[Edu-sig] first thoughts after OSCON

[kirby urner]

I've been to a number of OSCONs in my day, this being the 2nd wherein
a participated behind the scenes on the talks selection committee, a
pretty big commitment actually.  I've also been a speaker, which is
pressure of a different kind.

OSCON is like a weather sensing device, very sensitive, but of
patterns to complicated for the solo brain to grok, at least in the
short time -- takes time to consider.

Like this year the Cloud was big, with both Rackspace and HP about to
get more public about their support for the OpenStack solution, which
is very much a Python project, which is not to say Java can't be spun
up in a virtual server just like anything else i.e. a commitment to
Python as a platform language has nothing to do with limiting the
freedoms of developers.  Yes, we have a lot of Java programmers out
there, thanks in large degree to a chapter wherein people went gaga
for Java, especially in CS.  And why not?  It's a good and capable
language.

I worked at upping my level of appreciation for Go, no not the board
game, the computer language.  Yes it's open source and yes the talks
and tutorial were well attended.  I bought a book on Go as well, got
it compiling on the Air.

Could there be an implementation of Python in the Go language someday?
 That was my first question when Go started to get press, whereas the
more computer illiterate were asking dumb questions like was Go the
new Python killer.  One's a system language the other's an agile.  If
history is any guide, there'll be be a GoPython someday.

The Python and Perl tracks were both strong this year.  You can't beat
Damian Conway for drawing an audience.  I'm a huge fan of Perl
mongers.  Sorry but that divide and conquer thing didn't work.  We
agiles are soul mates.  OSCON got going thanks to Perl.

What was kinda weird though was the education track in F-151 (kinda of
like Area 51).  The Common Standards buzz is a new one at OSCON,
reminiscent of OLPC in terms of reaching a peak, feeding a frenzy, but
I didn't sense the same levels.  To be fair though, I didn't make it
to either Texas Pycon, when OLPC was flying high.

Pearson was there, and the Shared Learning Collaborative.

http://www.oscon.com/oscon2012/public/schedule/detail/26434

What were they there for, mostly?  To recruit?  To share source code?
To attend others' talks?  These are questions to take back for further
analysis.

I guess one could ask a similar question about O'Reilly School of
Technology, but no, not really, as (a) OST presented no talks and (b)
we're just O'Reilly Media (part of) anyway, but with a Red Leaf logo,
so we're an expected presence, with an already obvious agenda.

In the case of the FERPA talk, it sounded like university admin might
like more help with their dino sinking ship codebase, and I agree,
they could use some.  No question.

What I took away from my brief work with Portland State (vicariously,
not a direct contract) was that universities should do a lot more to
eat their own dog food when it comes to administrative software.
Start from the open source "clay" the real world economy uses, and
take this as a teaching opportunity, with lessons about how closed
data is still quite possible in this environment and in fact security
is more robust as computer literacy improves across the population.

I look forward to more university presence someday.  They should be
getting their faculty from us.  We do STEM, not just computer science.
 The focus on outdoor sports, quantified self, camping (for real),
planting sensors and enviro-cams around the world (oreilly/animals) is
already well entrenched.  The idea this is a group of cola drinking
nerds eating pizza in windowless basements is way too 1970s.  If
that's your picture, time to hit fast forward on that antique VCR of
yours.

Kirby