Over lunch I met with our local organizer for our 
Dean Visibility Day action. I picked up signs and a packet of materials, so I'll have some buttons and bumper stickers I can hand out. There are great folks in our local organization pulling events like this together. I'm happy to be involved doing things, but I wouldn't be the right person trying to organize things. I feel like I'm getting a great education seeing grassroots organizing first hand, though. I'll update my journal tomorrow after the event with comments and maybe some pictures.
I was pleased with class last night. We did our first session with Squeak -- I led them through a tutorial that involves making a drawing of a car and then building a script that lets you drive it around, creating a steering wheel and accelerator. We then looked at a few other scripts and I began making a pitch for "reverse engineering" as a useful model for learning how to accomplish programming tasks. I also pointed out the weasel essay which is an excellent (if ambitious) model for what a final project might look like.
The discussion about Flatland went better this week. It was clear that most, if not all, of the students had read it. We had a far ranging discussion that managed to hit most of the points I was hoping would get made. It is still hard for people to talk. One woman, who I wouldn't have expected to feel so self-concious, said that she was petrified to speak up in class. We're starting to break down the walls and within another couple of weeks, I think we'll be in good shape. Some of the discussions were interesting enough to the students that they spilled over into break time.
The last topic of the evening was web-development. We used BBedit to create a simple page and look at the the page with a web-browser. We talked about URLs a bit, about the structure of tags and html documents, and then began adding tags to our simple page. Finally, we came down to the BCRC to play with SubEthaEdit. We looked at the live web previews (so you don't have to keep reloading) and collaborative editing.
I noticed someone's page said
This class is soooo loooong!!!