[Edu-sig] Python News from My Corner

[kirby urner]

The USDLA conference in St. Louis was a blast.

That city has made some bold moves to save itself
from decay post End of the Passenger Train Era
(we still have Amtrak but 99% of traffic is by air).

The conference was in the old Union Station, taken
over by a hotel chain known for its conference savvy.
Speaking of which Steve Holden is holding a great
space in Austin over Labor Day if anyone is looking
for a professional venue.

High schoolers go to a Nexus Academy, free public
school in Michigan, and get to sign up for classes
like the one I teach, for high school math credit, in
Python.  Way cool.  Just what I was hoping would
happen.  We're OK with taking high schoolers and
the credit comes from the home state, not from us
(we're a dot com, not a dot edu).

The closing keynote was sobering, about how the
unaccredited like Coursera and EdX are chewing
away at the profit margins enjoyed by the monopolistic
accredited, more in my blogs.  O'Reilly School is one
of the "bad guys" in muscling in on college and
university turf and offering stronger content in many
cases.  The predictions for distance learning were
good, but not for many colleges and universities if
they don't understand the market.  I think Earlham
College understands.  I spent a few days there
talking to faculty while in the mid-west.  They're
doing more and more with Python.

The opening keynote was right on!  Save a ton
of money using Creative Commons licensed
curriculum materials.  Chances are, it's out there,
especially if its content that hasn't changed in some
years.

Have you looked at Wikieducator?  I've been on
that for a long time and watched it grow.

Take the money you save and invest it in more worth-
while projects, including helping students!  The
speaker had been with the Obama administration
before joining Creative Commons and clearly knew
what he was talking about.

Regarding Python IDEs, do they let you change the
prompt?  I like a single dot indented two spaces
e.g. instead of ">>> ", I sometimes use "  . " and not
just because I liked dBase / FoxPro.

Some mail clients make a big deal out of ">>> " thinking
to change font color and all that, whereas a simple dot
goes under the radar.  So far, PyCharm is one of those
that does NOT allow this level of customization, at least
not according to the company rep I talked to recently.
It is my IDE of choice for most work.

Speaking of work, I've been designing a RESTful API
for my Quakers (Pacific Northwest region) using
Django running inside Heroku.  This tutorial is very
clear although I had to downgrade the version of
Foreman to make it work on my OSX Lion:

https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo

If you're not on psf-members you probably don't know
the election of PSF Board members was rescheduled
owing to a last minute nominee not making it to the
ballot.  The election administrator resigned over the
fact that the Board was not allowed to meet before
his control of the eVoter was taken away in an
unceremonious / haphazard way.  PSF is still not
as professional is it might be someday.

We're using the interim between elections to
encourage the candidates to make speeches,
but because they're all behind closed doors, no one
out in the public sphere gets to know what these people
are about.  Yet the offices are arguably public:  the
501(c)(3) is like a church.  But then churches get really
culty and ingrown.

I'm pushing to have candidates enjoy a more public
airing of their campaigns.  psf-volunteers might be
the right forum?  Any existing list with a public archive
would do.  edu-sig even.  I'd say create a new mail
list (I've been saying that) but then look what happened
to diversity-sig:  it got created precisely for the purpose
of making sure no one could post to it.  I'm afraid that
will be the fate of psf-community, suggested by Laura
and others.

We also have a new Cuba Working Group mail list
aiming to jump start Pycon / Cuba.  Mertz is the owner.
I'm just one of many subscribers.

Kirby
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