Back from a break, up to date on the archives. On the Portland scene: the local user group is hot, jump started by a snake charmer from Texas, with me 'n Jason co-anchoring on meetup.com, but with our own profile at python.org as well, which makes us official. Jeff S. has been doing a good job of anchoring meetings. We've swapped pizza with PHP folks, shared a meeting room with Ruby (projectors back to back (pointing in opposite directions)). All this open source friendliness is owing to Portland Cubespace, the site of our first Portland Barcamp (elements of which I migrated to Centralia, for a test run of a physician-geek hybrid event (worked OK, for an alpha version)).
A couple years ago I started tracking koreducators.org and its mission to charter and fly a new school (public) in Portland. Their battle royale was nobly fought and well executed (I had only a bit part, made a strategic "boo!" sound on one of the public meeting tapes), and today LEP High is a reality, runs Ubuntu open source, attracts a broad spectrum of talented future entrepreneurs (the focus of LEP is Leadership & Entrepreneurship meaning you need to be thinking in terms of running a small business in order to graduate). I've been in to catalyze the Python culture, open source more generally, or maybe programming more generally, as that's a kind of "hard fun" that, like reading, like skiing, you don't spontaneously enjoy until you're somewhat good at it, meaning a chicken and egg vicious circle unless you've got good jump start materials. I got a circular from Helen King recently about complementary efforts in Cape Town, to leverage open source and its benefits. Lesson planning is a kind of source coding. Teachers closest to the action often have the best ideas, but frequently aren't tasked with sharing them. A more Japanese approach, availing of post-WWII state of the art theories (Peter Drucker and so on), breaks down any firewall between so-called managers and so-called workers, by setting up some revolving door plans. Administrate for awhile, teach for awhile, be a student for awhile. Keep switching. Don't think in terms of promotion or demotion, but of keeping limber, aware, in touch with the big picture. This is the kind of management consulting message we give from my tiny partnership, 4D Solutions, when called upon (but of course the devil is in the details, so I didn't just give away the store). Anyway, that's enough from my corner: PPUG is running smoothly, in coordination with other language communities, thanks to Cubespace; one of Portland's most innovative flagships is having fun with Python; schools of the future will distribute curriculum writing more wisely, to those best in a position to reflect, if only given the time to do so. Kirby Urner Senior Partner 4D Solutions (4dsolutions.net) PS: on the international scene, I'm remembering how hard Laura and Aiste worked on the last Europython so have been recalling some of those meetings and discussions. I made a couple posts to the Europython archive, I hoped of a helpful nature, but Portland and Vilnius or literally on other sides of the globe, so no way do I feel in a position to offer any micromanagement skills (more what I offer locally-based clients). http://mail.python.org/pipermail/europython/2007-November/date.html _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
