I recently had the opportunity to do some mentoring, this gave me some valuable insights into learning.
New blog post: paul.bone.id.au/2018/05/27/men
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Have you seen the Pyret language? It seems to me like a great choice for teaching: pyret.org - the tricky design problem is figuring out how to convince students that it is worth using a teaching language. I'm glad you pointed out that issue in your post!
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I havn't. Yeah, that's definitely an issue. IMHO most students don't want to use anything that's not common in industry. Including "why would we learn Haskell? isn't that academic?"
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Thanks for reading!
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I'm not an educator, but it definitely seems like something that should be addressed directly at the beginning of a course, in an up-front, compassionate way. Their concerns are very understandable, if misplaced.
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I've seen some time given to this in functional programming courses. It doesn't help people who don't enroll in it because it's "academic", and it still doesn't satisfy everyone, but it's something.
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Yeah - that's where the power of marketing comes in :) - changing people's minds for the better before they even get in the door!
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Alas lots of folks (especially in tech and academia) seem to think marketing is a BadThing™ - I agree that it can be, but when used for good it can be super powerful and helpful.
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I agree, but advertising can DIAF.
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Replying to
Yeah, I know, I should have made it clearer that I knew that. And I'm not against advertising in principal. I'm against it being everywhere (real/virtual), being noisy or inappropriate (real/virtual), or being a delivery system for malware (online).
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Yup - completely agree! When I say 'marketing' I mean, making sure you are letting the folks you want to reach know about your thing, and working hard to tailor your message to attract their interest and meet concerns they might have.
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