[Edu-sig] False alarms?

[kirby urner]

Wow that'd be something to have some student / faculty take advantage of
the schema.org templates for sharing topics.

The School Server:  Do We Have One?

At the college level you often get faculty / students building and tending
servers of various types, and otherwise assisting in the management of
computing infrastructure used throughout the school.

Were I to design a new school from scratch, I would assume a central store
where theatrical events, sporting events, student and faculty recordings in
many categories, could be collected and also to some extent shared with
alumni.  This describes my relationship to my university (as an alum, I
have access to various services), but not to my high school.

I don't think many millennials have a way to log in to their old high
schools, as alumni, to view debates, presentations, show & tell
experiences, nor even a school paper.  There's a home page perhaps,
something hosted at the district level, and a way to drill down for
institutional information, but don't expect to watch last week's football
game on-line.

Python.org is exemplary in documenting ongoing conversations and
administrative processes through discussion groups.  In the interests of
transparency, many of these are public.

Note:  through Facebook and informal networks sharing digital assets
privately, a well-connected alum may nevertheless gain access to a lot of
information, there's just no in-house dedicated effort towards maintaining
such services, meaning faculty and students are less likely to experience
real world responsibilities, such as for maintaining the Chess Club server
(which is a lot about community outreach and actually teaching chess, not
just giving students ways to play each other).

Impressions from OSCON

I keep coming back to what's happened in statistics, which in my high
school years was an elective on par with trigonometry.  If you wanted to
augment your required math with electives, you could add stats and trig to
the menu (I did).  Otherwise, just do Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2
(Pre-Calc) and Calc.

Statistics turned into Machine Learning in a lot of ways.  Tensorflow 1.9
is more like Pytorch these days in allowing us to skirt the "old way" of
doing it:  at a more meta level.  That way is still there, and important,
but Google is these days pressing ahead with:

# TensorFlow and tf.keras
import tensorflow as tf
from tensorflow import keras

Note how each of these 5 tutorials (as of July-August 2018) has a link in
the upper left to a corresponding Jupyter Notebook, dubbed Colab:

https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/

This is what OSCON tutorials look like today, with the speaker mentioning
how you rarely need more then twelves lines of code in a code cell.
Programming no longer has to mean writing lengthy scripts.  Mathematica
helped pave the way for these high level APIs.

All of which takes me back to my suggestion that we beef up the stats
aspect of high school and use it as a place to expose students to some of
these higher level APIs, giving them the flavor.[1]  Get used to managing
datasets, not just noodling through one little computation at a time.

Speaking of what's fun for kids, check out this drawing program, which
tries to guess what you're drawing ahead of time.  The algorithm is no just
looking the the cumulative graphic, but at the order in which you draw its
parts, as when writing a Chinese character.

https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/

Have your sound turned on, as it talks to you.

Kirby

[1]  https://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/2018-April/011825.html





On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 6:37 PM, Wes Turner <wes.turner at gmail.com> wrote:

> - [ ] Develop URIs for K12CS framework, Common Core, Khan Academy concepts
>
>   - [ ] Encourage educational CreativeWork creators to include schema.org
> markup in their HTML:
>
>   - schema.org/about
>   - schema.org/educationalAlignment .url @id
>   - https://schema.org/educationalFramework
>
> - [ ] Develop mappings between concept/curriculum/#head-ing URIs
>
>
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