft Office, porn, and Google. Only one or two of those is generally regarded as a really useful thing. And when the word "laptop" and "child" are put in the same sentence, all I can think of is MySpace and Alge-Blaster, which are things no nation should spend millions of dollars on. On the other hand, I *love* the term "Children's Machine", which is what the OLPC laptop was originally called. A "machine" is what I had when I grew up: it didn't help me with school in any direct way, it didn't serve as a replacement for a good textbook or a great teacher, but it served an entirely different purpose: it was my personal little lab where I could create things and tinker with the things others had created. Social scientists call it "Bricolage" or "Constructivism", and whatever it is, it's something that I wish every child in the world had some opportunity to experience. So the word "Children's Machine" brings back memories of what I had when I was growing up: it wasn't portable like a laptop, but it served many of the same goals, I think, that OLPC is aiming for. So I guess my two cents to OLPC are: drop the word "laptop". And especially don't call it "One Laptop Per Child", because that phrase alone is going to throw dozens of assumptions into people's heads and they're just going to laugh at you, like I once did. - Atul From jeff at taupro.com Fri May 11 10:20:50 2007 From: jeff at taupro.com (Jeff Rush) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 03:20:50 -0500 Subject: [Edu-sig] Some thoughts on the word "Laptop" In-Reply-To: <361b27370705101513w4d2f61a2v9e0fb6dcdfc6a949@mail.gmail.com> References: <361b27370705101513w4d2f61a2v9e0fb6dcdfc6a949@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <46442762.7090407@taupro.com> Atul Varma wrote: > > Well, I imagine it's too late to change the name of the program, but > to be honest the very name "one laptop per child" made me laugh out > loud the first time I heard it. I think it's because of the > connotations that the word "laptop" brings: it's something that, 10 > years ago, was a yuppie status symbol, and I think that's significant. > The word "laptop" comes with almost as much negative cultural baggage > as "cell phone". > On the other hand, I *love* the term "Children's Machine", which is > what the OLPC laptop was originally called. A "machine" is what I had > when I grew up: > So the word "Children's Machine" brings back memories of what I had > when I was growing up: it wasn't portable like a laptop, but it served > many of the same goals, I think, that OLPC is aiming for. The problem is that ones associations with a word depend, to some degree, on other things in your life. "Laptop" was probably chosen because of the connotations of "personal", "portable", "useful/practical" and "self-powered". I don't associate "laptop" with "yuppie", perhaps because I didn't develop a negative association with that word but first saw them carried by engineers/programmers and only later by business folk. A laptop was something that I as a kid wanted, but couldn't afford, personal, as in I didn't have to share with schoolmates or siblings. Mine. And for you "machine" has a positive meaning, as for me an engineer, but for some it means "dehumanizing", "rigid/inflexible", "noisy", "bulky". Definitely not something for children, unless you view them as resources to be processed mechanically, an offensive idea to most. >From my reading of your post, it sounds like you are referring to what in my childhood would be the explorations with tinker toys, erector sets, lego blocks, lincoln logs -- an open-ended set of pieces with which to tinker and explore. But to those people who don't understand the attraction, who lacked such things growing up, those remain just toys for a child's distraction and amusement, not something educational. Now we as geeks know the power of such constructivism, but many do not, perhaps intentionally due to its subversive nature. OLPC walks the narrow line between being pragmatic and having the appearance of irrelevance while carefully hiding its dangerous, subversive nature. It will succeed as long as it keeps one eye on the amplification of children, rather than that of teachers, administrators or governments. -Jeff From lac at openend.se Fri May 11 10:47:40 2007 From: lac at openend.se (Laura Creighton) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 10:47:40 +0200 Subject: [Edu-sig] Some thoughts on the word "Laptop" In-Reply-To: Message from Jeff Rush of "Fri, 11 May 2007 03:20:50 CDT." <46442762.7090407@taupro.com> References: <361b27370705101513w4d2f61a2v9e0fb6dcdfc6a949@mail.gmail.com> <46442762.7090407@taupro.com> Message-ID: <200705110847.l4B8leZZ029649@theraft.openend.se> Would 'the children's computer' work better? Laura From kirby.urner at gmail.com Fri May 11 16:40:11 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 07:40:11 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] Some thoughts on the word "Laptop" In-Reply-To: <46442762.7090407@taupro.com> References: <361b27370705101513w4d2f61a2v9e0fb6dcdfc6a949@mail.gmail.com> <46442762.7090407@taupro.com> Message-ID: I'll jump in to again tout CP4E as an "alive and thriving" acronym (or abbreviation) that escapes some of the OLPC spin, and that's a good thing. Diversity matters. Firstly, we escape "for children" and instead have "for everyone" or "for everybody" which sounds more egalitarian and less into inter-generational warfare, excluding adults, which in developing areas are as unlikely to have laptops as the kids. Secondly, we focus on an activity rather than a shape and/or size of computer, by emphasizing "programming" -- an activity which all these boxes require and support. Ever since OSCON 2005 I think it was, with the Gibson Guitar bus outside, Gibson a sponsor, I've been thinking of portable computers as musical instruments we carry around, like guitars in a lot of ways. Geek = Musician has a kind of pleasing set of connotations. The idea being: if you get into it more than superficially, you get into programming somehow, no ifs ands or buts about it. Now I'm not suggesting we help those anxious to paint laptops in a bad light, because they feel threatened by OLPC. I support OLPC and continue to push it, welcome it. But CP4E is different, both in approach and philosophy, is home grown within Python Nation (by Guido), has ongoing manifestations. So I'm not planning to drop CP4E *in place of* OLPC just as surely. They're not the same. Frankly, I think OLPC will get by without a lot of help from the Python community, in terms of just getting the hardware spread around. It's what goes on with those laptops once "in situ" that Python comes in. What will the students actually *do* with these machines? Will they learn to program them? Or will they be left essentially without direction, left to tackle a tired pre- computer curriculum that was never crafted with DynaBooks in mind (ala the Empire State model, a sorry affair I'm glad is unreflective of my own personal experience). Kirby -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/attachments/20070511/7b9df843/attachment.htm From kirby.urner at gmail.com Fri May 11 17:15:43 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 08:15:43 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] Python for Wanderers (Class 2) Message-ID: I'm numbering from 0, Python style, so this was actually our third meeting in the boyhood home of 2x Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, sitting around the big table, with projector (Optoma), speakers (including woofer), and laptop (Toshiba Satellite, WinXP w/ Python 2.5, VPython, POV-Ray 3.6, wxPython and PythonCard). The course for adults parallels my Saturday Academy course to some degree and I again showed Code Guardian as an opening cartoon feature, to show what one guy and some friends could now accomplish with a rendering engine, given sufficient talent, skills and commitment (can't trivialize any of those, if the end result is great art, which Code Guardian certainly is (cee-gee.net)). By way of intro on the whiteboard (erasable colored pens), I drew three partially overlapping circles, Venn Diagram style (each overlapping the others, a place in the center where they all overlappped). In the circles I wrote M, V, C for Model, View, Controller. I quickly connected MVC to a history of programming we'd already developed: (i) wild west spaghetti code era, deriving from hard wiring (ii) compiled imperative languages (COBOL, Hopper) (iii) structured programming (Djikstra), (iv) then more sophisiticated paradigms, including OO and then DP, where DP = design patterns, let's say premised on OOP, and where MVC is one very common design pattern people talk about. In this class, M, our model, depends mostly on the XYZ Cartesian style math kids already learn as a part of middle and high school, i.e. the usual pre-college analytical geometry pioneered by Descartes, Fermat and folks like that, already very entrenched, and later, via Hamilton, Gibbs, Heaviside and others, becoming today's "vector algebra" from whence the term "vector graphics" is derived. So for a Model, we're using high school analytic geometry and vector algebra. Good way to lean both, with Python mediating. Start with Dog and Monkey as subclasses of Mammal, to get familiar with a few __rib__ special names, the whole idea of classes, subclasses and objects, then move to "math objects" (more abstract) such as Vector, Edge and Polyhedron. V, our view, comes in two basic flavors: (A) real time and (B) render time. In real time, you get such as OpenGL, with a simplifying VPython facade, and/or DirectX or whatever. Engines that respond in real time to give a game-like experience (or a game). Doom by id set the standard when PCs were still new, showing what intelligent coding could accomplish, in terms of a first person shooter, with the minimal hardware of the day. The games have only gotten more impressive since then. And yet when it comes to attention to small detail and photo- realism, the real time games still can't reach the level of a rendered movie, like 'Shrek' or 'Cars' or 'Over the Hedge'. That's because in render time we have all the time we need to trace every ray of light, to get those photo-realistic frames, which only at the end get strung together and projected at a real time frame rate. So this counts as our other broad category of View -- not like these are the only two, plus many times we interleave them, i.e. a real time game will suddenly switch to a canned loop developed with ray tracing. To give students "cave painting" [1] insight into both kinds of view, we use Python as our controller (C). Python talking to VPython represents real time animation and simulation, ala the game engines, whereas Python talking to POV-Ray represents render time animation ala the movies, movies like Code Guardian. Python also implements a lot of the Model, in that the polyhedra and vector algebra we need is all exposed in source code, in the form of stickworks.py and polyhedra.py. There's a minimal Vector class, wrapped around VPython's, which we actually keep using when writing Scene Description Language for POV-Ray -- because in terms of the model, a vector is a vector and all we need is to be able to add and scale them (__add__ and __mul__ them). In sum, I'm seeing these major themes emerge from this course, which I'm regarding as open source and transferrable, usable by other teachers and/or peers teaching peers (which explains the screencasts): (1) history of computer programming, emergence of OO and DP (2) MVC as a DP example, with broad categories of V being (a) real time (games, some simulations, musc visualizers, screen savers) (b) render time (cartoons, some simulations, Animusic, photo-realistic static screen savers) (3) Python is implementation language (4) Vector graphics and analytic geometry for controlling the model (5) Python playing well with others, gluing together different kinds of engine (in this case OpenGL and POV-Ray). All of the above I think proves quite an eye opener for middle and high schoolers, not only in terms of reinforcing their everyday math and giving them entre to a powerful programming language, but in terms of giving a "how things work" overview of a lot of state of the art technology. Other courses will showcase different aspects of course. Like in my course for Winterhaven (Portland Public), we focused on XML (xml_rpc), GIS (Google Earth), and even a little on MySQL (my geographic quiz showcases USA states and capitals, very traditional, but with this Pythonic layer between a database and the web, ala LAMP) [2]. Kirby [1] "cave painting" means "enough of a semblance to give the idea but minus much detail" (say "dumbing down" if you like but I prefer "homomorphism" (vs. an "isomorphism")) i.e. an analogy with many dimensions missing by design). Example usage: http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=1418476 [2] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/2005-November/005533.html http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/geoquiz.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/attachments/20070511/8900548a/attachment.htm From kirby.urner at gmail.com Sun May 13 01:20:25 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 16:20:25 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] BarCamp Portland Message-ID: So this is turning out to be an amazingly productive venue from a networking point of view. I had no idea that US Bank had allowed its back office on Grand to become this CubeSpace establishment, just perfect for geeks looking to bliss out in some freewheeling social networking extravaganza. It's all managed by Wiki -- and I'm pretty sure that was Ward Cunningham I saw a couple times (inventor of Wiki), but he doesn't remember me from PORPIG days I'm thinking. PORPIG was our Portland Interest Group, spearheaded by Kevin Altis, who has gotten back in the loop, now that our Dallas friend, temporarily in PDX, is taking the helm and steering our Python Meetups. Just the other night, six of us, unknown to one another, shared enough critical info to keep the ball rolling, such that in 45 mins or so, we'll meetup again, this time in the context of Barcamp. The topic is restarting PORPIG, if that's what we're even calling it these days. Perlmongers certainly has their act together, with lots of signage around. http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2007/05/barcamp-portland.html http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2007/05/qyoobin.html One of the attractions here are the XOs, along with the Wii. I've spotting maybe four XOs so far, those Negroponte laptops, bright green with rabbit ears, running Linux, lots of clever hardware adaptations. I don't have my memory card adapter on me, so the pictures, which I'll add to my Flickr album and syndicate through Splashcast, will have to wait a few hours. Anyway, you've probably seen loads of pix by now, given this is edu-sig, and OLPC has been a topic for like months by now. I also finished Class 4 of 5 today, bringing my middle and high schoolers into the 21st century, climbing a 20th century ladder called "vector algebra" (for the model), plus OpenGL and raytracer (for views), Python the controller. http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2007/05/class-notes-session-four.html It's all so "traditional," this stuff, in the sense that we're backward compatible with the textbooks. Vectors are not a new invention by this time. But who wants to publish to wood pulp anymore? We're pretty pixel-oriented these days, using screens as our mathematical canvases. Anyway, back to the chat channel and networking. Getting people to cruise by one's cube is a fine art, akin to cosmic fishing -- something Nirel is better at than me I'd hazard (maybe not though -- I'm pretty good as a recruiter). Kirby -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/attachments/20070512/748b0ac6/attachment.html From kirby.urner at gmail.com Mon May 14 00:05:37 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 15:05:37 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] Sneak Peak... Message-ID: Sneak peak at my latest Pythonic Math write-up (CP4E files): http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/pymath.html Great meeting summaya at BarCamp recently, including Kevin Altis of PythonCard fame **. Kirby === ** I recently demoed PythonCard to Wanderers, in part to contrast assembly language device driving of pixels, vs. painting to a canvas supported by the OS and widget libraries -- PythonCard being an example of the latter strategy, Wanderer Bill Sheppard being an example of an assembly language programmer in my class. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/attachments/20070513/3a5ef779/attachment.htm From nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be Sat May 19 00:34:44 2007 From: nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be (Nicolas Pettiaux) Date: Sat, 19 May 2007 00:34:44 +0200 Subject: [Edu-sig] PyStart - Python Programming teaching/testing program Message-ID: This Google summer of code 2007 project has not yet, as far as I have noticed, been mentioned here, and many of you could be interested and also willing to share ideas and maybe coding. Title PyStart - Python Programming teaching/testing program Student Jason Lee Roy Brower Mentor Pete Savage Abstract PyStart will give teachers a way to work with programming students. And best of all, the students programs can be graded almost automatically will very little review from the teacher. PyStart will review code for the proper entries in the code and for the proper output. It will be created for beginners of programming. The goal of PyStart is to teach the basics of all programming skills. For example, loops and variable types. http://code.google.com/soc/ubuntu/appinfo.html?csaid=F43382157E7D628C https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GoogleSoC2007/python-trainer -- Nicolas Pettiaux - email: nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be Utiliser des formats ouverts et des logiciels libres - http://passeralinux.org From andre.roberge at gmail.com Sat May 19 00:45:58 2007 From: andre.roberge at gmail.com (Andre Roberge) Date: Fri, 18 May 2007 19:45:58 -0300 Subject: [Edu-sig] PyStart - Python Programming teaching/testing program In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7528bcdd0705181545m7c2a71acqaaba4ed69d79261c@mail.gmail.com> I did send an email to both Jason Brower and Pete Savage, inviting them to have a look at a possible collaboration with Crunchy. However, other than an acknowledgment from Jason, there has been no response. Still, I think the suggestion should be considered. Andr? Roberge On 5/18/07, Nicolas Pettiaux wrote: > This Google summer of code 2007 project has not yet, as far as I have > noticed, been mentioned here, and many of you could be interested and > also willing to share ideas and maybe coding. > > Title PyStart - Python Programming teaching/testing program > > Student Jason Lee Roy Brower > Mentor Pete Savage > > Abstract > PyStart will give teachers a way to work with programming students. > And best of all, the students programs can be graded almost > automatically will very little review from the teacher. PyStart will > review code for the proper entries in the code and for the proper > output. It will be created for beginners of programming. The goal of > PyStart is to teach the basics of all programming skills. For example, > loops and variable types. > > http://code.google.com/soc/ubuntu/appinfo.html?csaid=F43382157E7D628C > > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GoogleSoC2007/python-trainer > > -- > Nicolas Pettiaux - email: nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be > Utiliser des formats ouverts et des logiciels libres - http://passeralinux.org > _______________________________________________ > Edu-sig mailing list > Edu-sig at python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig > From yusdi at hotmail.com Sat May 19 07:00:48 2007 From: yusdi at hotmail.com (Yusdi Santoso) Date: Fri, 18 May 2007 22:00:48 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] PyStart - Python Programming teaching/testing program In-Reply-To: <7528bcdd0705181545m7c2a71acqaaba4ed69d79261c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: There seems to be quite a large overlap between Crunchy and PyStart...hey but then again...a lot of people reinvent the wheel just for the fun of it :p I wonder what they will do for the automatic grading? If it is to be interactive at all (i.e. through the internet instead of an online program), then PyStart will suffer the same problem as Crunchy and WebLab, namely the lack of sandboxing facility in Python. Just my ?0.02 of thought. Yusdi >From: "Andre Roberge" >To: nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be >CC: "edu-sig at python.org" , Jason Brower > >Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] PyStart - Python Programming teaching/testing >program >Date: Fri, 18 May 2007 19:45:58 -0300 > >I did send an email to both Jason Brower and Pete Savage, inviting >them to have a look at a possible collaboration with Crunchy. >However, other than an acknowledgment from Jason, there has been no >response. > >Still, I think the suggestion should be considered. > >Andr? Roberge > >On 5/18/07, Nicolas Pettiaux wrote: > > This Google summer of code 2007 project has not yet, as far as I have > > noticed, been mentioned here, and many of you could be interested and > > also willing to share ideas and maybe coding. > > > > Title PyStart - Python Programming teaching/testing program > > > > Student Jason Lee Roy Brower > > Mentor Pete Savage > > > > Abstract > > PyStart will give teachers a way to work with programming students. > > And best of all, the students programs can be graded almost > > automatically will very little review from the teacher. PyStart will > > review code for the proper entries in the code and for the proper > > output. It will be created for beginners of programming. The goal of > > PyStart is to teach the basics of all programming skills. For example, > > loops and variable types. > > > > http://code.google.com/soc/ubuntu/appinfo.html?csaid=F43382157E7D628C > > > > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GoogleSoC2007/python-trainer > > > > -- > > Nicolas Pettiaux - email: nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be > > Utiliser des formats ouverts et des logiciels libres - >http://passeralinux.org > > _______________________________________________ > > Edu-sig mailing list > > Edu-sig at python.org > > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig > > >_______________________________________________ >Edu-sig mailing list >Edu-sig at python.org >http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig _________________________________________________________________ Make every IM count. Download Messenger and join the i?m Initiative now. It?s free. http://im.live.com/messenger/im/home/?source=TAGHM_MAY07 From nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be Sat May 19 11:39:20 2007 From: nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be (Nicolas Pettiaux) Date: Sat, 19 May 2007 11:39:20 +0200 Subject: [Edu-sig] Fwd: PyStart - Python Programming teaching/testing program In-Reply-To: <1179563239.20642.1.camel@essence> References: <1179563239.20642.1.camel@essence> Message-ID: I relay this answer from Jason Brower that I thank. Nicolas ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jason Brower Date: 19 mai 2007 10:27 Subject: Re: PyStart - Python Programming teaching/testing program To: nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be I have the launchpad ready for blueprints here.. Have fun everyone! https://launchpad.net/pystart On Sat, 2007-05-19 at 00:34 +0200, Nicolas Pettiaux wrote: > This Google summer of code 2007 project has not yet, as far as I have > noticed, been mentioned here, and many of you could be interested and > also willing to share ideas and maybe coding. > > Title PyStart - Python Programming teaching/testing program > > Student Jason Lee Roy Brower > Mentor Pete Savage > > Abstract > PyStart will give teachers a way to work with programming students. > And best of all, the students programs can be graded almost > automatically will very little review from the teacher. PyStart will > review code for the proper entries in the code and for the proper > output. It will be created for beginners of programming. The goal of > PyStart is to teach the basics of all programming skills. For example, > loops and variable types. > > http://code.google.com/soc/ubuntu/appinfo.html?csaid=F43382157E7D628C > > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GoogleSoC2007/python-trainer > -- Nicolas Pettiaux - email: nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be Utiliser des formats ouverts et des logiciels libres - http://passeralinux.org From driscollkevin at gmail.com Sat May 19 18:13:19 2007 From: driscollkevin at gmail.com (Kevin Driscoll) Date: Sat, 19 May 2007 12:13:19 -0400 Subject: [Edu-sig] Fwd: PyStart - Python Programming teaching/testing program In-Reply-To: References: <1179563239.20642.1.camel@essence> Message-ID: <87a8578e0705190913q3f73f8c5n4eb9604d977dc9b1@mail.gmail.com> Definitely worth taking a gander at Hackety Hack, a learning tool based in Ruby. http://hacketyhack.net/ Kevin On 5/19/07, Nicolas Pettiaux wrote: > I relay this answer from Jason Brower that I thank. > > Nicolas > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Jason Brower > Date: 19 mai 2007 10:27 > Subject: Re: PyStart - Python Programming teaching/testing program > To: nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be > > > I have the launchpad ready for blueprints here.. > Have fun everyone! > https://launchpad.net/pystart > > On Sat, 2007-05-19 at 00:34 +0200, Nicolas Pettiaux wrote: > > This Google summer of code 2007 project has not yet, as far as I have > > noticed, been mentioned here, and many of you could be interested and > > also willing to share ideas and maybe coding. > > > > Title PyStart - Python Programming teaching/testing program > > > > Student Jason Lee Roy Brower > > Mentor Pete Savage > > > > Abstract > > PyStart will give teachers a way to work with programming students. > > And best of all, the students programs can be graded almost > > automatically will very little review from the teacher. PyStart will > > review code for the proper entries in the code and for the proper > > output. It will be created for beginners of programming. The goal of > > PyStart is to teach the basics of all programming skills. For example, > > loops and variable types. > > > > http://code.google.com/soc/ubuntu/appinfo.html?csaid=F43382157E7D628C > > > > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GoogleSoC2007/python-trainer > > > > > > -- > Nicolas Pettiaux - email: nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be > Utiliser des formats ouverts et des logiciels libres - http://passeralinux.org > _______________________________________________ > Edu-sig mailing list > Edu-sig at python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig > -- http://kevindriscoll.info/ From johannes.wollard at gmail.com Sat May 19 21:25:29 2007 From: johannes.wollard at gmail.com (Johannes Woolard) Date: Sat, 19 May 2007 20:25:29 +0100 Subject: [Edu-sig] Fwd: PyStart - Python Programming teaching/testing program In-Reply-To: <87a8578e0705190913q3f73f8c5n4eb9604d977dc9b1@mail.gmail.com> References: <1179563239.20642.1.camel@essence> <87a8578e0705190913q3f73f8c5n4eb9604d977dc9b1@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <10c99c2a0705191225v4e1d44d7m85ada711785d1e2c@mail.gmail.com> I talked to Jason a while back on IM - he implied that PyStart would be a very similar to HacketyHack, but with the addition of some automatic grading. He said he wanted PyStart to embed Gecko (as HacketyHack does) and be fully client-based (as Hackety is). he also seemed open to the idea of some kind of cooperation between Crunchy and PyStart - but he hasn't got back to me since. Johannes -- Johannes Woolard, Entz Rep, Oriel College, Oxford, 0X1 4EW mobile: +44 7847 679381 http://pytute.blogspot.net From kirby.urner at gmail.com Mon May 21 04:43:21 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Sun, 20 May 2007 19:43:21 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC on 60 Minutes Message-ID: So I just viewed this segment, mostly an interview of Negroponte with Leslie Stahl: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/1998/07/09/60minutes/main13546.shtml , but with lots of footage from Cambodia, plus significant footage of (a) Negroponte telling lecture hall that Intel was bad (b) Intel defending itself in the person of its CEO. For an intro to a big topic, I thought this was good overview, and 60 Minutes always needs a twisted plot i.e. a bad guy, so I don't begrudge dwelling on the private industry threat. My Project Renaissance model builds in the idea of test pilot nonprofit idealists like Negroponte paving the way for commercial imitators -- surely this pattern is repeated over and over (used to be the military was the biggest guinea pig, for health care innovations especially). Negroponte himself comes across as a class act, handsome, well spoken, an idealist we can love. So the XO uses AMD chips, so what? I'm glad the idea of massive computer power spreading to the world's underprivileged is being presented as pretty much a fait accompli. Even if Intel is getting in the way, it's doing so by embracing the vision. I hope the XO really flies big time though. Wouldn't bother me to see it fattening a bottom line or two -- the investors could be XO-using entrepreneurs in the developing world, doing the hard work of keeping the pipeline moving. Kirby -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/attachments/20070520/4a950ed1/attachment.htm From jeff at taupro.com Mon May 21 19:26:59 2007 From: jeff at taupro.com (Jeff Rush) Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 12:26:59 -0500 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC on 60 Minutes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4651D663.1060407@taupro.com> kirby urner wrote: > > So I just viewed this segment, mostly an interview of Negroponte with > Leslie Stahl... Thanks for the pointer - I viewed it as well, and found it a fair presentation in the time allowed and given the unfamiliarity of the audience with the topic. I really liked the interaction with Leslie at one point (timecount 4:35): Leslie: You're saying give them a laptop even if they don't go to school? Negroponte: Especially if they don't go to a school! Leslie: On my god! (quietly muttered) Negroponte: If they don't go to a school, this is a school in a box! Apparently the idea that kids might learn without proper instruction from an authority figure, is just shocking in this day and age. > I'm glad the idea of massive computer power spreading to the world's > underprivileged is being presented as pretty much a fait accompli. Yes, but Intel is, at this critical time (it couldn't be any worse), trying to suck the oxygen out of the project, suffocate it while vulnerable. It's a common tactic with Intel. BTW, if you're an SF reader, the idea of the world's children having computing power appeared in a 1999 book by Marc Stiegler, titled _EarthWeb_. Presented as background to the story (so its not a spoiler), there was a worldwide "PalmDrop" giving the disadvantaged wireless access to a futuristic Internet, greatly enhancing their economic and political power. He also years ago wrote _David's Sling_, which related the impact of UAVs w/weapons on the modern battlefield before they ever were implemented, and _The Gentle Seduction_ short story about transhumanism and the Singularity. The guy has a knack for seeing technology trends and writing interesting stories about them. In one of his books they have Truth Courts, fact finding organizations that dissect happenings for the public - not unlike the FactCheck.org site. To be honest, such courts were described in Eric Drexler's _The Engines of Creation_ book about nanotech, as a necessary protection for society. Marc Stiegler was a project manager for Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu, if anyone remembers that, and into markets systems for collaborative decision making, another element in his stories, and for which the PalmDrops were used. -Jeff From kirby.urner at gmail.com Mon May 21 20:55:39 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 11:55:39 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC on 60 Minutes In-Reply-To: <4651D663.1060407@taupro.com> References: <4651D663.1060407@taupro.com> Message-ID: On 5/21/07, Jeff Rush wrote: > > > Yes, but Intel is, at this critical time (it couldn't be any worse), > trying to > suck the oxygen out of the project, suffocate it while vulnerable. It's a > common tactic with Intel. I give credit to both Intel and AMD for helping us dig out from under the pile of TIs we currently dump on our kids, as poor excuses for real computers. And I worry a bit about Negroponte's "dumping" rhetoric as it applies to Free Geek which literally intercepts what was headed to the landfill ("the dump") as refuse, and makes decent Freekboxes out it, bundled for schools, often using an LTSP configuration (beefy server, thin clients). These solutions are easily containerized and shipped overseas, sometimes preconfigured as model small ecommerce sites with a dedicated web server, database server, and software to suit -- a setup XO laptops don't easily duplicate. So here we are "dumping" our non-XO solutions into classrooms. Are we "bad guys" for doing this? And more to the point, is what we're doing really hurting MIT? I wouldn't think so. A billion computers is a lot of computers and it's not true that MIT needs a zero competition zone in every context. I was glad to see Geek Corps as part of the story BTW, as that adds more of a CP4E dimension to the OLPC piece, i.e. we're not just focusing on children. That being said, Negroponte deserves to see the realization of his vision in many schools. The XO is an exciting platform and needs to be given a place in the sun. I really hope he gets those orders (sort of a global IQ test to see which school systems are smarter than New York's (the ones that failed to adapt to laptops)). Plus I would guess he'll turn out to be really quite flexible once the rollout is underway, and will have no problem with some schools using his laptops more as checkoutable library items (like at some publics in Portland), with desktops (some of them thin client) more dominant in classrooms and homes (bigger screen, cheaper components if allowed to be heavier -- like Dell has these new Ubuntu boxes for cheap). Given wireless, it's all server farms in the background anyway, like the ones in The Dalles. Kirby -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/attachments/20070521/dfd8bf0b/attachment.htm From andreas.raab at gmx.de Mon May 21 23:34:41 2007 From: andreas.raab at gmx.de (Andreas Raab) Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 14:34:41 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC on 60 Minutes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <46521071.50103@gmx.de> Also check out http://olpc.tv/ Cheers, - Andreas kirby urner wrote: > > So I just viewed this segment, mostly an interview of Negroponte with > Leslie Stahl: > http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/1998/07/09/60minutes/main13546.shtml , but > with lots of footage from Cambodia, plus significant footage of (a) > Negroponte > telling lecture hall that Intel was bad (b) Intel defending itself in > the person of > its CEO. > > For an intro to a big topic, I thought this was good overview, and 60 > Minutes > always needs a twisted plot i.e. a bad guy, so I don't begrudge dwelling > on the > private industry threat. My Project Renaissance model builds in the > idea of > test pilot nonprofit idealists like Negroponte paving the way for > commercial > imitators -- surely this pattern is repeated over and over (used to be the > military was the biggest guinea pig, for health care innovations > especially). > > Negroponte himself comes across as a class act, handsome, well spoken, > an idealist we can love. So the XO uses AMD chips, so what? > > I'm glad the idea of massive computer power spreading to the world's > underprivileged is being presented as pretty much a fait accompli. Even > if Intel is getting in the way, it's doing so by embracing the vision. > I hope > the XO really flies big time though. Wouldn't bother me to see it fattening > a bottom line or two -- the investors could be XO-using entrepreneurs in > the developing world, doing the hard work of keeping the pipeline moving. > > Kirby > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Edu-sig mailing list > Edu-sig at python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig From mtobis at gmail.com Wed May 23 20:50:46 2007 From: mtobis at gmail.com (Michael Tobis) Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 13:50:46 -0500 Subject: [Edu-sig] education as Python killer app Message-ID: Is education Python's killer app? I think it could be. I used the occasion of the Python Papers to motivate my efforts to explain this idea, and you can see what I came up with on pages 8-15. The part that makes me especially queasy is the CP4E section on pages 10-11. I wish I had more to say there. It's fairly clear to those of us who weren't there that there were some problems, but it's not especially clear what they were or what we should learn from them. I'd very much appreciate input from those who were actually there! Anyway http://tinyurl.com/yr62r3 seems to short-circuit some pointless hoop-jumping to get you to the article. If that doesn't work, try going to http://pyjournal.cgpublisher.com/ and looking for the spring 2007 edition. I suggest a concerted effort by the community toward leveraging the OLPC/Sugar momentum to revive the idea of Python as tool for teaching some programming as a useful part of universal education. I have posted this to the advocacy list and c.l.p. I welcome response or critiques. mt From kirby.urner at gmail.com Thu May 24 00:53:43 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 15:53:43 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] education as Python killer app In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > The part that makes me especially queasy is the CP4E section on pages > 10-11. I wish I had more to say there. It's fairly clear to those of > us who weren't there that there were some problems, but it's not > especially clear what they were or what we should learn from them. I'd > very much appreciate input from those who were actually there! Where is "there" exactly? Interesting paper, though of necessity you leave a lot out, such as how the Scheme people made tremendous strides in their CP4E mode, setting high standards with SICP. We hope Pythoneers don't dumb it all down by encouraging sloppy habits (the Schemers' worst fear). http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/153 http://lemonodor.com/archives/001497.html (tangentially related) As to "losing focus" and/or "herding cats" on edu-sig, I'm not sure if that's what happened, or if we're simply seeing from different perspectives. I see edu-sig like a water cooler (a watering hole) where people of diverse backgrounds come of their own volition to compare notes, shoot the breeze. That doesn't make it a management hub or anything -- we all go back to our respective meetings and decision-making processes. For example, the Jesuits, with hundreds of years of pedagogy to their credit, thousands of mostly-man hours designing curriculum, aren't necessarily interested in vetting their proposals to teach Python in some trademarked Jesuitical way via some organ within Python.org. They'll work within the Vatican or whatever it is that they do. Just a random example. Schools aren't obligated to be public with their planning is my point. The fact that Python itself is open source doesn't change that fact. So whereas I'm hopeful that edu-sig will continue to be a source of interesting filings (your paper and drafting process a case in point), I'm not expecting it to be much more than that, at least not for the many faculties with already semi-set ways of working together. Lots of proprietary stuff goes on that we only learn about on edu-sig long after the fact -- and that's OK (not a problem). On the other hand, some of us *are* committed to a more open source approach even w/r to curriculum design, at least in some aspects. I would encourage us to keep edu-sig a welcoming environment for such posters, which doesn't mean holding back all negative feedback (it's possible for curricula to suck, as well as to be wonderfully brilliant -- sometimes both at the same time). We shouldn't devolve into a mutual admiration society where "I'll just say good stuff about your stuff if you'll just say good stuff about my stuff" agreements dominate -- a recipe for lowering overall quality whenever and wherever. Fortunately, I see little danger of that happening here. Kirby From varmaa at gmail.com Thu May 24 11:23:29 2007 From: varmaa at gmail.com (Atul Varma) Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 04:23:29 -0500 Subject: [Edu-sig] Some thoughts on the word "Laptop" In-Reply-To: <46442762.7090407@taupro.com> References: <361b27370705101513w4d2f61a2v9e0fb6dcdfc6a949@mail.gmail.com> <46442762.7090407@taupro.com> Message-ID: <361b27370705240223v6a86e01qf410dcfce61e996e@mail.gmail.com> On 5/11/07, Jeff Rush wrote: > > The problem is that ones associations with a word depend, to some degree, > on > other things in your life. "Laptop" was probably chosen because of the > connotations of "personal", "portable", "useful/practical" and > "self-powered". > I don't associate "laptop" with "yuppie", perhaps because I didn't develop > a > negative association with that word but first saw them carried by > engineers/programmers and only later by business folk. A laptop was > something > that I as a kid wanted, but couldn't afford, personal, as in I didn't have > to > share with schoolmates or siblings. Mine. That's interesting, and understandable. > And for you "machine" has a positive meaning, as for me an engineer, but > for > some it means "dehumanizing", "rigid/inflexible", "noisy", "bulky". > Definitely not something for children, unless you view them as resources > to be > processed mechanically, an offensive idea to most. Also understandable. Although I believe that what attracts me most to the term "Children's Machine" is actually the juxtaposition of the two words: taken by itself, "machine" does tend to mean "dehumanizing" to me, but when the word "children's" is put before it--a term that is anything *but* dehumanizing--the phrase takes on an entirely different meaning. But as you said, a lot of this just has to do with everyone's individual perceptions. I get the impression that regardless of what word OLPC uses, it's going to be a loaded term for everyone that conjures up vastly different visions depending on each individual person's backgrounds and beliefs. Which is unfortunate in one sense, but on the other hand it seems to imply that "laptop" is as good a word as any other. > From my reading of your post, it sounds like you are referring to what in > my > childhood would be the explorations with tinker toys, erector sets, lego > blocks, lincoln logs -- an open-ended set of pieces with which to tinker > and > explore. But to those people who don't understand the attraction, who > lacked > such things growing up, those remain just toys for a child's distraction > and > amusement, not something educational. Now we as geeks know the power of > such > constructivism, but many do not, perhaps intentionally due to its > subversive > nature. > > OLPC walks the narrow line between being pragmatic and having the > appearance > of irrelevance while carefully hiding its dangerous, subversive > nature. It > will succeed as long as it keeps one eye on the amplification of children, > rather than that of teachers, administrators or governments. This is where I think my understanding of the aims of the OLPC project start to break down. What is the "dangerous" and "subversive" nature of OLPC, or of using laptops as constructivist tools? When I was a child, I never considered myself to be a dangerous or subversive person, and I never thought of computers as such either; at most, they were another means of learning and playing that (to my disappointment) my school didn't happen to embrace. If I were to teach a child Python today, I wouldn't think of myself as being dangerous or subversive, but rather just introducing them to a passion of mine, one that I hope they may find as fulfilling as I do. What is the OLPC program trying to subvert? And why is it dangerous? While it probably sounds incredibly naive of me, it strikes me that the amplification of children should actually be the goal of teachers, administrators, and governments, and that helping the latter should naturally benefit the former. If we assume that teachers, administrators, and governments are too ignorant to understand the power of the constructivist mindset, yet we still try to peddle constructivist tools to them in the guise of pragmatism, then it's understandable that people have misperceptions about the goals of the OLPC program, because the OLPC program is being unclear (and deceptive) about them in the first place. In other words, shouldn't the goal be to convince teachers, administrators, and goverments that constructivism is a good thing, rather than telling them that they need laptops so their country can produce the next Jobs or Gates? Or am I misinterpreting something here? - Atul -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/attachments/20070524/6167a084/attachment.html From kirby.urner at gmail.com Thu May 24 18:34:41 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 09:34:41 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] Some thoughts on the word "Laptop" In-Reply-To: <361b27370705240223v6a86e01qf410dcfce61e996e@mail.gmail.com> References: <361b27370705101513w4d2f61a2v9e0fb6dcdfc6a949@mail.gmail.com> <46442762.7090407@taupro.com> <361b27370705240223v6a86e01qf410dcfce61e996e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: > In other words, shouldn't the goal be to convince teachers, administrators, > and goverments that constructivism is a good thing, rather than telling them > that they need laptops so their country can produce the next Jobs or Gates? > Or am I misinterpreting something here? > > - Atul > Hey Atul -- You ask some very fine questions, very topical. I think the paragraph above is revealing of your perspective and shows you are highly educated. You think this is about demonstrating to the world the value of "constructivism", an approach to pedagogy championed by many in the OLPC movement. And I'm not saying you're wrong. In this telling, the laptops are the avatars of a philosophy which combats rendering students passive, mere vessels for knowledge, and suggests rather that each has an existential responsibility for constructing a working model of reality -- so best get to work, as this may prove an arduous job. Constructivism makes room for the doctrine called "question authority" i.e. it has this troubling groundrule: you can't assume anyone around you has the better model e.g. maybe "the adults" got it wrong. That, in itself, is a troublesome attitude in many societies, including the American one at the turn of the last century, if we're to believe Bucky Fuller's account in which a "darling, never mind what you're thinking, we're trying to *teach* you" attitude prevailed among the all-knowing adults (who proved to be wrong, again and again, about matters of some consequence). However, in the minds of many, including some government officials, the arguments among the various philosophies of education are considered insufferably academic. What's really subversive about the Internet is it puts out tools that level the playing field in many ways, between insiders and outsiders, when it comes to matters of accessing an international database of media sources (only a top elite used have that level of access, making it easy to censor, to control the syllabus). For one reason or another (depends on the scenario), the idea of a local population becoming highly informed, higly computer literate, can feel threatening. All those school children are going to realize X about Y. Fill in the blanks. Makes 'em feel queasy. At the very least, we should admit that the Internet traffics in many alternative models of "what makes it all tick" [quick scroll of conspiracy theories] and teachers find it distracting to have to compete with so many alternatives at every turn (not because they're censorious by nature but because lots of arguments and back talk may mean one's own model will languish, neglected -- kids won't even bother to tune in some of their own best heritage, if persuaded by foreign media that "Hollywood knows best" or some other such dubious thesis). The Internet has the potential to flood a quiet way of life, balanced with an ecosystem, with endless noise, subversive simply in the sense of highly distracting. In a generation, the kids have forgotten which plants are poisonous and it's downhill from there. Anyway, let me change it around a little and put it this way: we don't like to see the minds of young children subverted and rendered prematurely ugly by dint of unfortunate sequencing. Why should we deprive them of their innocence? That being said, it's so open to question what I'm even talking about. Am I talking about porn? And that's just the thing. We're talking about multiple namespaces (a Pythonic concept). In some households, "porn" is not what's so threatening, whereas in other households it may have apocalyptic significance. BTW, I wonder if you noticed the 2nd link into Scheme World in my previous post linked to subverting imagery... Kirby From kirby.urner at gmail.com Sat May 26 00:40:01 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 15:40:01 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] Latest gnu math paper Message-ID: Although sort of in the underground comix tradition, this overview/storyboard isn't guaranteed to make a whole lot of sense to people not already well versed in my particular school of thought (remote, obscure, far from the mainstream -- still fun though): http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/py4www.html Feel free to ask any questions and I will try to supply context. Kirby From jeff at taupro.com Sat May 26 06:26:06 2007 From: jeff at taupro.com (Jeff Rush) Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 23:26:06 -0500 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC on 60 Minutes In-Reply-To: References: <4651D663.1060407@taupro.com> Message-ID: <4657B6DE.10709@taupro.com> kirby urner wrote: > On 5/21/07, *Jeff Rush* > wrote: > > > Yes, but Intel is, at this critical time (it couldn't be any worse), > trying to > suck the oxygen out of the project, suffocate it while > vulnerable. It's a > common tactic with Intel. > > A billion computers is a lot of > computers and it's not true that MIT needs a zero > competition zone in every context. It's not that MIT needs zero competition. You misunderstand the term "suck the oxygen" -- it refers to the dark side of capitalism, where a competitor sows fear, uncertainty, doubt in the customer and financial market, where a competitor locks suppliers into sole-customer agreements to keep critical parts away from others, to obtaining sole source agreements with political entities in return for support. Often a young upstart competitor has limited capital and if the market owner can drag out their getting to market, make it hard to get additional funding or key anchor customers they will run out of funds and die. Negroponte has a limited amount of time to make OLPC happen, both due to funding and developer mindshare. There are many arrayed against him, who do not want him to succeed. You can just read all the postings around the Internet to see that - the OLPC project engenders strong feelings on both sides. It's part of the reason I find it so fascinating. > And I worry a bit about Negroponte's "dumping" > rhetoric as it applies to Free Geek which literally > intercepts what was headed to the landfill ("the dump") > as refuse, and makes decent Freekboxes out it, > bundled for schools, often using an LTSP > configuration (beefy server, thin clients). His "dumping" rhetoric was applied to Intel selling their laptops below cost, not Free Geek's mission, a good one. Besides Free Geek computers are not targeted at the countries/economic niche that OLPC is. The XO is unique in its ability to run in physically hostile environments at its price point - recycled PCs don't have a chance in their world. Free Geek also, from my reading of their site, seems focused more on vocational use of computers, providing OpenOffice.org and similar tools. A good thing, don't get me wrong, but OLPC is striving to provide "educational materials" in a consistent environment. A conventional PC, even one running Linux, is still a rather difficult/diverse software environment and relies upon educators to mold/apply it to their educational mission. This consistent environment/platform is not to be underestimated -- it has the potential to break the logjam and engender lots of open educational software. Why do you think there is such a dearth of educational software today? We have all the tools we need, a hungry educational market and yet I find it so hard to get people to create educational software. OLPC can galvanize the open source community to rally around the XO platform, which will never happen with computers, even free ones, that use non-free software. We have a known hardware platform, operating system, desktop environment, programming language (Python) and target user (children). You can't get more focused than that. > These solutions are easily containerized and > shipped overseas, sometimes preconfigured as model > small ecommerce sites with a dedicated web server, > database server, and software to suit -- a setup > XO laptops don't easily duplicate. "model ecommerce sites"? Are you expecting a flurry of 3rd world stores to pop up? You're focusing on vocational uses again. The XO is an educational laptop for children, to free their minds. And many of those destinations lack the continual Internet access and consistent power necessary for ecommerce in any case. It's silly. > So here we are "dumping" our non-XO solutions into > classrooms. Are we "bad guys" for doing this? And > more to the point, is what we're doing really hurting > MIT? I wouldn't think so. No, providing non-XO solutions to the homeless in America is not hurting MIT, since that niche is not being targeted. Please continue to help them. > I was glad to see Geek Corps as part of the story > BTW, as that adds more of a CP4E dimension to the > OLPC piece, i.e. we're not just focusing on children. As an educator you have to know that the minds of children are the most adaptable to new ideas, to learning. While vocational training of adults to raise them out of poverty is important, you get more leverage from children. Children, prior to age 5, are natural learners, exploring their world and quickly picking up knowledge. They lack the preconceived notions that impair adults, that things are the way they are just because they always have been. Adults in tight economic straits also tend to lack the discretionary time to learn, and generally prefer formal classroom training. So many have forgotten how to learn, so many have lost the thrill of learning. And adults will sacrifice for their children more than for themselves, working extra hours so their children can have a better life. > Plus I would guess he'll turn out to be really quite > flexible once the rollout is underway, I'm sure he is flexible - there are so many ways that Intel could help, but isn't. They could have stepped up, taken the open hardware design and competed to make an XO using Intel parts but with a better power/price profile. It could have been an industry competitive event. Intel could have embraced the server part of XO, volunteering to produce that as a counter to AMD. They could have offered leverage with their suppliers, to help OLPC obtain parts. Intel's focus is on killing AMD - nothing else. In the business news these two are fighting each other over a saturated market, with distorted pricing to keep the other from revenue and suffocate them. If Intel can eliminate AMD, they can control pricing but they cannot sustain this price war indefinitely. Either the market must consolidate or become unsaturated. OLPC stands at the gateway of both, unfortunately for OLPC. Intel is not so much worried about missing out on revenue on laptops as that their nemesis will gain economies of scale in their chip foundries, from producing the billions necessary to supply Negroponte's vision. Even if AMD sells them to OLPC's builder for cost, AMD will be strengthened in their ability to compete with Intel. Another slant -- it is better to have a non-profit like OLPC at the helm of the educational thrust, with AMD a key partner but controlled by the other project members, than to let a for-profit like Intel run things. Admittedly non-profits are not automatically angelic, but I think OLPC understands this project better than Intel. OLPC has been working on this for years, consulting with various countries on their needs. I believe OLPC is doing this for the right reasons and Intel isn't. Remember the old saying, that doing the right thing for the wrong reasons corrupts the work. Intel is simply wrong for this. Being for-profit and, so far, rather dictatorial in their approach to this project, they cannot garner the mindshare of goodwill that OLPC has. OLPC has amassed a set of partnerships and captured the mindshare of the open source and charitable communities. Go read the postings on the OLPC site -- people are volunteering to set their lives aside to help -- it's rather inspirational and emotional. They wouldn't do that just for a corporation. And when it is unable or unwilling to gain partners in those hard-to-control communities, Intel will fall back on industry partnerships, with Microsoft, with those aggressive textbook publishers who squeeze the US educational system, with the commercial educational software companies behind the laptop failures reported in the news. They will push Windows, not Linux (yes they say their unit will run both), special "discount" versions of their products, preying on the fear of governments that their people won't be vocationally trained in 1st world office technology. They will peddle control, to those governments, to the school boards and a fear of falling behind. And once OLPC is marginalized, if those countries aren't paying to its cabal enough to make it worthwhile, they will cancel the project, ostensibly at the behest of their shareholders, saying it just doesn't make economic sense to help those children. It is also in our own interests, for many reasons but one is that a strong AMD to compete with Intel will keep technology prices down for us consumers, and stimulate innovation from both of them. We do NOT want Intel to destroy AMD, regardless of what you think of AMD products. Just my rather long-winded $0.02, -Jeff From jeff at taupro.com Sat May 26 08:40:05 2007 From: jeff at taupro.com (Jeff Rush) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 01:40:05 -0500 Subject: [Edu-sig] education as Python killer app In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4657D645.90005@taupro.com> kirby urner wrote: >> The part that makes me especially queasy is the CP4E section on pages >> 10-11. I wish I had more to say there. It's fairly clear to those of >> us who weren't there that there were some problems, but it's not >> especially clear what they were or what we should learn from them. I'd >> very much appreciate input from those who were actually there! > > Where is "there" exactly? >From his email, "there" are those who were involved in the CP4E project and who can tell us why it failed to reach fruition. I've never found a good explanation myself, that didn't pull punches and told the story. > As to "losing focus" and/or "herding cats" on edu-sig, I'm > not sure if that's what happened, or if we're simply seeing > from different perspectives. > > For example, the Jesuits, with hundreds of years of pedagogy > to their credit, thousands of mostly-man hours designing curriculum, > aren't necessarily interested in vetting their proposals to > teach Python in some trademarked Jesuitical way via some > organ within Python.org. They'll work within the Vatican or > whatever it is that they do. > > Just a random example. Schools aren't obligated to be public > with their planning is my point. The fact that Python itself is > open source doesn't change that fact. If we have the destination in common but do not agree on the path, we cannot share the journey nor the burdens thereof and must say 'fare thee well'. > So whereas I'm hopeful that edu-sig will continue to be a source > of interesting filings (your paper and drafting process a case in > point), I'm not expecting it to be much more than that, at least > not for the many faculties with already semi-set ways of working > together. > > Lots of proprietary stuff goes on that we only learn about on > edu-sig long after the fact -- and that's OK (not a problem). Sadly, these people miss out on a diversity of viewpoints, because they did not share their problems. Perhaps that is their fear, that someone will solve them but not in a way to their liking and without their aid. Better to keep the problems. -Jeff From jeff at taupro.com Sat May 26 10:46:25 2007 From: jeff at taupro.com (Jeff Rush) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 03:46:25 -0500 Subject: [Edu-sig] education as Python killer app In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4657F3E1.7080402@taupro.com> Michael Tobis wrote: > Is education Python's killer app? I think it could be. > > I used the occasion of the Python Papers to motivate my efforts to > explain this idea, and you can see what I came up with on pages > 8-15. Michael, thanks for writing for the Python Papers. I found your article quite interesting. I would ask though, of what education are you thinking? I mean, there is the use of Python to teach programming, and there is the teaching of other topics but using Python to do it. And there is the teaching of children versus adults, although a case can be made for some degree of overlap there. Much of the effort I've seen is to teach programming, but the OLPC project has intrigued me more to consider non-programming topics. Since I hang out mostly with other programmers, this is challenging. > I suggest a concerted effort by the community toward leveraging the > OLPC/Sugar momentum to revive the idea of Python as tool for teaching > some programming as a useful part of universal education. While there are those who enjoy solving abstract problems, programming or otherwise, if seems to me that if we're going to tackle CP4E (computer programming for everyone, for those not aware of the history), we have to make programming not the end-goal but the tool for doing the things in which those people are interested. CP4E will never make the vast majority of people programming geeks. So it seems to me that it would advance the cause, of programming in general and Python specifically, if a repository of resources were assembled. I'm sure some of these exist scattered across the net but some I've never been able to find. And non-programmers can be so impatient in rummaging through sites, understandably wanting to get on with solving their problem. I tossed together a very rough wiki page of some ideas I've been kicking around. These resources attempt to answer a response I get frequently when I push the learning of Python, that of "but what would I -do- with Python once I learned it?". http://wiki.python.org/moin/Advocacy/ProgrammingForNewprogrammers I call that group "new programmers" - somehow calling them normal or average folk seems mildly insulting to someone, and calling them "non-programmers" isn't accurate if our goal is to teach them programming, albeit non-vocational style. "Non-professional programmers"? "Typical" people? "Making People Programming-Literate"? -Jeff From kirby.urner at gmail.com Sat May 26 17:19:17 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 08:19:17 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] education as Python killer app In-Reply-To: <4657D645.90005@taupro.com> References: <4657D645.90005@taupro.com> Message-ID: On 5/25/07, Jeff Rush wrote: > kirby urner wrote: > >> The part that makes me especially queasy is the CP4E section on pages > >> 10-11. I wish I had more to say there. It's fairly clear to those of > >> us who weren't there that there were some problems, but it's not > >> especially clear what they were or what we should learn from them. I'd > >> very much appreciate input from those who were actually there! > > > > Where is "there" exactly? > > From his email, "there" are those who were involved in the CP4E project and > who can tell us why it failed to reach fruition. I've never found a good > explanation myself, that didn't pull punches and told the story. > My view is CP4E is alive and well, achieving results daily. > If we have the destination in common but do not agree on the path, we cannot > share the journey nor the burdens thereof and must say 'fare thee well'. > Our destination is pretty much everybody programs, a taken for granted skill, although "to program" means many things, doesn't imply mastery of Python. > > Lots of proprietary stuff goes on that we only learn about on > > edu-sig long after the fact -- and that's OK (not a problem). > > Sadly, these people miss out on a diversity of viewpoints, because they did > not share their problems. Perhaps that is their fear, that someone will solve > them but not in a way to their liking and without their aid. Better to keep > the problems. > > -Jeff It's not either/or. Today's software is a mix and the same people may do a lot of both. Kirby From kirby.urner at gmail.com Sat May 26 17:41:57 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 08:41:57 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] OLPC on 60 Minutes In-Reply-To: <4657B6DE.10709@taupro.com> References: <4651D663.1060407@taupro.com> <4657B6DE.10709@taupro.com> Message-ID: > It's not that MIT needs zero competition. You misunderstand the term "suck > the oxygen" -- it refers to the dark side of capitalism, where a competitor Didn't use the term at all that I can recall. > sows fear, uncertainty, doubt in the customer and financial market, where a > competitor locks suppliers into sole-customer agreements to keep critical > parts away from others, to obtaining sole source agreements with political > entities in return for support. Often a young upstart competitor has limited > capital and if the market owner can drag out their getting to market, make it > hard to get additional funding or key anchor customers they will run out of > funds and die. > > Negroponte has a limited amount of time to make OLPC happen, both due to > funding and developer mindshare. There are many arrayed against him, who do > not want him to succeed. You can just read all the postings around the > Internet to see that - the OLPC project engenders strong feelings on both > sides. It's part of the reason I find it so fascinating. > I'm counting the days it takes the US State Department or other agency to order up a bunch for sending out with Peace Corps types or other special operation development types. Show up with a container full, help wire a village. Go home. Visit again someday. It's a no brainer if you want to earn the world's trust, that you could buy from Negroponte. The USA would do well to put some confidence building measures in place, stuff of a civilian nature. If nothing else, FEMA could buy a bunch of XOs for its little trailer villages for Katrina victims (might help compensate for the poison gas, formaldyhyde if you didn't catch that CBS News segment). Or does the USG have a sweetheart understanding with Intel? Buy both then, to cover up the scandal. > > And I worry a bit about Negroponte's "dumping" > > rhetoric as it applies to Free Geek which literally > > intercepts what was headed to the landfill ("the dump") > > as refuse, and makes decent Freekboxes out it, > > bundled for schools, often using an LTSP > > configuration (beefy server, thin clients). > > His "dumping" rhetoric was applied to Intel selling their laptops below cost, > not Free Geek's mission, a good one. Besides Free Geek computers are not > targeted at the countries/economic niche that OLPC is. The XO is unique in > its ability to run in physically hostile environments at its price point - > recycled PCs don't have a chance in their world. > > Free Geek also, from my reading of their site, seems focused more on > vocational use of computers, providing OpenOffice.org and similar tools. A > good thing, don't get me wrong, but OLPC is striving to provide "educational > materials" in a consistent environment. A conventional PC, even one running > Linux, is still a rather difficult/diverse software environment and relies > upon educators to mold/apply it to their educational mission. > I live a few blocks from Free Geek and have participated in its inner workings. It's a Python shop to some high degree, but also Ruby 'n Perl 'n other stuff. CP4E isn't just about Python. You can't be a "glue language" if there's nothing to glue to. We also use POV-Ray's Scene Description Language and Sketchup with Google Earth. > This consistent environment/platform is not to be underestimated -- it has the > potential to break the logjam and engender lots of open educational software. > Why do you think there is such a dearth of educational software today? We > have all the tools we need, a hungry educational market and yet I find it so > hard to get people to create educational software. OLPC can galvanize the > open source community to rally around the XO platform, which will never happen > with computers, even free ones, that use non-free software. We have a known > hardware platform, operating system, desktop environment, programming language > (Python) and target user (children). You can't get more focused than that. > > > > These solutions are easily containerized and > > shipped overseas, sometimes preconfigured as model > > small ecommerce sites with a dedicated web server, > > database server, and software to suit -- a setup > > XO laptops don't easily duplicate. > > "model ecommerce sites"? Are you expecting a flurry of 3rd world stores to > pop up? You're focusing on vocational uses again. The XO is an educational > laptop for children, to free their minds. And many of those destinations lack > the continual Internet access and consistent power necessary for ecommerce in > any case. It's silly. Yes, flurry of 3rd world eCommerce sites popping up, relating to tourism, coffee trade and much more. But specializing a web server vs. a database server is what you do in admin as well, not just in vending. Lots of GIS stuff to stick in the Model (then you need Views and Controllers). > > > So here we are "dumping" our non-XO solutions into > > classrooms. Are we "bad guys" for doing this? And > > more to the point, is what we're doing really hurting > > MIT? I wouldn't think so. > > No, providing non-XO solutions to the homeless in America is not hurting MIT, > since that niche is not being targeted. Please continue to help them. > Definitely will. DynaHomes for DignityVillage -- one of the topics we have on-line chatter about, looking for more aerospace sponsors. > > > I was glad to see Geek Corps as part of the story > > BTW, as that adds more of a CP4E dimension to the > > OLPC piece, i.e. we're not just focusing on children. > > As an educator you have to know that the minds of children are the most > adaptable to new ideas, to learning. While vocational training of adults to > raise them out of poverty is important, you get more leverage from children. > Sounds like you might be a teacher of some kind. > Children, prior to age 5, are natural learners, exploring their world and > quickly picking up knowledge. They lack the preconceived notions that impair > adults, that things are the way they are just because they always have been. > > Adults in tight economic straits also tend to lack the discretionary time to > learn, and generally prefer formal classroom training. So many have forgotten > how to learn, so many have lost the thrill of learning. And adults will > sacrifice for their children more than for themselves, working extra hours so > their children can have a better life. > A typical village could benefit from high technology, in ways the local elders will brainstorm and implement, taking cues from youth, while training youth to take over. > > > Plus I would guess he'll turn out to be really quite > > flexible once the rollout is underway, > > I'm sure he is flexible - there are so many ways that Intel could help, but > isn't. They could have stepped up, taken the open hardware design and > competed to make an XO using Intel parts but with a better power/price > profile. It could have been an industry competitive event. Intel could have > embraced the server part of XO, volunteering to produce that as a counter to > AMD. They could have offered leverage with their suppliers, to help OLPC > obtain parts. > > Intel's focus is on killing AMD - nothing else. In the business news these > two are fighting each other over a saturated market, with distorted pricing to > keep the other from revenue and suffocate them. If Intel can eliminate AMD, > they can control pricing but they cannot sustain this price war indefinitely. > Either the market must consolidate or become unsaturated. OLPC stands at the > gateway of both, unfortunately for OLPC. > > Intel is not so much worried about missing out on revenue on laptops as that > their nemesis will gain economies of scale in their chip foundries, from > producing the billions necessary to supply Negroponte's vision. Even if AMD > sells them to OLPC's builder for cost, AMD will be strengthened in their > ability to compete with Intel. > > Another slant -- it is better to have a non-profit like OLPC at the helm of > the educational thrust, with AMD a key partner but controlled by the other > project members, than to let a for-profit like Intel run things. Admittedly > non-profits are not automatically angelic, but I think OLPC understands this > project better than Intel. OLPC has been working on this for years, > consulting with various countries on their needs. I believe OLPC is doing > this for the right reasons and Intel isn't. Remember the old saying, that > doing the right thing for the wrong reasons corrupts the work. > > Intel is simply wrong for this. Being for-profit and, so far, rather > dictatorial in their approach to this project, they cannot garner the > mindshare of goodwill that OLPC has. OLPC has amassed a set of partnerships > and captured the mindshare of the open source and charitable communities. Go > read the postings on the OLPC site -- people are volunteering to set their > lives aside to help -- it's rather inspirational and emotional. They wouldn't > do that just for a corporation. > > And when it is unable or unwilling to gain partners in those hard-to-control > communities, Intel will fall back on industry partnerships, with Microsoft, > with those aggressive textbook publishers who squeeze the US educational > system, with the commercial educational software companies behind the laptop > failures reported in the news. They will push Windows, not Linux (yes they > say their unit will run both), special "discount" versions of their products, > preying on the fear of governments that their people won't be vocationally > trained in 1st world office technology. They will peddle control, to those > governments, to the school boards and a fear of falling behind. And once OLPC > is marginalized, if those countries aren't paying to its cabal enough to make > it worthwhile, they will cancel the project, ostensibly at the behest of their > shareholders, saying it just doesn't make economic sense to help those children. > > It is also in our own interests, for many reasons but one is that a strong AMD > to compete with Intel will keep technology prices down for us consumers, and > stimulate innovation from both of them. We do NOT want Intel to destroy AMD, > regardless of what you think of AMD products. > > Just my rather long-winded $0.02, > > -Jeff > Sounds like Intel is really helping, by playing the bad guy in all this. I said as much as my review. But anyway, I don't see edu-sig as a place to get into an economic discussion, given how redundant that'd be with the rest of the net. OLPC will happen or it won't (looks to me like it's happening), but edu-sig isn't just about that small set of hardware platforms. Computer languages cut across hardware. My point about Free Geek was simply that laptops are relatively hard to come by when intercepting landfill (we don't see so many), plus the ones that come through are way old, and likely broken in too serious ways to rectify. So desktops are more the norm. Kirby From lac at openend.se Sat May 26 21:53:03 2007 From: lac at openend.se (Laura Creighton) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 21:53:03 +0200 Subject: [Edu-sig] [python-advocacy] education as Python killer app In-Reply-To: Message from Jeff Rush of "Sat, 26 May 2007 03:46:25 CDT." <4657F3E1.7080402@taupro.com> References: <4657F3E1.7080402@taupro.com> Message-ID: <200705261953.l4QJr3GY013577@theraft.openend.se> In a message of Sat, 26 May 2007 03:46:25 CDT, Jeff Rush writes: >I call that group "new programmers" - somehow calling them normal or average >folk seems mildly insulting to someone, and calling them "non-programmers" >isn't accurate if our goal is to teach them programming, albeit non-vocational >style. "Non-professional programmers"? "Typical" people? "Making People" >Programming-Literate"? > >-Jeff I think the word you are looking for is "amateur". Unfortunately it has bad connotations for some people. So I think rather than focusing on the _people_ and labelling _them_ we should focus on the code and label _that_. Amateur programs? Do-It-Yourself programs? Home automation? Practical Programming? Laura From kirby.urner at gmail.com Sat May 26 22:12:31 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 13:12:31 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] education as Python killer app In-Reply-To: <4657F3E1.7080402@taupro.com> References: <4657F3E1.7080402@taupro.com> Message-ID: On 5/26/07, Jeff Rush wrote: > I tossed together a very rough wiki page of some ideas I've been kicking > around. These resources attempt to answer a response I get frequently when I > push the learning of Python, that of "but what would I -do- with Python once I > learned it?". > > http://wiki.python.org/moin/Advocacy/ProgrammingForNewprogrammers > Thanks for getting this going. Re: http://wiki.python.org/moin/ConceptualRoadmap I'd suggest delisting VPython as one of the interpreters (amidst Jython and IronPython) because it's not really a Python shell or interpreter, offering interactive use of the language, but a C++ library and API focussed on OpenGL type stuff pretty exclusively. VPython is like wxPython in that sense, but with a different purpose (tho partially overlapping as wx provides a window into OpenGL -- which I've never used very successfully (whereas VPython has been at the basis of several Pythonic math courses I've taught)). VPython does integrate with IDLE pretty well, which is maybe where this impression of VPython being its own Python interpreter is coming from. iPython is a wrapper for CPython that doesn't use Tk or IDLE -- or is it a wrapper for Jython as well? I've used it, but haven't explored it in great depth. Seem to recall needing ctypes to run it, at least on a Windows box. I think CP4E ultimately requires stepping outside the scope of any one language and getting more into the bigger picture. I think a basic understanding of tcp/ip is maybe where to start with a lot of students. There's a basic "how it works" flavor to it. I suggest screening 'Warriors of the Net' for starters, which comes in a variety of languages, could come in even more. Kirby From lac at openend.se Sun May 27 07:47:59 2007 From: lac at openend.se (Laura Creighton) Date: Sun, 27 May 2007 07:47:59 +0200 Subject: [Edu-sig] [python-advocacy] education as Python killer app In-Reply-To: Message from Jeff Rush of "Sat, 26 May 2007 03:46:25 CDT." <4657F3E1.7080402@taupro.com> References: <4657F3E1.7080402@taupro.com> Message-ID: <200705270547.l4R5lxIl025640@theraft.openend.se> In a message of Sat, 26 May 2007 03:46:25 CDT, Jeff Rush writes: > http://wiki.python.org/moin/Advocacy/ProgrammingForNewprogrammers > >I call that group "new programmers" - somehow calling them normal or average >folk seems mildly insulting to someone, and calling them "non-programmers" >isn't accurate if our goal is to teach them programming, albeit non-vocational >style. "Non-professional programmers"? "Typical" people? "Making People >Programming-Literate"? > >-Jeff Dorai Thodla suggests 'beginners'. And perhaps that would work. But my initial reaction was negative. It may simply be that I find the labelling of people that distasteful. In my world, labelling is well-associated with building rigid and discriminatory class structures,though 'beginner' seems relatively free of this particular poison. But that may be its own rub. 'Beginner' is a stage which one goes through on the way to something else, while I think that Jeff is looking for something that could well be permanent -- what Anna Martelli Ravenscroft called (calls?) 'for the rest of us'. She too was stuck on the 'but what would I do with it' question. The thing is that this sort of thing seems to be orthagonal to becoming a professional programmer. I know some professional programmers who don't think that programming is fun. They only do it for work, when they are paid for it. (Admittedly, they don't use python). So they don't have a box of helpful programs they have written over time to automate some tedium out of their lives, even though they are well equipped with the skills to do so. But most of us have these quick hacks lying all around. And they are the sort of thing that could appeal to professional programmers and non-programmers alike, because they solve the sort of probelms that everybody has, not the sort that only professional software developers call 'work'. Laura From kirby.urner at gmail.com Sun May 27 17:04:03 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Sun, 27 May 2007 08:04:03 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] [python-advocacy] education as Python killer app In-Reply-To: <200705270547.l4R5lxIl025640@theraft.openend.se> References: <4657F3E1.7080402@taupro.com> <200705270547.l4R5lxIl025640@theraft.openend.se> Message-ID: > But that may be its own rub. 'Beginner' is a stage which one goes through > on the way to something else, while I think that Jeff is looking for > something that could well be permanent -- what Anna Martelli Ravenscroft > called (calls?) 'for the rest of us'. She too was stuck on the 'but > what would I do with it' question. > I use the word "tourist" a lot, and I think computer world is so huge that we're all tourists in big parts of it, when we wander far afield (to be encouraged -- changes are we bring back new insights, or maybe even move the home office). A tourist in Python Nation might be a high mucky muck in the Republic of Perl (they actually have their own names for these things). Probably another reason I like "tourist" is that one generally treats them well, offers guidebooks, guides, opportunities for recreation and entertainment. We know that tourists are somewhat out of their depth and don't hold it against 'em. However, I also use "gnubee" (aka "newbie") because of the "gnu" inflection mixed with the "busy bee" connotation -- plus bees are cross-pollinators, wanderers, another big meme with me... Science would be ruined if it were to withdraw entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are wanderers-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines -- Benoit Mandelbrot You can maybe see the "wanderer = tourist" equation lurking in the above. And when you're not a tourist anymore, what are you? Maybe a neighbor, a local, or "on staff" in some way -- different terms apply, depending on the namespace. I've you're a master of Python, you might be a snake charmer in my book. Kirby From kirby.urner at gmail.com Sun May 27 17:21:35 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Sun, 27 May 2007 08:21:35 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] [python-advocacy] education as Python killer app In-Reply-To: References: <4657F3E1.7080402@taupro.com> <200705270547.l4R5lxIl025640@theraft.openend.se> Message-ID: I'm obviously a tourist in the English language this AM. Let me elaborate slightly while fixing a few typos: > I use the word "tourist" a lot, and I think computer world is so huge > that we're all tourists in big parts of it, when we wander far afield > (to be encouraged -- changes are we bring back new insights, or > maybe even move the home office). "-- chances are..." There's a lot of security in having a job title and a place in some pecking order sometimes, and tourists, especially if traveling alone, have to put up with being "incognito" for long spells. Yet this ability to become humble without suffering humiliation, mortal without becoming mortified, is a key to restarting one's career and/or moving into a new space, new skills. A little humiliation and mortification is even OK -- goes with being a tourist. I've always felt that computer skills in themselves promote a kind of tourism, in that people in so many walkx of life need their computers programmed. Looking back on a long career, it's amazing where I've been tasked to write code, including in the Kingdom of Bhutan, where I also taught generic xBase skills (another language I use a lot, originally marketed as dBase). > > A tourist in Python Nation might be a high mucky muck in the > Republic of Perl (they actually have their own names for these > things). > "Monks" are pretty high level right? > Science would be ruined if it were to withdraw entirely into > narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are > wanderers-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare > of the settled disciplines > > -- Benoit Mandelbrot > See: wwwanderers.org > apply, depending on the namespace. I've you're a master of > Python, you might be a snake charmer in my book. > > Kirby "IF you're a master..." blah blah. Kirby From jeff at elkner.net Sun May 27 18:50:15 2007 From: jeff at elkner.net (Jeffrey Elkner) Date: Sun, 27 May 2007 16:50:15 +0000 Subject: [Edu-sig] Let's work together on this... In-Reply-To: 0 Message-ID: <20070527165015.30678.750989019.divmod.quotient.6357@ohm> Hi Jeff, I really liked your posting from yesterday and think you are right on the mark with the benefit of creating a repository of programs for "new programmers". I'm working with several student interns this summer developing curriculum materials for Arlington Public School's new "Intro to IT" course. I plan to make the OLPC a center piece technology for that course. We are working on a beginners graphics API called gasp: https://launchpad.net/gasp students love the power a library like this gives them to create fun to play games programs even as beginners. Steve Holden was kind enough to stop by my school and give an impromptu demonstration of how to design a network game server for games like checkers and battleship: http://linus.yhspatriot.net/cs/netprog/HomePage I have my students working on versions of these games as end of year projects. By mid July I will have the best results of their efforts polished up a bit, annotated, and put on the Python Bibliotheca: http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/pyBiblio I'll then be sure to edit your new wiki to fill in links to the work we are doing wherever appropriate. What I like most about the wiki is that it will give us ideas for future projects. Thanks for taking the time to set it up! jeff elkner open book project http://ibiblio.org/obp ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Jeff Rush jeff at taupro.com Sat May 26 10:46:25 CEST 2007 wrote: While there are those who enjoy solving abstract problems, programming or otherwise, if seems to me that if we're going to tackle CP4E (computer programming for everyone, for those not aware of the history), we have to make programming not the end-goal but the tool for doing the things in which those people are interested. CP4E will never make the vast majority of people programming geeks. So it seems to me that it would advance the cause, of programming in general and Python specifically, if a repository of resources were assembled. I'm sure some of these exist scattered across the net but some I've never been able to find. And non-programmers can be so impatient in rummaging through sites, understandably wanting to get on with solving their problem. I tossed together a very rough wiki page of some ideas I've been kicking around. These resources attempt to answer a response I get frequently when I push the learning of Python, that of "but what would I -do- with Python once I learned it?". http://wiki.python.org/moin/Advocacy/ProgrammingForNewprogrammers I call that group "new programmers" - somehow calling them normal or average folk seems mildly insulting to someone, and calling them "non-programmers" isn't accurate if our goal is to teach them programming, albeit non-vocational style. "Non-professional programmers"? "Typical" people? "Making People Programming-Literate"? -Jeff From naveen.bandla at yahoo.co.in Mon May 28 13:39:15 2007 From: naveen.bandla at yahoo.co.in (naveen bandla) Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 12:39:15 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Edu-sig] (no subject) Message-ID: <824743.74560.qm@web7810.mail.in.yahoo.com> --------------------------------- Did you know? You can CHAT without downloading messenger. Know how! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/attachments/20070528/76d725e2/attachment.htm From mtobis at gmail.com Tue May 29 17:05:36 2007 From: mtobis at gmail.com (Michael Tobis) Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 10:05:36 -0500 Subject: [Edu-sig] education as Python killer app In-Reply-To: <4657F3E1.7080402@taupro.com> References: <4657F3E1.7080402@taupro.com> Message-ID: Jeff: sorry for the double mailing; I erroneously replied to you and not all. All: On 5/26/07, Jeff Rush wrote: > Michael Tobis wrote: > > Is education Python's killer app? I think it could be. > > > > I used the occasion of the Python Papers to motivate my efforts to > > explain this idea, and you can see what I came up with on pages > > 8-15. > > Michael, thanks for writing for the Python Papers. I found your article quite > interesting. Thanks. I hope it helps bring some new energy to CP4E. > I would ask though, of what education are you thinking? I mean, > there is the use of Python to teach programming, and there is the teaching of > other topics but using Python to do it. Absolutely. I want there to be a well-designed computer language in common use so that I can write simple pieces of code to convey the fundamentals of climate and earth science that are policy relevant and have substantive discussions with people, instead of having to go over the fundamentals over and over again. That was my motivation for getting interested in CP4E in the first place. I expect you may hear from others on this list ( :-) ) who are using Python to teach math. > And there is the teaching of children > versus adults, although a case can be made for some degree of overlap there. Yes. Check my taxonomy of five classes of beginner. I think that may be the most substantively original part of my modest contribution. > Much of the effort I've seen is to teach programming, but the OLPC project has > intrigued me more to consider non-programming topics. Since I hang out mostly > with other programmers, this is challenging. > > > > I suggest a concerted effort by the community toward leveraging the > > OLPC/Sugar momentum to revive the idea of Python as tool for teaching > > some programming as a useful part of universal education. > > While there are those who enjoy solving abstract problems, programming or > otherwise, if seems to me that if we're going to tackle CP4E (computer > programming for everyone, for those not aware of the history), we have to make > programming not the end-goal but the tool for doing the things in which those > people are interested. CP4E will never make the vast majority of people > programming geeks. I absolutely agree. The purpose of literacy is not to create novelists, either. Findamental programming competence is not vocational training. It ought to be and (if we survive the next coming crunch intact) probably someday will be a prerequisite for effective participation in the democratic process. > So it seems to me that it would advance the cause, of programming in general > and Python specifically, if a repository of resources were assembled. I'm > sure some of these exist scattered across the net but some I've never been > able to find. And non-programmers can be so impatient in rummaging through > sites, understandably wanting to get on with solving their problem. > > I tossed together a very rough wiki page of some ideas I've been kicking > around. These resources attempt to answer a response I get frequently when I > push the learning of Python, that of "but what would I -do- with Python once I > learned it?". > > http://wiki.python.org/moin/Advocacy/ProgrammingForNewprogrammers Wiki is good. Yes wiki please. I think we should also update the edu-sig page on python.org . One of the purposes of the article was to nucleate a maintained directory relevant resources of all types. Michael From kirby.urner at gmail.com Tue May 29 18:25:41 2007 From: kirby.urner at gmail.com (kirby urner) Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 09:25:41 -0700 Subject: [Edu-sig] education as Python killer app In-Reply-To: References: <4657F3E1.7080402@taupro.com> Message-ID: On 5/29/07, Michael Tobis wrote: > I expect you may hear from others on this list ( :-) ) who are using > Python to teach math. Yeah that'd be me, except I'm gravitating to the Shuttleworth Foundation approach of referring to "analytical thinking" (http://www.kususa.org) and/or not calling it math. Sometimes I call it "math... not!" or ~M! for short (kinda quirky -- using it to help storyboard a TV show). It's just that when I look at the current K-12 and try to see how we get from there to here, I notice lots of content in the math curriculum that's a natural fit. Algorithms like Euclid's for the gcd, a classic in Python (by Guido) *could* be reached through a history class, but math is where we'd traditionally encounter and use it pre-college, given computer science tends to start up with it later (see Knuth TAOCP, vol 3). Another example: Python's primitive types, available out of the box, go naturally with a discussion of the mathematical sets N, Z (int), Q, R (float), C (complex). Then we say "math is an extensible type system" i.e. you inherit a set of tools (types), with which to roll your own (types, classes). Q (rational numbers) would be a user type, as they're not primitive in Python (ergo 'import rat' or 'from rats import Rat' or whatever). Vectors likewise (historically a user type, making use of earlier types and ops). The thing about types is we define them in terms of what they can *do* (meaning as use -- Wittgenstein), which often means in terms of Python's special names or __ribs__ as I call them. When students see __add__ and __mul__ overloaded again and again, but in different ways depending on the type, it seems natural to clue them in about some of the abstractions, i.e. the concept of "inverse" and "identity". In Z, every int has an additive inverse such that m + (-m) = 0 (additive identity). In Q, every p/q has both an additive *and* a multiplicative inverse (except 0 in the latter case): Rat(1,2).__add__(Rat(-1,2)) == 0 and Rat(1,2).__mul__(Rat(2,1)) == 1. Meaning: 1/2 + (1/2) gives 0 and (1/2) * (2/1) gives 1. This leads to a discussion of such concepts as group, ring and field (Z is a ring, Q a field) which are considered "advanced" by current standards, but which I think the practive of operator overloading brings within range of a pre-college student (ala Kusasa). A practical use of this knowledge is explaining RSA (public key cryptography, built in to web browsers, used everywhere daily). Math has this advantage of being a "required subject" which everyone recognizes is part of the "core curriculum" whereas "computer programming" is out in the cold as a peripheral elective. Oregon state schools don't even use AP compsci, so boning up on Java in high school isn't going to earn you credits at Oregon State. K-12 computer teachers are the first to get repurposed in a budget crunch, asked to teach math (required), or maybe gym (also required). Plus so much of "computer class" tends to *not* involve in programming, is focused on bizapps like spreadsheets. Similar in other states I'm guessing. Changing all this to make programming more integral would seem quasi-hopeless on the one hand, but on the other hand we have a lot of motivated kids and a lot of distance education tools for reaching them at home via the Internet. It's possible to start building our new curriculum today, complementing what we know the schools are teaching, but not confining ourselves to that content. Kids engaging in these prototype learning experiences actually find themselves clued in to a lot more critical info plus find themselves develping job-relevant skills, so there's payback, reward, for study. But of course only the most self-motivated are going to develop these study habits. The Internet is *so* distracting -- by default many don't find a way to stick with it. Formalizing the reward system would be a next step, and that includes various forms of credentialling and certification. Finally, Arthur and I used to fight over whether my investments in the Buckminster Fuller literature we're helping or hurting my efforts around CP4E. I think the Bucky stuff is helping because I'm able to establish that my geometry modules contain some basic curricular innovations that math teachers have just been too lazy to accommodate, given the high inertia and traditional-bound nature of their subject. I teach about the whole number ratios between important polyhedra, about the space-filling MITEs and Couplers, they don't. Plus I get the geodesic domes and spheres out of my investment (HP4E meme). So even as I distance myself from traditional K-12 mathematics via my storyboarding for ~M!, I'm able to show that I've got some of the best treasures in active use, vs. languishing from disuse and neglect. My positive futurism is backed up with a respectible track record. Kids, still with most of their lives ahead of them, tend to gravitate to positive futurism, provided it's not just empty BS. Kirby