[Edu-sig] Getting it going

[John Maxwell]

Ulf Engstrøm writes:

> With what intentions do you all get into this and what kind of
> discussions should we have?

Well, by way of introduction... I'm a grad student in education at the U
of B.C. and the research work of my professor and colleagues has to do
with general technology-integration issues in curriculum. My own bent is
to promote a more general 'literacy' by getting kids (grade 8-10?)
programming *again*, rather than doing a lot of shallow websurfing or
learning how to run MS Office so they can get a "job". I'm just starting
to get this stuff defined, and I was playing around with the idea of doing
a project using Tcl/Tk when I ran across CP4E -- which gives me a whole
bunch of encouragement to go the Python route and to tie in to things
others are doing under this umbrella.

Just to head off the debate which I don't want to start, the Tcl/Tk idea
was based on the ability to scaffold it into some *very* simple building
blocks for younger kids. But looking deeper into Python (a language I'd
worked with myself a couple of years back and had some difficulty with 3rd
party modules) I'm feeling pretty confident about it being the right
direction to go.    


  - John Maxwell                  jmax@portal.ca
------------------------------------------------
 Multimedia Ethnographic Research Lab (MERLin)
 University of British Columbia, Canada