Grand Rapids (Michigan) Airport has Free Wifi

Yayay!

Attending PyCon 2008

I attended the PyCon 2008 in Chicago March 13 - 15. It was a cool conference - it was partially on a weekend and it was right near an airport and it was in a relatively inexpensive location. The Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza at Chicago's O'Hare airport is an excellent conference venue.

You can see the videos of the conference up here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/pycon08

I am pretty excited about Python after teaching (si182) this past semester - I wanted to get a sense of the nature of Python and perhaps run into other teachers. I also came to the conference hoping to meet Guido von Rossum and do a quick video of him for my "Internet and Web Pioneers" series.

Since this was my first PyCon - I made a few mistakes. First I wore a jacket - big mistake. Anything but a t-shirt immediately indicates you are a noob. This is a situation where a jacket+kahki's does not work. Of course I had not brought any of my cool street-cred enhancing t-shirts so I was stuck with my dorky and out-of-place business casual.

After I registered for the conference I set up my camera to take stop-motion video of registration - in case I got to interview Guido. As I was walking around in the hallway - there he was! Without thinking I whipped out my camera and took a bit of video. After abut 15 seconds I realized that he was talking about kids and being sick from school - at about the time I realized it was a personal conversation, he realized that he was being taped. He was not pleased - he motioned me over and told me to erase the footage - which I immediately did - apologizing profusely and feeling like a total idiot. Sonce I was the only guy in a jacket, any chance of being nice to him and getting an interview was lost. Within the first thirty minutes of my time at PyCon - I had established myself with Guido as a rude person. Ah well - time to pick myself up and dust myself off and move forward - no point feeling sorry for myself.

The first session was a keynote by Guido - so I decided to tape it all and edit his keynote as my first cut of a Guido video for my SI182 class. So I went in and got a really good seat so I could video tape his whole keynote. As I taped I was sure that he was looking right at me (the rude guy in the suit) and that he was still ticked at me - but more likely this was all in my mind. He was clearly on his game during the PY3K talk - making jokes and interacting with the audience.

Guido's keynote was a replay of his "Python 3000" keynote from a year earlier - he apologized to the audience members who had already seen it - but for me it was all new and completely fresh. Guido is called the "Benevolent Dictator for Life" by the Python community and this talk was clear evidence of why he absolutely deserves the title. Unlike an end-user application, a programming language is smaller conceptually even though there are millions of small details. Clearly Guido kows every little corner of the core language. It was comforting to know that he was keeping track of it all.

What impressed me the most about Python 3000 is how carefully Guido thought about every little thing and understood every detail. The key is that Python 3000 allows him to do some non-upwards compatible changes in the language that are essential for Python to move from a niche language to an Enterprise language. I was impressed as he went into every little detail - it was clear that he was adopting ideas from other languages like Ruby and Java - he saw features such as universal Unicode support that was supported better in Ruby than in Python and addressed it in Python 3000.

At the same time, he is willing to fix simple things like integer division truncating. In Python 3000 - integer division gives a float. While this seems to be simple, it is brilliant and bold - one of the key wins of Python is that it is a powerful language that is quite approachable by beginners. A little thing like integer division truncating is just a silly notion from the C language - over 30 years ago - there is no reason to keep it just for "tradition". While many may feel that this is messing with the primal forces of nature, Guido realizes that the definition of "what is a language" needs to change over time and that it is OK for Python to be the first to do "the right thing". It was ironic that I was giving a midterm at the time and one of my questions was about integer division truncating. Integer division truncating is so "dumb" that I have to specially call it out on a midterm to help students remember it. Also I cannot tell how many times the students programs had bugs when computing an average because they had an integer count. Python 3000 has lots of little good ideas.

I kind of wish Python 3000 would improve the OO syntax in Python. Frankly, some additional upwards compatible syntax (almost pre-processor style) could make OO code look much cleaner in Python - but that is not to be. Perhaps the new argument annotation will show the way forward in that area.

After the keynote the next talk I attended was Kirby Urner - Kirby runs the Edu-sig for Python - here is his talk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbeHdg8mtdc

His talk is a brilliant wander through various approaches to teaching children mathematics - for me as a teacher his approach and insight was quite useful. He talked about how the whole K-12 math education is less about teaching math understanding and more about scaling the "Calculus mountain" - and implicitly sorting students - by washing most of them out of math by overly difficult material. As someone interested in K12 math education - I found this fascinating - even if it were a little impractical to implement :).

In the evening I went to the Education BOF - this was great - I met a number of cool people also very much interested in Python and education. I met Dr. Andrew Harrington from Loyola University who teaches a beginning Python class at Loyola.

http://us.pycon.org/2008/tutorials/Python101AHarrington/

I also met Anna Ravencroft who is a co-author of the O'Reilly Python Cookbook and talked to Anna about techniques for teaching SI182. I also attended Anna's session on data extraction with Python.

http://www.amazon.com/Python-Cookbook-Alex-Martelli/dp/0596007973

I talked to Anna about the use of Python as a data-grokking language.

After I talked to folks about teaching using Python at the college level I also listened to some of the other sub-groups talking about One Laptop Per Child and the approach to learn about math through wooden blocks (Gattegno method). This was all pretty fascinating. I wanted to learn how to use the colored blocks to teach common denominator. It has to do with thinking of multiples as infinite series and showing the concept graphically with the blocks. I have to think about that some more.

The next morning I went to a topic called "Using PyGame and PySight to Create an Interactive Halloween Activity" presented by John Harrison or Insight Industries. This was probably one of the most entertaining presentations that I have ever been in. He used a Macintosh with built-in camera and a laser pointer and a computer projector to make an interactive halloween game in his garage. He did it just because he wanted to learn PyGame - and because he is a very cool dad. Here is a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7PkSFFpkYI

I also went to a talk titled Using Python To Teach Object-Oriented Programming in CS1 by Dr. David Letscher. David is a co-author with Dr. Michael H. Goldwasser of the book titled "Object-Oriented Programming in Python" (http://prenhall.com/goldwasser). I had looked at this book for teaching SI182 but decided it was too Object-Oriented - too focused on CS concepts and not enough on just using the language to get stuff done. But since I was watching the talk *after* a whole semester and realized that properly presented, OO concepts can be helpful even to the beginning programmer - I liked his talk and learned a good bit from it.

I prepared a lightening talk about SI182 - but there was not time - it was probably just as well - all in all I felt really intimidated by the coolness of the Python folks. Here is my talk that I wanted to give but never gave:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/talks/2008/2008-03-15-python-light.pdf

Lighting talks are a cool thing - sign up the day of the talk - you get five minutes and then the hook - using two projectors - a new speaker is up every five minutes.

I also attended a session where the Python Software Foundation chair talked for a while. As a person who was part of setting up the Sakai Foundation I found the culture and relationship between the Python Foundation and the open source community to be quite fascinating. During the talk I surfed the PSF web pages to learn more about the PSF.

I found the PSF web pages simple and easy to read (while I was listening to the talk) I was quickly able to find a clearly articulated set of mission and goal statements:

http://www.python.org/psf/mission/

If you look at the committees of the foundation, you can see that the focus of the foundation is very much supporting the open source community and nurturing independent contributors:

http://www.python.org/psf/committees/

If you look a little further down the bylaws - the only way to become a PSF member is to contribute:

http://www.python.org/psf/membership/#how-does-one-become-a-member-of-the-psf

This is very similar to Apache where the requirement of contribution and demonstrated long-term commitment to the common good and to the open source community acts as a filter to entering into foundation governance. I could see no indication that the Foundation attempted to govern the technical direction of Python - this was left to the open source community led by Guido (Benevolent Dictator for Life).

One thing that particularly impressed me was the devotion that members of the Python community showed toward the overall community. This was clearly far more than a technical collaboration. At one point the conference chair told a story of how he had a rough patch in his life and how his involvement in and support from the Python community (emotional and financial) helped him get though the rough bits in his life and turn things around.

The Python Software Foundation spent $160,000 in 2006 with the following expense breakdown:

http://www.python.org/files/psf/records/financials_2006.pdf

If you look at what the money is spent on you can see the top expense is the conference followed by grants for community members to attend the conference. You can clearly see the focus on nurturing the community.

Summary (finally)

I came to PyCon 2008 with three perspectives: (1) as a teacher looking for help on how to teach Python more effectively, (2) as a computer scientist / architect wondering if Python has a place in the enterprise application space, and (3) as an Open Source thinker and fellow traveller in open source governance.

As a teacher, I was very pleased - I learned a lot - I do wish there were more talks on education so I could have learned even more.

As a computer scientist / architect - I was very pleased - Guido has Python well in hand and has a broad based and strongly committed open source community. Google clearly is providing a high level of support as well. Python seems to be the "language of Google". The Python 3000 talk was wonderful - it gave me a lot of confidence of the future of Python and the amount of deep thinking that was going on as Python evolves. Python will not rest on 18 years of success - Guido wants to add the most modern features and at the same time keep Python the most approachable programming language on the planet. And looking at Python 3000 he is both improving and simplifying the langage at the same time.

Looking at the Python Software Foundation I was also impressed - it seems to have a very clear mission and goals and clearly understands its role in the Python community. The Python Software Foundation is an important element in the long-term viability of the Python effort.

All in all I was very excited and expect to find ways to increasingly use Python in the courses I am teaching. Python seems like a great bet as a language.

New Position: IMS Global Learning Consortium - Developer Network Coordinator

You may have heard by now that alongside my full-time teaching at the University of Michigan School of Information I will be working with the IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. My task is to improve and grow the IMS Developer Network and to focus on increasing the adoption of IMS standards in real, released and widely deployed applications.

http://www.imsglobal.org/severance.html

This IMS work is very complimentary to my work in the School of Information. My research area and focus since 1996 has always been very web 2.0 and very much about technology enhancing teaching and learning - so this fits very well with my research agenda in the School of Information. Even before this position, I was already talking with some of my students about summer projects in teaching and learning and internships with IMS members. My management at the School of Information (Judy Olson) is very supportive of my activities in IMS.

The University of Michigan CIO office (John King) is also very supportive of my increased level of involvement in IMS in a consulting role - Michigan was one of the founding institutions which formed IMS over ten years ago and Michigan continues to be a strong supporter of IMS. I will no longer be the University of Michigan's formal technical representative to IMS so David Haines will take over that role and Noah Botimer may also become involved in IMS from Michigan. I am excited to see how Michigan is increasing its commitment to IMS at this point in time. Their enthusiastic support for me in this new effort is part of that increased commitment - I appreciate that very much. Michigan is hosting the next IMS Quarterly Meeting in Ann Arbor June 9-12 - I hope to see you there - Ann Arbor is wonderful in June. We are planning an awesome summit meeting with speakers from around the world.

http://www.imsglobal.org/june2008meeting.html

Looking forward, as I take on this new role, a couple of things won't change much:

(a) I will continue to be interested in interoperability between tools and data between different learning management systems. I will continue to be interested in building bridges between commercial and various open source learning management systems.

(b) I will continue to be involved in Sakai as a volunteer developer in my spare time. My interests in the past year have centered around Sakai's portal and IMS Learning Tool Interoperability 2.0. I expect this will continue - I hope that over the summer I can go after some of my assigned Sakai JIRA items and get my list down to a manageable level for the 2.6 release.

(c) I will continue to attend Sakai, JA-Sig and other meetings to the extent that I have funds to support my travel. At these meetings I can represent both Michigan and IMS.

(d) I will continue to come to IMS meetings and participate in working groups - I will be giving a few formal IMS talks about the developer network at the meetings in addition to participating in working groups.

(e) I will continue to take my Sakaiger (www.sakaiger.com) with me as I travel and take pictures of the Sakaiger with wonderful people in teaching and learning in wonderful locations.

I like many things about my new IMS position:

(a) I can work on developing relationships with the developers and decision makers in various open source and commercial companies - and try to use personal interaction and connections to build "critical mass" for standards adoption in a way that "sticks" - I love this kind of community building work. I love talking to folks and learning their needs, goals, and issues and trying to find a path forward where everybody wins.

(b) IMS has a very large community which is easily accessed through webinars using Wimba's Classroom product. IMS webinars draw a wide ranging audience and are a great way to generate interest in IMS initiatives. This lets me do another thing I like very much - prepare PowerPoint and give talks :)

(c) Rob has given me some resources (time and money) to invest in advancing the adoption of IMS standards - it is not a lot - but it means that I can push on a few really important things. I can also raise additional funds through IMS to further speed up the process of adoption and dispersion.

So the basic idea is to get a lively development community around the IMS standards. I would like get IMS to have an open source repository, contribution agreements, and have IMS become an open source development organization where we focus on building reusable code that makes IMS standards adoption as easy as possible in as many languages as possible. For example, I would like to see us collectively build and maintain some utility elements and test harnesses that allow developing applications for IMS standards easier.

As an example, this week I am working at Wimba on IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 2.0. Wimba has developed some simple PHP code that can be used to emulate a IMS LTI Consumer tool - it is not a Learning Management System - it is just 300 lines of PHP - it is very useful to exercise an LTI Producer. I doubt that Wimba would want to release, support, and maintain this code as Wimba - but the code would be extremely useful to others interested in learning about LTI and in particular, implementing LTI in PHP. So it would be nice to have a repository where code like this could be contributed and made available under an Apache 2.0 license from IMS. The code may or may not be perfect - but at least we don't lose the material that is produced as we do the engineering that goes on as part of standards development. We will be very careful to separate and label "contributed" materials form those materials which are actual IMS products.

I would like to get to a point where we have a team of developers from the IMS member organizations where those developers are released to spend a bit of their time on the problems of the commons. I hope to help guide that activity and produce a roadmap for where we would go with these shared resources.

It is a key point that my role does not have enough resources from IMS to actually *do* much of anything - I may do (or support) some focused development here and there to make a demo better or do a proof of concept to help people to see possibilities or to take some code that is contributed and improve the documentation or things like that. The bulk of the work will still need to be done by the member organizations. It is my hope that with some central coordination and communication we all can do it together much more efficiently.

My Google Summer of Code is a good example of how I hope to leverage resources to advance IMS standards adoption - focusing on adding coordination and leadership value to help guide resources in the right direction for the common good.

http://www.sakaiproject.org/soc2008/

I will initially focus on IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 2.0 and try to get it to the point where it can serve to help define the right way to build and accumulate technology in the IMS Developer's Network as we work towards developing and finalizing a standard. I will move into Common Cartridge and Learner Information Services (formerly Enterprise). After those standards, my interest is in IMS Learning Design and Portfolio standards and seeing how these standards can have increased impact in the marketplace.

I will be giving a talk next week at JA-Sig in Minneapolis, MN on functionality mash up and IMS Learning Tools Interoperability. If you are going to JA-Sig stop by and say "hi".

You can contact me at my IMS E-Mail at cseverance at imsglobal.org - of course csev at umich.edu will continue to work as well. Please let me know if you have any ideas as t how to improve the IMS Developer Network please let me know. I hope to see you at future IMS meetings such as IMS Learning Impact in Austin May 12-16 and at the IMS Quarterly Meeting in Ann Arbor, IM USA June 9-12.

http://www.imsglobal.org/learningimpact2008/agenda.html

http://www.imsglobal.org/june2008meeting.html

P.S. If you know of any good places to do Karaoke in Austin - let me know. We should have a good Karaoke BOF at Learning Impact.

Dr. Chuck Sings the Blues in Geneva

So the week started out great with a wonderful time in Spain at the LaSalle Conference (post) and meeting with the campus project. The second half of the week was in Geneva and leading up to my debut singing with a live band for the first time. The singing was Friday (below) - lets start with Thursday.

Thursday - CERN Tour

If you are in a hurry to just see the video of me singing with the Canettes Blues Band click here on YouTube. Otherwise read on to get all the detail - and the inside story about what really happened during my visit to CERN and at Mr. Pickwick Pub that Friday evening...

I woke Thursday morning at 7AM after about 2.5 hours of sleep - I did not want to risk missing my flight and Barcelona traffic is really bad. It took nearly 30 minutes to get a cab but one finally arrived and I made it to the airport in plenty of time.

I slept for most of the flight from Barcelona to to Geneva. When I arrived, Steve was waiting for me at the exit to customs to whisk me to CERN. Of course we drove in his 1969 Plymouth Valiant. It is the perfect Bluesmobile for Blues Man like Steve. We went straight back to CERN to get a tour of the pit.

The LHC beam will be turning on in a few weeks and then the public will never be allowed back down because of radiation levels. Steve has been a long-time tour guide for the Atlas detector pit and this would be his "farewell tour" - I was honored to be on his last tour - I was also excited to be able to see the completed detector. My family had taken a detector tour in 2004 as part of a family vacation to Geneva when the detector was about 10% done - so for me it was like a trip back home.

After we had some coffee and caught up it was time to go for the tour - it turned out that about 10 more people had heard about the "farewell tour" and we met them in the CERN welcome Center. We ended up with several Physicists and one brought their family. Jeremy Herr was also in town doing some lecture taping so we met him for a tour as well. I bought a bunch of CERN logoware - I am a sucker for science stuff.

Steve took us down the tour - doing a super job as usual - Steve has a wonderful way to be able to explain something complex to a non-technical audience in a way they can understand. We started in the control room - it was pretty basic - for the Angels and Demons film they made their own control room because the real one was just too boring. Angels and Demons is a thriller similar to "Davinci Code" but this time it is set set in the Vatican and CERN.

The coolest part of the control room was that the detectors were already working and data was coming out. Gamma rays come down from the sky and you can see them as the rays shoot through the detectors. You can see background noise and then when a ray comes through - it computes a track - right there on the screen. The Sun is running diagnostics on the detectors all the time. Sweet.

Once the tour started we found out that Sony Pictures was filming in the pit - they were filming the "making of Angels and Demons". This was not the movie - it was the "making of". They had a camera hung on a crane going down in the pit. We walked around the film crew as we made our way through the tour.

They have pieces of the various detectors on display for us to touch - it is all so amazing that they basically invent all this high tech stuff and make it work the first time it is invented. And since they have been ding this physics detector thing so long - they even know how stuff wears out under intense radiation and how to build stuff to be repaired. Yikes - wicked cool.

The detector was Awesome - so many intricate widgets - and Steve explained each one - my favorite bit is the cameras that are used to check to see if things are in the right place or if they have moved out of place. It is important to know physically where things are so when the detectors produce data - it will be accurate. Because of the filming - the normally closed stuff had been pulled open so we could see the intricate detail of the five-story end cap and the detectors that go around the barrel.

At one point we stopped at a gantry and we noticed that the Sony movie camera was pointing right at us. Like a bunch of tourists we all whipped out our cameras and started taking pictures of the movie camera. After we had our fill of taking pictures of the camera - Steve went on answering questions - and gesturing at the detector - I noticed that the camera was moving ever so slightly and then following Steve as he described things - I think after about five minutes the whole group realized we were being filmed and everyone got really actor-like - we intently listened to Steve's questions and looked where he pointed. The camera followed us for about 10 minutes. I figured - we had a chance of being in the film (more later).

When the tour finished, we thanked everyone and I went to Steve's home for dinner. Jeremy was going to join us. My favourite Raclette restaurant in Freney was now closed due to some village politics with the mayor - so instead we had a delightful Raclette prepared by Steven and Valerie.

I had come to visit Steve with my family in 2004 and had met Steve's children - they had grown so much since 2004 and it was nice to visit again. I hoped that I might bring my family to Paris at the Sakai conference and come back to Geneva with my family to visit again.

That night I slept in the "princess suite" - Steve's daughter's room. Valerie has it decorated a really cool bedspread with tiny bells on it - each time you move - there is a tiny tinkling noise - not so loud as to wake you up - just loud enough to gently remind me that I was indeed a princess for at least one night.

Friday - Sing the Blues

Knowing that I had had about 6 hours sleep in the past four days, Steve let me sleep in Friday morning - he worked form home while I got a good night's sleep. By the time I got up and about it was time to go to CERN to have lunch.

I took the opportunity of lunch at CERN cafeteria 1 to make my re-acquaintence with the delightful "Steak Entrecote with Frites" - my absolute favorite meal at CERN. We had lunch with Jeremy and worked out the details for the filming for the evening.

After lunch we had a coffee and while we drinking the coffee, Mick Storr comes by and sits and talks - we catch up on lecture recording, teaching and learning, I show him my fancy Rails lecture taped at Polytechnic University of Valencia - and we discuss the pedagogy that it enables and encourages. We also talk about me learning cricket (thanks to the 2006 family vacation to Lancaster and Adrian, Miguel, and Rob taking us on a picnic and teaching us cricket). Since Mick is a British ex-pat it is always fun to talk cricket with him. We also talked about the Rugby match I went to when I was in Cambridge visited John Norman and his family.

After the coffee was done, we went to Steve's office. He had some work to do so I took the opportunity to go and practice my song. I took my iPhone and walked to a desolate corner of a CERN parking lot so no one would hear me sing with my iPhone earphones in my ear.

Steve sends a note around to the Canettes fan club mailing list hinting at me singing. One astute fan quickly googles me and finds my earlier blog post (post) about being nervous about singing - and so the cat is out of the bag that I am a Karaoke singer and not a blues singer. A bit of nervousness amongst the band ensues.

At 3PM - the gig preparation starts - we meet up with Simon Baird (lead guitar) to load up the stuff at the CERN music club building. Then we get into the Plymouth Valiant to go down to the Gig at Mr. Pickwick Pub in downtown Geneva. On the drive down inthe Valiant Bluesmobile, Steven and I sing the song together several times listening to my iPod. Steve coaches me to relax a bit, stop singing like Frank Sinatra, and feel the words more like Muddy Waters. I try - singing in the car with Steve does help. At least I am less embarassed singing in front of Steve.

The band sets up for a while - I focus on getting ready to videotape and waiting for Jeremy to arrive - I do a stop motion of the setup - we will see how well it turns out. I meet the other band members I mostly talk to Connie Potter (Vocals) and David Boys (Percussion) and Chris Thomas (Connie's boyfriend) who also works at CERN.

It turns out that Chris was working at the CERN pit during the filming of Angels and Demons and he was working with the film crew while they were filming us. Chris said we were not going to be in the film and that the the only reason that they had filmed us was that they wanted to get the right size for humans as they had made a computer model for that area of the detector and a set for the gantry on which we were standing and wanted to see human-sized people in context to calibrates their models. So instead of being a star - we are just calibration - ah well it was still fun.

At this point a little history is necessary - I met Steve in 1999 when I came to CERN to help with some lecture recording software I had written (Sync-O-Matic). Steven is a University of Michigan Physicist that worked at CERN on the Atlas project. He loves softball and singing the blues. He knew I was a serious Karaoke nut. Over the years I got to CERN about once per year. One time I even interviewed Robert Cailiau - the co-inventor of the world-wide web - at one point in the video Robert talks to Steve who is also in the room with me.

I have been on the Canettes mailing list for years. When it became clear that I could be in Geneva during the Mr. Pickwick concert - Steve suggested I sing a song. I did a intersection between his set list and Karaoke tracks I could get and came up with seven songs - we finally narrowed it down to "I got my Mojo Working". I took a recording of the band doing Mojo Working - and since Mojo is exactly 12-bar blues - I took one of the bridge sections and pasted it in enough times to make a lyrics free "Karaoke" track. I practiced this for about three months daily during my two hours communting from Lansing to Ann Arbor. I got pretty comfortable with the song - at least for Karaoke.

Back at Mr. Pickwick Pub, Connie had to take off to get dressed so I got to do the singing for Connie's mic check - the band played Mojo Working and I sang - but apparently I sang like a tiny bird - with no strength at all. When I sang it sounded tiny - when Steve came up and sang into the same microphone it sounded really big. This made the already nervous band more nervous. It made me a bit nervous - but mostly it really clarified for me - that I needed to punch out my song when the time came - don't sit back - kick it out.

After mic check - Simon Baird (who is very talented and concerned about quality and seems to be the second-in-command) pulled Steve into the green room to express his concerns about me singing (I am guessing). Afterwards the agreement was that Steve would sing the first verse to get me into the song and I would pick up after the first verse and that if I sucked - Steve would just come take the microphone back and I would sing chorus with Connie. This would limit any damage to the band's reputation that I might do.

So we came up with the ruse of getting me on stage as the cameraman. It worked and I realized that I had to kick out some sound or get the hook - thankfully I had practiced singing loud in my car so I survived - after 2 verses I actually enjoyed it and went out into the crowd for a chorus.

I think I did OK for never singing with a band before. It is so different than singing with Karaoke. The band wraps you with sound - it is like a wave and you are a surfer - you have to sing to find your place in the sound. In Karaoke - your place in the sound is there for you to easy step in to - with a band - you need to assert your place and hold it.

It is so addictive and such an amazing experience. My legs shook for about 30 minutes afterwards - but I was busy filming for the rest of the gig.

And after the concern about my singing, the band really took care of me wonderfully during the song - for the chorus parts they figured I was singing it a little differently and just adapted to my way of singing. Also I mistakenly added a measure when I said "one more time" and the band just took it right in stride - it is an amazingly dynamic and collaborative and fun.

I was so happy at the end - particularly that I survived and did not shame the band. And I want to thank the band for being so nice to me and helping me along as I was learning everything for the first time. In the final analysis - all the stress and gentle pressure from the band and constant coaching from Steve resulted in giving me just enough feedback to do a good job - each little experience (watching Marc Alier sing on Monday (post) singing in the car, doing mic check, etc) was enough of a success to keep my confidence up and enough of a failure to motivate me to be better. I peaked at the time that I actually sang the song - whew!

I got to the hotel at about 3:30 AM and got up at 6:00 AM - yet another day in a week with virtually no sleep - but it did not matter - it was a heck of a week and I was on the way back home..

Here is the URL for the video:

http://www.dr-chuck.com/media.php?comment=feed&id=88

Visit to Spain

I was honored to be invited to speak that the LaSalle University F1rst Congress on Information and Communication Technology Managers. The title of my talk was Open Source Learning Management Systems: Much More Than Free Source Code - here is the abstract.

http://www.dr-chuck.com/csev-blog/000437.html

The talk was great fun - Lluis wanted me to talk more broadly than just Sakai and address teaching and learning in general and give some vision of how I think things will go forward. It is always fun to be given a broad swath. My talk was Tuesday of the week - but I will start upon arrival.

Sunday

Sunday, I arrived and we went straight to Lluis' new home to cook Paella - Lluis is a great Paella cook and he shared with me enough secrets so I can make my own Paella back home. It was wonderful - it was a genuine Valencia Paella and it was slightly burned on the bottom - which was very tasty - something you don't get in restaurants.

After finishing the Paella - we decided to take a walk to get some coffee - on the way, Lluis asked if I had even been to "Par Guell" - a mountain top park designed by Gaudi. I had not been and so we decided to divert our walk to the top of the mountain. It was very nice - with a wonderful view of Barcelona and a lot of very fun and clever Gaudi touches.

Dinner Sunday night was with the leadership of the Campus Project where we shared a delightful fresh fish dinner baked in salt. Eva, Prof Valverde, Magi, and Francesc - all showed me all the cool things they could do with their iPhones. In my earlier visit to Barcelona - they all really liked the iPhone a lot and now they had become experts in iPhone alteration.

Monday

Monday I had an all-day meeting with the Campus Project team. The campus project (www.campusproject.org) is working on building a new pattern for tool creation that will work in both Moodle and Sakai for the Open University of Catelonia. The meeting was excellent and we talked about many things including performance issues and how to solve them as well as a possible way to connect IMS Tool Interoperability.

Monday night the Campus Project team took me out to dinner. At dinner Marc Alier and I started talking about the Google Summer of Code and how he wanted to make an IMS Tool interoperability Producer for Moodle with his student. It turned out that the deadline for student applications for SOC was that very night in about five hours. So Marc called his student Jordi Piguillem Poch and told him to apply right away. His application made it in and even with a very short timeframe he did a great job on his application.

After dinner, we went to a very fun place called Anti-Karaoke (www.antikaraoke.com) at the SideCar club in Plaza Reial in Barcelona. Anti-Karaoke is a combination of heavy-metal Karakoe and Rocky Horror Picture show. You must sing hard rock songs and sing them well and there is no screen with lyrics. There is a Rocky-horror-esque hostess who makes it all very fun. The singers were really talented - it was more like a concert with a different audience member singing every song. I was hopeful when I saw ACDC - the only rock song I know is ACDC's Who Made Who - but they did not have that song. So I put in a Johnny Cash Song - but then I withdrew it as soon as things started and I realized these people would boo Johnny Cash. Marc Alier put in an ACDC song and since he is a real rocker, he got to sing and did an awesome job on it. His performance inspired me for my own singing debut later in the week in Geneva with the blues band.

Tuesday - Talk Day

Tuesday was my talk which went very well - I followed Martin Dougiamas who came in via Skype. Unfortunately there were technical difficulties that popped up a few times. All in all Martin's talk was excellent - I had never seen him give the Moodle over view and Roadmap - it was impressive and well thought out. Because of the technical difficulties, I needed to squeeze my 95 slides into less than 1 hour of time - at the same time speaking clearly for an international audience. I actually made it in just over an hour.

I really enjoyed giving the talk - Here is my basic outline:

• Comparing teaching and learning technology to water going from a solid to a liquid and then a gas - focusing on the heat of vaporization and heat of fusion and the need to keep investing even when progress seems slow.
• Talking about how open source leads to open interchange of ideas and how the Sakai and Moodle communities watch each other and learn from each other and how respectful competition is healthy and makes everyone better.
• I presented the University of Michigan's Student-Centered Learning Approach and discussed some ideas that we have there. I came up with the idea of "learning turbines" to characterize the "two-ring" approach of the UM Medical School.
• I presented a brief review of several user-centered portfolio systems courtesy of University of London Computing Centre (http://portfolio.evaluation.ulcc.ac.uk/) - While none of the three portfolio systems that I looked at (Moodle, Elgg, and Mahara) was perfect, I thought that Mahara (http://www.mahara.org/) was the closest to my thinking about the next generation of user-centered learning systems. I based my opinions on only about 30 minutes with each product - so a grain of salt is necessary on any conclusion I reached.
• Then I moved into discussing how we cannot move to real student-centered learning without first solving functionality mash up - we need to break down the stovepipes of Sakai, Moodle, BlackBoard, etc and give the students and teacher control of their world over their lifetime. I charged us with not tolerating any student-centered learning environment that was not massively extendible. I challenged us not to tolerate another stovepipe and build in functionality mash up form the beginning.
• Then I reviewed IMS Tool Interoperability from a technical perspective and described the demos planned at IMS Learning Impact in Austin and encouraged folks to come.
• Then I reviewed the Google Summer of Code activity and emphasized that its purpose was to work across projects and begin to break down stovepipes that these systems have built up.
• Then I pointed out the efforts of the Campus Project and how they relate to IMS Tool Interoperability.
• Then I mentioned the outstanding work of Cambridge University on MyCamTools as a move towards a more user-centered Sakai. I suggested that this would not make Sakai "user-centered" in my strictest definition - but it was a move toward meeting the needs of the student in a way that was useful to them.
• In my summary I revisited a triangle with the Institution, Teacher, and Student at the three points. I characterized Sakai as strong for the institution, Moodle strong for the teacher, and Facebook/Mahara as strong for the student. But I suggested that in a sense all three projects (and many others) realize their weaknesses and are rapidly evolving to solve all of the problems.

I likened the current state to a transition from the fluid state of water to the gaseous state of water - and that it is an exciting time to be working in technology and education.

I hope the talk will be recorded and published by LaSalle University. I had a good time preparing and doing the talk and there were lots of good questions afterwards.

Tuesday Afternoon - There was a joint workshop on using Sakai and Using Moodle. In times like these I love being a teacher :) I just showed them my courses and how I use Sakai. I showed them how I use CTools at UMichigan to show a hybrid deliver approach - then I used m Etudes account to show how Sakai can work very well in a distance situation with different tools and choices. I showed Melete, Mneme, and JFroum. It all went really well.

There was a bit of ribbing about how hard Sakai was to install - the first thing the Moodle guy did was hold up a USB stick and do a Moodle install. I felt bad but the Moodle install did not go so well - so he did what I did and demonstrated Moodle funcitonality instead.

While sitting in the back listening to the Moodle demo and rooting around in my backpack, I found the USB stick that I was given by EDIA (http://www.edia.nl/) back almost a year ago in Amsterdam. It was Sakai 2.3 on a USB stick with a special one-click EDIA installer - I had never even tried it but I had carried it around for almost a year. I quietly put it into one of the lab's laptops and clicked on the EDIA icon. It *ALMOST* worked - it was coming up and then it got some bean error. But that made me think that I need to get something on such a stick with EDIA's auto-start code so that I am ready for the easy install of Sakai from a stick for my next demo!

Tuesday evening was a wonderful dinner at a beach front restaurant. It was a very relaxing and pleasant evening for me since the talk was finished. The guys from Brazil wanted to go to a disco Tuesday night - but the rest of us were beat and made an early evening of it. So far I had been operating on very little sleep and it seemed like a good idea to get one night's sleep knowing that Wednesday was my last night in Barcelona. :)

Wednesday

On Wedensday we had the meeting of the Sakai Spain User's Group. The discussion was excellent - Lluis will have to give me the list of attendees - there were about 25 people there - several schools (Valencia and Ledia) were long-time Sakai adopters who have done much to help develop Sakai, Others were in Pilot, and still others were just curious. We talked of a number of topics:

• How to share expertise and get help when schools run into issues. Valencia and Lleida said they would be glad to help anyone with Sakai.
• How to get a mailing list for the group
• How to have a workshop on installing and administer Sakai. Lleida volunteered to host the workshop. The idea was that the workshop could happen in as short a time as next month. I wished out loud that John Leasia could come to the workshop and promised to see what I could do in that area.
• How to have a Sakai Spain Conference - we talked about a November time frame and thought it would be great fun for Michael and I to both come to that meeting.
• We talked about some transition issues from existing LMS systems - it was mostly about user-comfort issues when going from WebCT to Sakai. This is such a common problem and I wish we were better organized for this. I asked to get a list of the needs. Interestingly, many of the needs were actually usability and portal design - I showed them my Cam tools and everyone's faces brightened up. Ian Boston might find MyCamTools in production in Spain before it is in production in Cambridge :)
• We talked about making sure folks know about any commercial companies in Spain that are building skills - and share the names of those companies when folks need a bit of out-source help.
• At the end I presented a special gift to the Lledia team thanking them for their strong contribution to the internationalization of Sakai in 2004. Alex Balliste accepted the gift and gave a very short speech :)

All in all, I was totally excited and energized by the meeting and the activity level in Spain. We could easily have 3-4 new schools if we were better organized. Perhaps I will have some time over the summer to get things more organized and provide some help to these schools.

On Wednesday after lunch - we went into a programming festival with the team at Lleida responsible for putting Sakai into production. We covered the following topics:

• Looking at Course Management and coming up with a strategy for building their course management implementation. I was pretty pleased with the documentation of the Course Management API. The README and Javadoc were well done. I do think we need a tool that talks to the Admin interface to CM - I remember some debate about this in the old days - I don't remember how things were resolved.
• Figuring out how to make the Rutgers Link Tool work in Python/DJango - we made a nice little DJango example that should be available soon - I really wished in my heart that this would have been IMS Tool Interoperability - but now was not the time - and I actually had to learn LinkTool so I can feed the pretty clever thinking that Chuck Hedrick put into Link Tool into the IMS TI specification.
• Figuring how to protect Sakai Web Services with the IP filter code borrowed from the WSRP code (thanks Vishal) - Francesc - tested it nicely and gave me the patch which I will commit when I get a spare breath.
• Looking at how LaSalle wanted to use the Matrix Tool to begin to address Bologna Process Issues - I reviewed how Alfa College (thanks portfolio4u.nl) uses it and we brainstormed on ways to bend some thinking to make use of Matrix tool in its current form and then how to modify Matrix tool is simple ways to accomplish what they needed. Sadly I did not have the experience to give them exact guidance. They were already talking to Beth - perhaps I now can help in the discussion.

All in all it was a good afternoon of coding :)

Wednesday evening started out with watching a quarter-final match between Barcelona and a German team in the European playoffs - Lluis had a favorite place with a big screen TV to watch the game so we went there with several LaSalle folks and two of the conference attendees from Brazil. There was much said about Ronaldinho (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronaldinho) he is a Brazilian soccer player who was a star for many years for Barcelona - the food was again great - Barcelona won 2-0 and advanced to the semifinals.

Our next visit was to Conteste Karaoke - this was a place that Lluis spent many fun nights when he was going to school. The place was pretty empty initially - and we sang a few songs - I sang songs I had not prepared just to experiment a bit - we were having a lot of fun.

Then a really large group came in and sat in the front. Lluis told me that it was a bunch of media people who were doing some work and that the main person was Isabel Coixet (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0170043/) and that she directed a movie called "My Life Without Me" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0314412/) - very cool - Lluis must have a photographic memory! The manager of the place had heard me sing "Strangers in the Night Earlier" and came to me and asked me to sing "My Way" as soon as they walked in - I said yes and belted it out (I love that song - it reminds me of Open Source). The group with Isabel had some awesome singers - and they sang some great songs very well.

About half way through the evening a friend of Lluis' named Anita showed up from the airport - she was an long-time friend of Lluis on her way to Valencia for a wedding and needed to stay at Lluis's home for the night so she could take a train. She was a good singer so we had even more fun. She lives in Istanbul and Paris - she sang this really cool French song with the perfect French accent. I wanted to sing a Grease song with her - but they only had one song and it was in Spanish and I could not figure out if it was "Hopelessly Devoted to You" or "You are the One That I Want" - folks translated it and I thought it was "You are the one that I want" - so Anita and I went up to sing it. It turned out to be "Hopelessly Devoted to You" and Anita did not know it so I ended up singing the whole song in falsetto :). It as late enough by that time that it was not really that embarrassing for me to do Olivia Newton-John in falsetto.

At about 2AM we decided to go - but then Anita mentioned that she had never been to Luz 'de Gas (http://www.luzdegas.com/) - since it was a few blocks away - we decided to go for *one* drink so she could see it. As usual Lluis knows the manager and owner and bartenders so we get in for free - Anita loves the place - she starts dancing and all the young guys immediately gravitate towards her - Lluis and I are the big brothers for her so she can have a good time. Of course Lluis ended up talking to many people he knew there and we spent a little over an hour.

I get back to the hotel at 4AM and get a bit of sleep - getting up about 7AM to go to the airport for a brief visit to my good friend Steven Goldfarb, a tour of the CERN detector facility, and then my singing debut with a live Blues band. That will be the next story.

Off to Barcelona - Lasalle University

I will be speaking at the Lasalle University in Barcelona on Tuesday at the world-wide conference of Lasallian Universities. Lluis asked me to not just talk about Sakai but about Open Source in general and general future directions for teaching and learning with Technology - what a fun topic and wide open opportunity.

I will take advantage of the opportunity to revisit with my friends at the Campus project and get an update on the Moodle/Sakai/OKI tool interoperability project. Now that it is April - I am really looking forward to seeing what the Campus project has accomplished with 6+ months of work.

I hope to also see friends from Lleida and Valencia if I have time.

On Thursday and Friday I do a bit of touristing. The CERN High Energy Physics facility (the birthplace of the web) is having an open house for the next set of Large Hadron Detectors (about 5 stories tall) - the beam line is about to turn on and it is the last time the public will be allowed into the pit. I visited CERN with my family in 2004 and Steven Goldfarb gave my family a tour of the detector when it was 1/3 done - very impressive.

Then on Friday April 11 - I sing with Steve's Band (The Canettes Blues Band - http://www.canettes.ch/) at the Mr. Pickwicks Pub in Geneva (http://www.canettes.ch/). This will be my first live band experience - I will sing one song - "I have got my Mojo Working" - I have been practicing for about 3 months in my car as I drive between Lansing and Ann Arbor.

I am quite excited and very nervous. This is my first time singing with a band - I am hopeful all those years of serious Karaoke dedication will finally pay off. There will be a video team there so it should be caught on tape - could be awesome - could be bad. It might be my *only* time singing with a live band - so I want to make it a good one.

Hey - if you are in the Geneva Area - stop by Mr. Pickwicks - here is the Gig URL:

http://www.canettes.ch/2008/0411-Pickwick

Steve tells me when the Canettes play at Mr. Pickwicks - seats are at a premium - so come early.

Saying: Understanding Bright People and How They Think

The brightest people are the ones who have a choice in what they do. They will only give fully of themselves to a project, effort, or even a job if they are assured that in the giving of themselves - they are not losing themselves. The rarest and most precious gift is the gift of ideas, vision, and leadership. Bright people are bursting to to share their best ideas and efforts with the world - but they do not want to lose their own right to those gifts.

See also:
The Apache Software Foundation Individual Contributor License Agreement
http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt

Python Thread Notes

https://ctools.umich.edu/dav/715d3da9-f664-4281-80f6-e60869a420c8

http://docs.python.org/lib/module-threading.html

http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Python/Basic-Threading-in-Python/3/

http://docs.python.org/lib/timer-objects.html

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/Python/PyThreads.pdf

http://artfulcode.nfshost.com/files/multi-threading-in-python.html

http://artfulcode.nfshost.com/files/multi-threading-in-python.html

Locking:

http://linuxgazette.net/107/pai.html