The USDLA conference in St. Louis was a blast. That city has made some bold moves to save itself from decay post End of the Passenger Train Era (we still have Amtrak but 99% of traffic is by air).
The conference was in the old Union Station, taken over by a hotel chain known for its conference savvy. Speaking of which Steve Holden is holding a great space in Austin over Labor Day if anyone is looking for a professional venue. High schoolers go to a Nexus Academy, free public school in Michigan, and get to sign up for classes like the one I teach, for high school math credit, in Python. Way cool. Just what I was hoping would happen. We're OK with taking high schoolers and the credit comes from the home state, not from us (we're a dot com, not a dot edu). The closing keynote was sobering, about how the unaccredited like Coursera and EdX are chewing away at the profit margins enjoyed by the monopolistic accredited, more in my blogs. O'Reilly School is one of the "bad guys" in muscling in on college and university turf and offering stronger content in many cases. The predictions for distance learning were good, but not for many colleges and universities if they don't understand the market. I think Earlham College understands. I spent a few days there talking to faculty while in the mid-west. They're doing more and more with Python. The opening keynote was right on! Save a ton of money using Creative Commons licensed curriculum materials. Chances are, it's out there, especially if its content that hasn't changed in some years. Have you looked at Wikieducator? I've been on that for a long time and watched it grow. Take the money you save and invest it in more worth- while projects, including helping students! The speaker had been with the Obama administration before joining Creative Commons and clearly knew what he was talking about. Regarding Python IDEs, do they let you change the prompt? I like a single dot indented two spaces e.g. instead of ">>> ", I sometimes use " . " and not just because I liked dBase / FoxPro. Some mail clients make a big deal out of ">>> " thinking to change font color and all that, whereas a simple dot goes under the radar. So far, PyCharm is one of those that does NOT allow this level of customization, at least not according to the company rep I talked to recently. It is my IDE of choice for most work. Speaking of work, I've been designing a RESTful API for my Quakers (Pacific Northwest region) using Django running inside Heroku. This tutorial is very clear although I had to downgrade the version of Foreman to make it work on my OSX Lion: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo If you're not on psf-members you probably don't know the election of PSF Board members was rescheduled owing to a last minute nominee not making it to the ballot. The election administrator resigned over the fact that the Board was not allowed to meet before his control of the eVoter was taken away in an unceremonious / haphazard way. PSF is still not as professional is it might be someday. We're using the interim between elections to encourage the candidates to make speeches, but because they're all behind closed doors, no one out in the public sphere gets to know what these people are about. Yet the offices are arguably public: the 501(c)(3) is like a church. But then churches get really culty and ingrown. I'm pushing to have candidates enjoy a more public airing of their campaigns. psf-volunteers might be the right forum? Any existing list with a public archive would do. edu-sig even. I'd say create a new mail list (I've been saying that) but then look what happened to diversity-sig: it got created precisely for the purpose of making sure no one could post to it. I'm afraid that will be the fate of psf-community, suggested by Laura and others. We also have a new Cuba Working Group mail list aiming to jump start Pycon / Cuba. Mertz is the owner. I'm just one of many subscribers. Kirby
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