TITLE: And Now Starring...
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 10, 2004 11:03 PM
DESC: days 2 and 3 at plop
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I was in a skit tonight.  I don't think I've had a role in a skit
not created by one of my daughters since 1985 or so, when I teamed
with one of best friends and the cutest girl I went to college with
on a skit in our Business Law class.

The skit was put on by Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising to introduce
their forthcoming book,
<A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0201741571/qid=1094873493/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-0051359-6267853?v=glance&s=books">
   Fearless Change:  Patterns for Introducing New Ideas</A>.
They wrote a short play as a vehicle for presenting a subset of their
pattern language at
<A HREF="http://www.xp2004.de/xp2004/talks.htm">
   XP 2004</A>,
which they reprised here.  I had two lines as an Early Adopter, a
careful, judicious decision maker who needs to see concrete results
before adopting a technology, but who is basically open to change.
Wearing a construction paper hat, I pulled off my lines without even
looking at my script.  Look for the video at a Mr. Movies near you.

My favorite part of the skit that didn't involve me was
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog-images/dilbert-091004.jpg">
   this Dilbert comic</A>
that opened the show.

<A HREF="http://hillside.net/plop/2004/">
   PLoP</A>
makes you do crazy things.

Our writers' workshop was excellent.  Ralph Johnson and I had two
papers on our elementary patterns work at
<A HREF="http://hillside.net/chiliplop/">
   ChiliPLoP</A>.
They are the first concrete steps toward a CS1 textbook driven by
patterns and an agile approach from the beginning.  The papers
were well-received, and we gathered a lot of feedback on what
worked well and what could stand some improvement.  Now we're
talking about how to give the writing project a boost of energy.
I'll post links to the papers soon.
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