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From Ham Radio to Microscopy to Django to Unschooling

 This blog has seemingly taken a departure from unschooling of late. I say 'seemingly' because at the end of the day, because of strewing, the gang's lives and mine are always twined together. So, if you watch what's going on—even with the recent slew of technical posts here—you can get an idea of what the gang's up to in unschooling. For example, they’ve been working on Morse code practice for the last several weeks. Code practice is related to radios—sure—but it’s also related to writing practice and learning typing.

Anyway, I digress. I’d arrived at the conclusion that this blog no longer looked like an unschooling blog. I felt perhaps it would be interesting for me to write about the topic more intentionally, but hadn’t arrived at a way to get there when I sat down to read tech blogs this morning. About ten minutes later, I’d found the path back. The path, as much as anything, is a great illustration of how seemingly completely random unschooling and strewing links seemingly unrelated interests together to form a learning scaffolding for parents and kids.

The gang and I started last week by attending a meeting of the history section of the San Francisco Microscopy Society. It’d been a while since we’d attended a meeting of any sort together, and one of the goals of the gang’s SEL (social & emotional learning) curriculum is in fact being able to attend meetings, enjoy getting to hear something new, and hopefully—and as it turns out—almost always, glean something new from them. We got into microscopy because of Foldscopes and a renewed interest by the youngest kid—known here as Tawnse—in microscopes. (And Holy Smokes! I just realized we got into foldscopes because of another unschooling curriculum item: perusing museums as resources. We first encountered the little paper microscopes at San Francisco MOMA where—by they way—kids get free admission.)



I had other reasons for going. Being involved since the early days of Google App Engine (as a user), I’d written plenty of software using Django, which was co-created by one of the members of the history team, Simon Willison. My most entertaining use of this stuff had been to track ham radio satellites back in the original days of Google Earth existing as a web accessible API:


Sadly, now that the kids and I watch a lot of satellites from McLaren Park, that incarnation of the API no longer works. It'd be nice to be able to see what satellites we'd been watching, or to know which ones to watch for. One day though, one day.

I’m running out of writing time this morning, so suffice it to say that Simon has a blog, and—this is so meta—in a recent post he wrote about a hacker news scraper he developed

Checking out the news scraper, I found one of Simon’s posts I’d linked to a few days back in this blog. Trying to understand what the scraper did, I clicked through on the user name shown below Simon’s post:


That led me to  usrme’s blog and finally to John Taylor Gatto, a much revered writer among unschooling folks. And!!!! It was actually a really useful post. I've, strangely, never read Gatto's work, (I'm more of a Collin Ward fan.)

Annnddddd, tada! Unschooling!

Anyway, yet another fun example of where all this unschooling stuff can lead.





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