Right now, find a company doing something bad ass with HTTP and then make Mongrel2 blow their socks off. Then repeat it again and again until I've got something.
Zed, you do not want to go anywhere near an education graduate school. All these opportunities are yours except D.Ed. — Attempt no landings there.
If you think you've been a poor fit at some companies, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Education departments attract some of the very worst students, people pathologically stricken with know-nothingness. The graduate schools then take the more craven among them, the ones that realize that their school-system contracts give them huge automatic raises for getting higher degrees, often paid for too. They often come out as worse teachers after having had the recently recycled fad pedagogies pumped through them, which they then regurgitate in a game of telephone onto their students.
If you want to work on some stellar CS education stuff, try to talk your way into Kay's VPRI. Stay the hell away from Ed schools, they'd make your blood boil.
Say what you like about the tenets of Constructivism, Zed, at least it's an ethos. I'm surprised that you'd have beef with it — you don't even like Papert's Constructionism?
As easily misinterpreted and misapplied as liberation pedagogy can be, at least it gives the non-subject-matter-experts something to apply themselves at, something they could actually help children with even if they're as dumb as a bag of rocks. It's definitely not a good fit for you, but it's far from worthless.
I'm a scientist mostly, so I prefer Direct Instruction from Siegfried Engelmann and Wesley C. Becker and learned quite a bit about how to teach effectively from them. What's interesting is DI is the only method with solid evidence backing its success. Lots of it. The others are mostly just bullshit rhetoric.
Would you like it if you weren't the author, director, and performer of the script?
DI does have it's merits — it does keep bright assholes like us from dominating the classroom as students in a mixed setting. You can also get through the material a lot faster without getting mired in repetitive interactivity, but the script has to be perfect, or you can skip past a crucial facet without noticing, and there's very little opportunity to get back on the rails, especially because from the lecturer's perspective the resulting complaints are difficult to distinguish from the usual whining.
Part of the problem with curriculum design is that trials generally only occur with either uniformly high-achieving or uniformly delinquent students, both of whom can abide nearly any method if it's intentionally delivered.
What's your sales pitch for mongrel2 against things like Unicorn & Passenger. The new features of mongrel2 seem awesome (particularly multiple protocols over the same socket) and given the success of mongrel, I think we all have high hopes for mongrel2. But I'm curious what your thoughts are on what the "killer apps" are for mongrel2 that make it the superior solution to the alternatives.
Operations guy: Mongrel2 is a ops wet dream. Totally automatable and you can use it to easily carve your infrastructure up as needed to scale and deal with all the random crap programmers throw at you.
Programmers: Mongrel2 is future proof and gives you want you need with low friction. Wanna do sockets? Got it. Use any language? Got it. Change up the request flow to work around a bug? Got it. Drop Scala for Rails? Got it.
I'm not that jazzed about the idea of reminiscing about a Smalltalk. How about instead of making esoteric references, you just say what's on your mind?
Alan Kay's talks aren't only about Smalltalk ... they are often about education, and the part computers might play in children's lives. The man is a genius.
