These discussions give a background to
Safe Net and National Project to Establish
the Knowledge Sciences Curriculum
The background is just laid out, so that
others can see where
the process is and how they might
contribute to it.
From Michael McLay:12/12/2003 6:04 PM
A short section to the proposal should be on the value of studying the work of masters in the process of learning.
Studying the threads in blogs would a useful educational exercise for a CS major. This exercise would identify the actually challenges in representing events in discussion spaces.
Tim Peters did a remarkable job of refining the algorithm used to filter out spam and reading the thread. His decision-making was kind of like watching Picasso paint a picture. He'd test one method and throw out most of it and try a different tactic. (Beadmaster’s Note: This is like what Amnon Myers does at Text Analysis International Corporation, using his linguistic parsers.)
It was great fun watching it evolve. He did the same thing when he added the stable sort implementation to Python.
Another thing that is useful to use in education is the standard Python module. They provide an excellent collection of well-vetted code to study.