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Going North! ACEC2006 conference

I’ve been very lucky, I got a paper accepted for the Australian Computers in Education Conference which is being held 2-4 October in Cairns, Far North Queensland. So I’m heading North, about 1850 km, as I live in Brisbane in South-East Queensland. Cairns is a great place, I actually lived there for a while. It’s where the tropical rainforest meets the great barrier reef.

So, about my talk. It’s actually about a pet project of mine, and I prepared the paper together with Shaun Nykvist from the Queensland University of Technology. The paper is called Introduction to the pragmatic teaching of database concepts and in it we look at the possibilities for teaching relational database fundamentals without getting bogged down in theory. And we’re not thinking “monkey-see monkey-do” tutorials either, what we are actually aiming for is real understanding so that people develop skills which they can apply to different situations.
It’s not even an IT topic per-se, it’s really just about basic high-school math. The method is not MySQL specific either, however the paper does identify reasons why choosing open source tools for this purpose might be good.
A book that uses this methodology is in the works, I’m writing it in my abundant spare time! This conference will be an ideal opportunity to get some good feedback about the ideas, the structure and some draft contents.

In Cairns, I also hope to chat with people about MySQL’s own academic program, which makes training course materials available to educational institutions. This is mostly aimed at a different (and higher level) audience, so I think that the two aspects of my presence there complement each other nicely.

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