This is a picture of the the Event Space, the main presentation space. Besides the obviously very high ceiling, the room is laid out diagonally. It works. A simple idea. Brilliantly executed. The building really is designed (by Fumihiko Maki) with function in mind.

Loneliness is failed Solitude

I find the most value at the conference not at the workshops and how-to sessions, but the more general education related sessions. Day 2 KeyNote by Sherry Turkle, Henry Jenkins and Marina Bers was great. Turkle presented her latest thought on the importance of Solitude. This frankly scares me. She has pointed out with our new constantly connected, constantly fed (with information) environment, would teens (and adults) know now to be alone? Not knowing the value of solitude, when one creates, and engage in deep self development, teens will be increasingly dependent on shallow casual interactions. Their phones become the center of their lives. They move from “I have a feeling; id’ like to make a call” to “I want to have a feeling; I need to make a call.”

Turkle ends with an encouraging note — Do not use the word “Addiction” when talking about this connected world. Addiction implies that we want to get rid of the cause. We will not and cannot get rid of the Internet.  While many people falls into the fallacy that we are stuck with the current state, the Internet is actually very young. We can learn to live with it.

Referencing Thoreau, she encourages us to not live thickly – “Just because we have the net we do not have to live thickly”.

Side Note: A funny moment at the start of her presentation, when Turkle says “you know when I say phone, I don’t mean phone”. Of course, she meant the smart phone/device that is used for texting, running apps connecting to facebooks, and seldom for realtime phone conversation.

2.0 is a Business Model, not a Pedagogy

Jenkins pointed out that the participatory culture is not new. Facebook is not the first social network. While Jenkin’s studies often reference the fan fiction culture, there are many more examples. A “good” participatory community is not a pure consuming community. The “hanging around” group consume content, but also communicate with each other. The “Messing about” group contributes with self-expression and self-actualization. The “Geeking out” group tinkers and create for the community. A participatory community allows experts and beginners share a common interest and help each other.

“Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute when ready, and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued.”

BYOB for No Ceiling Computer Science Education

Brian Harvey gave a short presentation on Day 2, and a long one on Day 3 on BYOB, the CMU developed variation of Scratch that has list of lists and “procedures” which turn Scratch into almost visual Scheme. Given these new first order data object, one can program much more advance concepts using BYOB.

Technically BYOB is brilliant and I can’t wait to use it. Politically they are working hard with the core Scratch team to find a way to incorporate BYOB into Scratch. Harvey is extremely sensitive to no wanting to split the Scratch community into the beginners and the advanced users. I hope they find a way to do this as BYOB clearly is a good thing.

Useful Software Finds

By talking with different people in different disciplines, often from different parts of the world, I found a few new software and web projects that are of interest:

• Animationish — flipbook type of desktop app
• mind42 – a free online mind mapping tool
• prezi — a web based and desktop presentation software with a twist

I have been looking forward to this Scratch conference. Last one was two years ago and it was a great event. This year it is held at the almost brand new Media Lab building. I had been there for various local events before in the evenings, but this is the first time I get to spend the day there, and we get to check out the view from the terrace. What a beautiful 90 million dollars building.

Adapting Workshops for Informal Library Settings

There are always too many good sessions and not enough time. I decided to skip most of the demo and workshop type of sessions and went for the big ideas. With my current involvement with schools and libraries, the first session I went to was a session by Jennifer Nelson of the Hennepin County Library and Keith Braafladt of the Science Museum of Minnesota. They Talked about their experience in adapting Scratch workshops from the paid Museum classes settings to free workshops in the library settings.

Some highlights:

• it is difficult to gain focus of the teenagers at the information settings, often they are distracted by having to baby sitting a younger sibling at the same time, for example
• as a free workshop, best goal is to introduce enough concepts so that it will extend their interest, or give them enough knowledge so that they will try it themselves later
• personalize the experience to spark the interest / gain their attention
• music is big with teenagers, not video games — start with project that use their own music
• “all about me” project is a good example (didn’t we do this at Kindergarten?) — personalized story telling
• this session also reinforce for me the importance of community library, especially at an urban settings like ours
• BTW they have a book coming out, and this is their new public website containing useful resources

Computational Thinking

Why do I attend these conference? To learn outside of my usual circles. This is what I consider Computational Thinking to be the next New Big Idea. The educators and the computer scientists are still debating what exactly is Computational Thinking. Yasmin Kafai, Mitchel Resnick, Karen Brennan and Barbara Ericson described the many aspect of this new idea. You can also read the initial paper by Jeannette Wing to get some background. I am going to let you read all the current articles and decide exactly what is Computational Thinking. At a computer scientist and an amateur educator I think this new direction is going to be big. The Workshop Report is available, and you can download a free copy there.

LEAD Creative Classes in Hong Kong

It is always good to hear what’s going on in Hong Kong, especially about education. Who knows, we may head back there some day! Dr. Felicia Tsang gave a wonderful review of their efforts in integrating Scratch and other creative classes into the core curriculum in Hong Kong’s local primary and secondary schools. Some of her observations:

• Don’t make mistake of running workshop for the teachers, get them involved at the beginning
• being so test driven, these classes stop after Form 3, because they are then focused (sadly) on the public exams
• Parents thought negatively on why the teachers are doing “unusual” things with the kids instead of teaching them the old way (just like what the parents went thru in the old days)
• While HK Government fully back the ideas and funding and equipment is not a problem, often schools ended up locking up computers because they don’t know what to do with them
• parents (and sometimes teachers) are intimidated because the children will ended up knowing more then what the adults know
• the traditional Chinese localization is not good, the blocks are translated literally, and often do not make sense. They ended up using the English interface once they learnt the system
• Scratch is introduced through non technology classes, starts with art and English classes.
• Starts with all girl schools, then challenge the boy schools with the impressive results

Dr Tsang showed off an amazing robot that some student built, taking a year, from parts sourced from street vendors from the electronics district. (The old Aplui street? I spent many weekends there during my school days).

See larger image Kindle 3G Wireless Reading Device, Free 3G + Wi-Fi, 6" Display, 3G Works Globally - Latest Generation (Electronics) List Price: $189.00 USD This title will be released on December 31, 2037.

I am an early adaptor and reader. Of course I have the original white, wedge, Kindle. In fact still prefer that design than the new slim design. Since the launch of the Kindle, to the point when Apple seemingly enters the race with the iPad and the iBook store, I bet a lot of people has prematurely declared the death of the Kindle. How they were wrong!

I admire Steve Jobs a great deal. I am a Apple Fanboy. But I also love Amazon. And lately I really started to appreciate Jeff Bezos. The phrase “slow and steady win the race” comes to mind. Of course the Amazon book pricing is going to end. Of course there will be competing devices to the Kindle. But Bezos hung in there, working up to the “mass market” Kindle event today slowly. This is the right move. And he took his time. Why not?

At the end it is about the reading experience. And you cannot beat the Kindle. Call me old school. When I read I don’t want to be distracted. I don’t want to flip over to check email or get ping on my twitter account on the iPad. I want to read. Lifehacker happen to run a story on the need to rebuild one’s attention span and focus, referencing this How To Focus article. (While you are at it, skip over to the Onion for a laugh on this topic.)

I’ll leave you with a little Jeff Bezos advice:

My office is in a industrial loft building in an up and coming part of Boston. I used to shared an office space with another company. During last Christmas, while all of us were out of the office for about 20 minutes, someone came into the office and stole a brand new MacBook from one of the staff.

Fast forward seven months. We moved upstair to another space of our own in the same building. In the early afternoon, I went out to the bathroom for 2 minutes, upon returning to my space, I saw that our office door was slightly opened.

A man walked out from the lobby area out side of my office. Reasonably well dressed, holding a backpack in front of him. I blocked his exit, at the same time I saw the edge of a MacBook Pro peeking out of his backpack. I am pretty sure that’s mine. “That’s mine” I said. He pulled it out and gave it back to me, at the same time pushed his way towards the main stairs. I blocked him again. I must say I was only doing that because he is not too intimidating physically. That does not mean that he is not going to pull out an weapon.

What’s running thru my mind at that point?

• does he have a weapon?
• is he going to make a run for it? I don’t want to fall backwards down the stairs
• will I drop my laptop?
• what else in my office would he have taken? I made a huge assumption that he is he same person who took the laptop at Christmas time, at which he only took the laptop — smart move, as that’s the most cost effective theft
• should I take a picture of him?

At the end, I made him empty his backpack, which I found my wallet, and a pair of pants not from us (very strange). I spent enough time with him as I took note of his appearance, then I let him go. I was heading to a meeting. Police report tomorrow.

I feel lucky that I caught him. There must be a 15 second window before he made his way out of our floor. And I feel extremely luck to have gotten my stuff back, stuff unharmed, and myself unharmed.

Good karma, perhaps.

Last week Renee, and I took a short day trip to Chappaqua, New York to visit Laura at her new (to me anyways) office of Wilson Daily Prep). I visited her first office when we first started working on WilsonDailyPrep a few years back. How quickly time passes.

Chappaqua is about thirty minutes from NYC and in a beautiful town. WDP is located on a walking street downtown lined with interesting cafe’s and small businesses. The new WilsonDailyPrep office was a former bank. While it is on the ground floor, it has floor to ceiling windows. It looks like the ground has been dug out so from the inside it seems like you are in a nature observatory (see pictures below). Just like the loft here it can get warm with all the windows. But just like the loft here, I love the light and won’t give that up for anything.

Laura is always busy. There have been times that Laura has traveled to our office for 9 in the morning, leaving Chappaqua as early as 5 AM. It’s only fair that we take the drive down for a change to save her some time. Of course we got lost a little and was late. I blame the iPhone. It is no match for a real GPS.

The second to last picture is outside the front door of WilsonDailyPrep from the Graph It Forward campaign to give tools to underprivileged students. WDP has gotten tons of SAT prep books by donors.

I am as much of an Apple Fan as the next person. I stood inline for six hours for my last iphone. But I don’t have an iPad. And I have the original Amazon Kindle.

Every time I pick up my Kindle and start reading, all doubts fade away. The device is easy to hold. The print is crisply readable. The book selections are great. Although thanks for Apple, the book prices have increased. I just want a cheaper Kindle (so I don’t have to baby it as much), cheaper books, and a way to share books. The only real issue is that books has to be formatted correctly when there are diagrams.

We do not need a colored Kindle. We do not need a touch screen.

Instapaper has an interesting take on username. It allows you to create an account with either a simple username (mynamehere) or an email address. However, it strongly recommend that you use an email address as the username because it does not separately store an additional email address field in your account.

Instapaper has this setup partly because it offers a very long barrier to initial user. To “register for an account”, you just enter a single username or email address. You can immediately start using the system. You do not have to set a password. Isn’t this clever?

You can setup a password if you want to, and it’s probably a good idea since it would be easy to guess people’s usernames.

Like many of you, I am migrating all my Django sites to Django 1.2.1. For sites that are currently in production, I am doing the slow migration route. Just trying to get the site up with 1.2 without using any of the new features yet.

One thing that I ran into is the new CSRF support. If you were not using it before, there really is no change with one exception — all the generic views and admin views requires CSRF protection. This means that if you are using django login view django.contrib.auth.views.login , you have to make sure that any wrapper or custom templates support CSRF.

Specifically:

1. If you use your own login template, you must add {% csrf_token %} to the end of the openning form tag.
2. If you wrap the call to login with your own view, you must add the csrf decorator @csrf_protect to your view, after importing django.views.decorators.csrf.csrf_protect
3. If you use the django.contrib.auth.logout view to redisplay a login form, you have to replace that with a wrapper because the auth.logout view does NOT add the csrf token. (Updated)

Otherwise django will send you a 403 error when you try to login.

Here are the videos for the Boston Python Meetup in May, on “Testing”. Two speakers were Marshall Weir on “Testing, Where Do I Start?” and Stephan Richter on “How to Test the Hard Stuff”.

The videos are pretty long. I ran out of SD space at the end so missed a little bit of info at the end. There were constructions at NERD with banging and buzzing. It is amazing that we got even this much usable audio from it.

Boston Python Meetup 2010 May Part 1 from PK Shiu on Vimeo.

Part I.

Boston Python Meetup May 2010 Part II from PK Shiu on Vimeo.

Part II

LinkedIn is one of those sites that you hate but use. It is boring. It has horrible user interface. But it is useful as a secondary professional network — to loosely stay in touch with professional acquaintances.

There is however one ridiculous problem with how it support groups. You can setup a group for managing communications between people within that group. It should be useful for non-profits, SIG’s, etc. I recently setup a group for the people who attended the iPhone bootcamp in Boston. Often you want a group’s membership to be approved by the organizer. Here is the catch — LinkedIn will not notify the organizer if a group membership request comes into LinkedIn. So you have to log in and check for requests. That screen is of course four clicks away. Tedious.

This bug is actually documented on their website here.