TITLE: That's a Wrap
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 12, 2008 6:57 AM
DESC:
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BODY:
I have posted all of
my reports
from the 2008
SECANT workshop.
In sum, SECANT is a worthwhile community-building
effort. It brings together such a mix: academia
and industry, different disciplines, and different
kinds of schools, from large Big Ten and other R-I
universities down to small liberal arts colleges.
This one of the reasons why I love OOPSLA, but this
venue provides a smaller, more intimate setting.
(Of course, while SECANT lies at the intersection
of computing -- and especially programming -- OOPSLA's
domain is really Everything Programming, which is
even better.)
The workshop was again a great source of ideas and
inspiration for me. This seems like a good use of
a relatively small amount of money by NSF. The
onus is now on us participants... Will we do the
work to grow the community? To develop courses
and materials? To transform our institutions and
disciplines. A tall order.
As for being done with my reports, I feel a small
measure of pride. Sure, last year, I posted my
final workshop report
only five days after the workshop ended, and this
year I'm at eleven days. But my
report on SIGCSE
-- from March -- is still incomplete,
with two entries on top: a general description of
a panel on bringing the joy and wonder back to CS,
and a more detailed report on one of the presentations
from that panel, by Eric Roberts.
Is there a statute of limitations on blog entries?
Has my coupon to post on that panel session expired?
If I were Kent Beck, I'd probably call this long
delay a "blog smell" and write a pattern!
For me, blogging suffers from a stack-of-ideas
phenomenon. I have ideas, and they get pushed onto
the to-blog list. Sometimes, I have more ideas than
time to write, and some ideas get pushed deep in the
stack before I get a chance to write them up. Time
passes... And then I look back at the list of ideas,
and most feel stale, or at least no longer have their
original hold on my mind. I currently have three
levels of "blog ideas" folders, and each one contains
a bunch of ideas that I remember wanting to write
now -- but which now I feel no
desire to write. Sounds like it's time for a little
rm -r *.*
Going to a conference only makes the stack-of-ideas
problem worse. The sessions follow one upon another,
and each one tends to stir me up so much that I push
even the previous session way back in my mind. That's
one advantage of a 1.5-day workshop over a several
day conference like SIGCSE or OOPSLA: the scale does
not overflow my small brain.
Do readers care about any of this? Is SIGCSE stale
for them? Perhaps, and I figure anyone who was
wondering what went on in Portland has likely found
the information elsewhere, and in any case moved on.
But the topic of the unwritten entry may not be stale
yet, so hope remains.
To return to the beginning of this blog, on the end
of my SECANT reports: I hope you get as much from
reading them as I did writing them.
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