John Naughton wrote a public set of proposals to Michael Gove, Britain’s MP, Secretary of State for Education, for rebooting its ICT curriculum and published it in The Guardian. It’s a good read.
Even better, check out The Guardian’s profile of 7 teenagers who code.
Related:
Metafilter: Guardian feature on the future of computing education in UK
We’ve come a long way from the 80s and the devices that so many of us started our journey as programmers Charles Miller notes in “Johnny and Jenny Can Code”:
Today, if you’re a teenager with a Mac (insert some other platform into this paragraph if you object to Apple on moral or financial grounds), you can download for free the same tools that professional developers use to write Mac, iPhone and iPad applications. You can read countless free tutorials on how to use them, download reams of sample code for free, and ask for help on forums full of people who may never know you’re a precocious kid.
YouTube: naddani: Wasted Years (Iron Maiden) – Acoustic cover:
YouTube: Thomas Zwijsen: Classical/Acoustic: Iron Maiden acoustic – Wasted Years:
YouTube: JonathanHarpa: Iron Maiden in harp and guitar – Hallowed be thy name:
YouTube: vkgoeswild: Iron Maiden – Run To The Hills – piano cover:
YouTube: WonkyFonk: Iron Maiden – Hallowed Be Thy Name (acoustic):
YouTube: ThomasZwijsen2007: Bruce Dickinson – Tears Of The Dragon (Acoustic):
YouTube: Jcronk: Folkified Hallowed Be Thy Name:
YouTube: hampusvh2: Iron Maiden – The Trooper (Piano):
Related:
Metafilter: “Thomas Zwijsen performs Nylon Maiden”
This presentation was great to get a peek at what Twitter’s Storm was about: YouTube: PyCon US 2012: Gabriel Grant:
Related:
Twitter Engineering: “A Storm is coming: more details and plans for release”
GitHub: Storm
At Strange Loop 2011 Clojure’s Rich Hickey gave a presentation (video) on programming and simplicity that rankled some feathers and triggered a heated discussion at reddit.
Duncan McGreggor, decided to contact Python’s Guido Van Rossum to interview him about his keynote talk at PyCon US 2012 (video), specifically his thoughts on callbacks.
Emily Badger in The Atlantic recently wrote about “The Dawn of the Municipal Chief Innovation Officer”. Technically Philly had a conversation with Philadelphia’s Adel Ebeid, Philadelphia’s first Chief Innovation Officer, back in November last year:
“There’s this one side of the coin where people see just this disenchantment and negative view of government,” says Jay Nath, the Chief Innovation Officer for the city of San Francisco. “But there’s also this flip side where people actually believe that working with government, we can make a better solution and better improvements for our society.”
…There are, by our count, just two major cities in the U.S. that currently have someone sitting in this role, and they’ve both settled in within the past six months. Adel Ebeid stepped into the job in Philadelphia after working as the chief information officer for the state of New Jersey. Like Nath, he views his role largely as connecting city hall and all of its resources with a new generation of problem-solvers outside of it.
…The birth of the municipal chief innovation officer job is a response to these two trends: to fundamental changes in technology that are revolutionizing citizen engagement, and to a cultural movement that is turning the data-dense inner workings of city halls into public challenges that are actually kind of a kick to solve.
“There aren’t that many of us right now,” Ebeid says, “but I can tell you we’re certainly an early testbed for what will become mainstream by 2015.”
Related:
City of Philadelphia: Office of Innovation and Technology
Tor.com gets at the philosophical core of “Total Recall” in ‘”If I’m Not Me, Then Who The Hell Am I?”: Total Recall’. I need to get around to reading some of Philip K. Dick’s stories.
Allen Wirfs-Brock, a Mozilla Research Fellow, at YOW 2011, defined what he considers the current era of computing, and some exciting elements of where we are and where we are going in his talk “The Web Browser is a Transitional Technology”.
It looks like YOW 2011 had some fantastic talks to check out.
Author of “Invent with Python”, Al Sweigart, makes the case for teaching programming skills while enabling children to accomplish something, like making a game, not as an end in and of itself, in “Nobody Wants to Learn How to Program”. I believe this is mostly true, and the sooner we approach K-12 CS education similarly the better.