Sean’s blog

Over the past several months I have been organizing a gathering in Chicago called Ignite Chicago - based on the Ignites that Brady Forrest organized in Seattle and San Francisco earlier in the year. Jesper Andersen was my conspirator in this endeavor.

An Ignite consists of an Ignite Contest and a series of Ignite Talks.  Our Ignite contest  was to build piles of junk that cast interesting shadows on the wall when illuminated with a flashlight similar to those made by English artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster.

The Ignite Talks are 5-minute talks with 20 slides on autoprogress (so you only get 15 seconds / slide).  They can be about anything, but usually have a geeky theme. I will put the videos up when I get back from San Francisco - we really had some great talks.  There are lots of folks in Chicago working on interesting stuff.

These were the speakers / topics:

Sean Blanton - Using Perl to Control Java

Matt McCall - Ugly Duckling or Black Swan?

Derek Wade - Scrum: It Depends on Common Sense

Steve Heady -  Divless - CSS Coding that Works from Front To Back

Brawley Reishman - How to Preserve Your Sanity in the Global Economy

Massimo DiPierro - Gluon (Python web framework)

Justin Kruger - Game Economics

Erin McKean - lex i cog ra pher

Ravi Shankar - Moving Toward Rich Internet Aplpications

Keith Shacht - Why You Should Care About Platforms Like Facebook

Leon Chism - WoW! Everything I Know I Learned in Azeroth

Jon Pasky - Protecting Your IP in 5 Minutes

Michael Gruber - Killing Your Startup’s Changes to Receiving Early Stage Funding

Jason Fried - 20 Questions

Harper Reed and Scott Van Den Plas - Zebras vs. Mustaches

Jason Rexilius - Scaling Web Applications Across Distributed Networks

Paul Caswell - Thinking Together

I got a little snow in Boston when I was there this weekend but this is the first real snow of the year in Chicago - and its a pretty good one.

As a society we spend a lot of money on textbooks.  Textbooks are useful for providing a broad and narrow overview of a topic and good teachers heavily supplement textbooks with customized learning materials.

Since they are a generic overview of a topic, textbooks rarely change dramatically, which is why it seems silly to pay so much money for them.

I would really like to see a wikipedia-like set of textbooks, available for free and edited by teachers.  The resulting materials could follow a textbook outline/framework but would have the capacity to incorporate all of the customized learning materials that teachers prepare for their own classes, resulting in a much richer learning experience in addition to freeing up resources.

Open Educational Resources has a  very complete list of links to projects similar to the one I described above.  Benkler wrote a very interesting paper on the topic called Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials. Unfortunately Benkler found that none of the community-produced efforts are working.

I have a lot of other stuff going on, but I am going to spend some time trying to figure out a solution.