Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
Benjamin L. Russell:
I am interested in starting a new mailing list on Haskell.org, aimed
mainly at liberal arts teachers and elementary-level learners of
Haskell, called "Haskell-Edu: The Haskell Educational Mailing List."
This new mailing list would be guided by the principle that Haskell is
useful not just in research, but also in teaching programming as part
of a liberal arts education, on a par with Scheme. When I suggested
the idea of this mailing list to Simon Marlow, the Haskell.org mailing
list administrator, he suggested that I post this idea on The Haskell
Mailing List, so I am posting it here to ask for feedback.
The main purposes of this new (proposed) mailing list would be as
follows:
1) To provide a primarily non-research-oriented discussion forum to
serve the needs of users wishing to focus on the uses of Haskell in
education, such as in high school and in introductory computer science
college courses, as opposed to in research.
2) To provide a primarily non-research-oriented discussion forum to
serve the needs of non-computer-science students of Haskell who wish
to focus on Haskell as a language for learning programming as part of
a well-rounded a liberal arts education, as opposed to an
engineering/mathematics/science-oriented education.
The Haskell community seems to be growing quickly and clearly becomes
more diverse. So, a mailing list aimed at users with less experience
and/or a non-computing, non-math background makes sense to me.
Whether you will be able to gather a critical mass of knowledgeable
people who are happy to answer questions on the list is hard to answer
without trying your idea. But mailing lists are cheap. So, I'd say,
let's give it a try and see whether it works. In any case, it'd be
important to describe the purpose of the list at
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Mailing_lists
properly to make clear which discussions should go to which list.
My main concern here is that the remit for the new list is not clear
enough. I can see a potential need for two lists:
* a list for discussion related to teaching Haskell;
* a list devoted to those learning Haskell, with a less research-
oriented feel than haskell-cafe.
it's not obvious to me that both of those needs should be served by a
single list. I believe it's important that the mailing lists served by
haskell.org should have clear non-overlapping topics.
So I suggest that we add haskell-edu for the purposes of discussing the use
and teaching of Haskell in education. For the second point above, I'd be
inclined not to add a new list, but I don't feel that strongly - if there's
a concensus in favour of adding haskell-beginners (for example), that would
be fine.
Cheers,
Simon
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