What is it that I expect to accomplish through curriculum writing? For some decades, I've been this working class dweeb who teaches online programming classes, on the basis of earlier decades developing computer applications, having majored in philosophy at Princeton, but always finding computers cool.
But then my online content isn't entirely about teaching programming. It's about thinking about geometry with a 3D computer graphics tool at one's elbow. A ray tracer in my case. To make the ray tracer do what I wanted, I had to feed it programs too tedious to write by hand, so I'd have another program do that, and control that one at a high level.
Let's take a look at some code I was writing yesterday:
The raytracer I use is called POV-Ray, a free open source tool that renders slowly compared to say Blender. I don't mind its slowness in the context of what I use it for, to generate animated GIFs such as the one above.
POV-Ray expects to read and process files with extension .pov and in the code above we see I'm opening a .pov file to receive a lot of stuff, through the arbitrarily so-named fileobject: out. I bring polyhedra into the foreground as objects: Icosahedron, PD, Octahedron. PD stands for Pentagonal Dodecahedron. I also have an RD, a Rhombic Dodecahedron. The code for those is in the same module, but once defined, I have a pretty succinct syntax for conjuring them, manipulating their properties, and writing them out in Scene Description Language for POV-Ray to process.
Am I saying I expect other teachers to simply copy my code and use it verbatim? Sure, to start with, one may clone or fork my codebase, slides too. But then many teachers will be more into using their own methods, while picking up on more of the shoptalk, around BASKET modules, Quadrays, Synergetics in general. For them, this material may all be a gateway to 20th Century History and a telling that includes what the Boomers were doing (USA namespace) to propagate the "4D" memes.
As a boomer myself, one who propagates "4D" (e.g. 4dsolutions.net), I'm a student of intellectual history and so my classes and lectures tend to have elements of that. My knowledge is quite limited. I'm a fan of CJ's commitment to comprehensivity but accept, as he did, that omniscience is not necessarily the objective. Carve out a patch and cultivate that, and you'll receive news from afar in ways you might use, within your own garden (not walled exactly, but protected, perhaps even encrypted).
I'm also a political cartoonist, and my work with Holdenweb and Open Bastion was more along the lines of event producer. The logistics supervisor work in hotels in years prior set me up to be at home in such institutions. Not that I don't still have much to learn. At 66, I'm still a noob. But a noob with some experience, I'd be foolish to deny what little I've got.
Finally, I fancy myself a type of science fiction writer, but within the context of curriculum writing and general systems theory (GST) more generally. Science fiction becomes a stand in for what my dad did: regional planning. That field has its specific techniques, over which I am not a master, let alone doctor (he had a PhD), but the idea is similar: conjure a possible future by means of narratives, stories, blog posts, and other artwork.
