Selena Deckelmann's talk @ PyCon

[Jim Garrison]

Hi all,

They just posted the video from Selena Deckelmann's PyCon talk, "What
teachers really need from us."

http://pyvideo.org/video/1697/what-teachers-really-need-from-us

I highly recommend watching it. One thing she said that particularly
stood out to me is that "[teachers will] use anything that you give them
that is useful."

Maybe we really just need to build a tool that is more immediately
useful to teachers? Right now our front page advertises the ability to
learn any language, and then the user is presented with a poor
experience once choosing a language to learn. One thing I've been
considering lately is whether maybe we should make Wikiotics (for now,
at least) more advertised toward making one-off lessons, so that
teachers can build something useful with only a few minutes on the site.
This reminds me of github's "gist" feature and other pastebins.
There's no central routing method to help someone find the "gist" that
they are interested in; it is expected that they will be linked from
elsewhere. If we could focus on making such one-off lessons useful
using our current tools, we could worry later about directing users to
useful lessons (once a large enough body of such lessons exists).

- Jim