I’m teaching “Mixing and Remixing Information” once again Spring 2007. I’m also writing a book on the subject matter of the course. The book proposal that I had originally written follows a logic that does not account for the demands of teaching a 15 week course that meets twice a week. I now need to create myself a schedule which does reconcile the sometimes conflicting, but somtimes harmonious, demands of writing a book and teaching a course during an overlapping time frame.

One decision that I’m contemplating right now is whether to use Python in the course. I am definitely planning to use Python as the core language to illustrate my book, and therefore, it might make sense to use it also in my course. Last spring, I stayed away from Python because the primary textbook for the course (oreilly.com — Online Catalog: Flickr Hacks) used Perl and PHP. The students found PHP to their liking but, by and large, found Perl to be a bit confusing. I didn’t make a concerted effort to teach programming directly. This time around, I will probably push programming techniques more explicilty and use Python for those purposes. I would like to retain some PHP and perhaps introduce Ruby on Rails, but we’ll see.

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