Surfing in Kansas
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At LPDN, our weekly programmer drinkup, we have been talking for a while about watching the SICP lectures from MIT as a fun thing to do. I then got to thinking about how it would be neat to involve more than just the few of us in Lawrence. Everything is more fun on a larger scale, and having compatriots makes you more likely to finish it. Somewhere along the lines of the Infinite Summer, I was thinking about having some kind of Hacker Book Club.
SICP may be a bit intense for the beginning of the club, but it's something that I think that everyone can learn and have fun with. Along with the typical book club style things, seeing the audience, I think we could make some really neat additions to the idea. A few have come to mind, but I'm sure there are lots more.
I would imagine having an IRC channel where we can all hang out and ask each other questions. I'm sure the #scheme channel will be a resource as well, but it could be neat to have a focused group of people focused on learning the same material. It feels a bit like an open source classroom, where disperate people can come together to learn and share in the open source mindset. Sharing is caring, not cheating.
Since SICP is available for free online, we could suck the book into a database of some sort and allow a commenting/discussion medium around the text as well. The Django Book is a good example of that. I think it would be interesting trying to tie in discussion on the site with IRC. Perhaps have some kind of encoding that allows you to reference pages in the book on IRC and have that inline the log transcripts. My friend Nathan also runs Readernaut, and already has a basic syntax established for tracking book progress on Twitter. We could throw this on IRC and twitter as well, where each user could register their account and keep progress.
I think it would be a really interesting way to combine a lot of the conversations that happens across the web in one place, with context, about a book. I have also wanted similar abilities in other things (Think your work IRC channel and code instead of Book pages). This could spawn a neat open source project, if we were so motivated.
Let me know what you think!
Comments have been close for this post.
Posted at 1:12 p.m. on September 26, 2009
Comments: 16
Tags: book , club , hacker , idea , readernaut
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Comments
1 Brian McManus says...
I think it's an incredible idea. I live nowhere near Lawrence but I've been considering creating a group of geeks much like your LPDN for my locality. There is a lot of us, we just don't socialize outside of work.
Perhaps the book club could extend beyond your lpdn!
Posted at 12:02 a.m. on September 27, 2009
2 Marc Chung says...
You should check out the wizardbookstudy club.
It's a newly formed, long distance book club aimed at programmers who wish to further their knowledge of SICP with other like-minded geographically distributed, individuals, like yourself.
The hashtag on Twitter is #sicpstudy and the mailing list is publicly available at: http://groups.google.com/group/wizardbookstudy/
Posted at 12:26 a.m. on September 27, 2009
3 Parag says...
Hi,
This is a really nice idea. I have put up a little website which has computer science course videos in an organized manner.
Every course has topics. The topics contain videos and an embedded Disqus commenting system. The comments can be used as an embedded forum for each topic. I like Disqus because it allows commenters to take ownership of their comments.
SICP is one of the courses on the site:
<a href="http://www.adaptivelearningonline.net/courses/course/show/SICP/">http://www.adaptivelearningonline.net/courses/course/show/SICP/</a>
Posted at 11:54 a.m. on September 27, 2009
4 Parag says...
Oops messed up the url - http://www.adaptivelearningonline.net/courses/course/show...
Posted at noon on September 27, 2009
5 or says...
SICP is overrated.
Posted at 2:18 p.m. on September 27, 2009
6 yapapanyatt says...
Nice post — this really hits home for me.
Posted at 5:25 p.m. on September 27, 2009
7 loputreyu says...
Спасибо за статью!
Posted at 1:16 p.m. on September 29, 2009
8 Carl Meyer says...
I'd join in. I'm in the midst of ch 2 but got stalled by higher-priority projects, it'd be great to work through it with some other people.
Posted at 5:49 p.m. on September 29, 2009
9 rachAntewathe says...
Oh, I’ve done the research. I’ve updated the post to include a hyperlink to the Wisconsin Law Review article I wrote on the subject.
Posted at 3:09 a.m. on October 1, 2009
10 golYterW says...
Где-то я уже похожее читала, причём слово в слово.
Posted at 6:13 a.m. on October 3, 2009
11 Kolyewe says...
И вот долгожданный топик от автора, спасибо как всегда на высоте!
Posted at 11:33 p.m. on October 4, 2009
12 Gundospud says...
Aloha! eii
Posted at 1:23 a.m. on October 11, 2009
13 lokyrte says...
Не совсем в тему, но вопрос такой возник автору. А почему вы именно этот движок выбрали для своего блога? Имхо, слаед бы лучше был. Я вот ваш блог постоянно читаю :)
Posted at 2:33 a.m. on October 13, 2009
14 hjeryew says...
Любопытная статья, да и сам сайт я смотрю очень даже не плох. Попал сюда по поиску из Яндекса, занес в закладки :)
Posted at 10:20 p.m. on October 15, 2009
15 Tabblettochka says...
Как хорошо что удалось отыскать такой потрясающий блог, и тем более отлично, что есть таковые автора толковые!
Posted at 2:24 p.m. on October 16, 2009
16 Saderinka says...
Данный пост реально поддержал мне принять очень важное для себя решение. За что творцу отдельное спасибо. Жду от Вас новых постов!
Posted at 12:38 a.m. on October 17, 2009