ntoll.org

I spent last week at two events:

1. A beginners Erlang course given by Richard Carlsson on Monday to Wednesday, and
2. The Erlang eXchange conference (sic) for the rest of the week.

As the Erlang site states Erlang is a functional programming language with an emphasis on concurrency, distribution, robustness, “soft” real-time (where response times are required within milliseconds), hot code upgrades, incremental code loading and external interfaces to connect to the outside world.

Why am I, someone who writes C# code for an investment bank, interested in this? There are three reasons…

By creating the curriculum that we teach we choose the sort of society that we want.

This is true in three ways:

1. In creating the content of a curriculum we are capturing our society’s culture, values, knowledge and traditions so that they can be passed on to others.
2. The means of sharing a curriculum reflects how our society engages with its citizens.
3. The process by which we choose to define a curriculum is itself a reflection of our society’s values.

TeacherTool.org is a means of collaborating in the creation and sharing of an open and evolving curriculum.

This is how it works…

The composition of counterpoint is not based on fortuitous chance melodic combinations, nor is its practise restricted to only those possessing musical genius. Rather, it is the result of applying heuristic rules and guidelines. In other words, it is a skill that can be learned.

Species counterpoint, based upon the stylistic conventions of the great Italian composer Palestrina, is a method of learning these compositional techniques.

This article summarises species counterpoint.