[Edu-sig] notes from django con

[kirby urner]

Some of you may have been peeking at my blogs, where I'm packing in
details re DjangoCon, ongoing in Portland.

I'm getting a lot of validation for this idea of bringing GIS / GPS
closer to the core curriculum (talking high school servers) with all
these local data sources about real world concerns.  On the math side,
it's all great circles and polyhedra i.e. the bridge from geometry to
geography is gonna be central (anticipated in Vilnius slides, linked
in my last post).

GeoDjango is part of what's exciting me here, and the Postgres back
end.  Those of you on diversity at python.org will have seen a lot of
traffic twixt python-dev management e.g. Aahz and one of the top
Postgres community organizers, Selena.  We're also on great terms with
Admirers of JavaScript here in Portland (lots of overlapping
attendance -- the we did better with Cubespace as a grand central
though, a step back to have these separate office towers with locked
doors and guards).

The reason I bring up JavaScript is we're seeing a lot of robustness
in that language, as the guts of the browsers.  V8 in Chrome.
HTML5.... So picture more control panel or cockpit type GUIs with low
level JSON chatter over the wire, with Django type stacks on the
server (Rails type...).

Anyway, it's all way cool and math related.  GIS is all about
polygons.  If you're a math teacher looking for applications, here
they are.  But then a school needs strong IT to move into these areas.
 Who on faculty wants to take this on?  This is knowledge to pass
directly to students, not hide behind curtains.  If you use computers,
you need to learn how to control them.  That's part of what the new
literacy entails, per R0ml, so if the math teachers refuse, maybe the
language teachers will take it on.

Django culture is very Kansas-meets-UK flavored, which feels a little
like Clint Eastwood meets Dumbledore.  I was snake bearer for PSF,
helping bring the two totems together **, more like a Vulcan mind meld
than a Klingon mating ritual, although they're both at the hotel
now... (I'm local, so at home).

Kirby

**
http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2009/09/ppug-200998.html
( @psf_snake at PPUG last night )
http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2009/09/djangocon-day-2.html
( @psf_snake and @djangopony with totem bearers)