[Edu-sig] Things to come

[Kirby Urner]

At 02:05 PM 05/12/2000 -0400, Jeffrey Elkner wrote:
>On Fri, 12 May 2000, Arthur Siegel wrote:
>> So can we say that curricula should lead - not language or interface?

>Curricula, on the other hand are still sorely lacking, and Python will
>not be adapted widely in schools without it.  The question then is 
>what to do to overcome this lack.  I am really interested to see how 
>this develops.  

Me too.  Sitting around waiting for mass-publishing to catch
up is NOT the way to go however.  That's just being lazy.
Seems you agree.

>One of the things most attractive to me is the opportunity to be 
>part of a development effort that has the possibility of being 
>collaborative in nature and focused on the legitament needs of 
>learners rather than profit driven and characterized by salesmanship 
>and hype.  

Yep.

>I want it to be successful and I am willing to put a lot of my 
>own time into it for that reason.  

This is what I've been doing.

>I've already met and am working with others who feel the same way.

Great.

>If anyone has any time on their hands and wants to help out, it 
>would be a big help to me if we could get the livewires course 
>materials put into some web ready format.

I'm working on developing my own curriculum materials, but 
best wishes with that effort.  

BTW, I don't consider PDFs all that web-unready (despite 
previous poster's remarks).  Just download and print.  Sure, 
you can't easily change the text, but not all published 
documents are open source code in that sense.  

As an author/writer, I produce finished products, as well 
as works in progress.  The concept of plagiarism still 
holds (i.e. if it's not your own work, don't pretend that 
it is; credit your sources).

>These excellent middle school level materials can be found at:
>
>http://yhslug.tux.org/obp/livewires

Yep.

>I have two students working on converting them into HTML.  

Did you see the Python source-code colorizor posted about
here?  Great to show Python source in color-coded HTML, using 
same colors as IDLE, AND make it downloadable as .py files 
(zipped or as tar-balls).

>They are volunteers and the work is proceeding slower 
>than I would like.  I will be learning to use DocBook this 
>summer, and will try to write Python tools to convert them 
>into DocBook, but I don't know yet how that will go.

Why so much energy into rehashing Livewires stuff into 
these various other formats?  Better to source your own
curriculum materials, no?, given there's a shortage of 
good Python-centric literature right now.  

I don't see pouring old wine into new skins as the same 
thing as curriculum writing.

>Thanks in advance for all the help that I know is forthcoming  ;-)

Kirby