Calling all Chicago (and midwest regional) education hackers:

The Shared Learning Collaborative is holding a two-day tutorial / tagathon / code-a-thon event in Chicago this coming weekend, September 8th and 9th. There will be introductory sessions explaining the SLC architecture and ecosystem, API intros, coding sprints starting from the sample code and working toward real applications, etc. If you haven’t heard of SLC, think of it as doing for K-12 education data what the nascent health IT movement is doing for health care data.

Illinois is one of the states in the pilot phase of the project, with integration starting in Bloomington in September and proceeding through the state over the next year or so. So if you have or know kids in public schools in Illinois, they’ll be using SLC software soon. SLC is opening sourcing their stuff, of course, and is explicitly aiming for a multi-developer, multi-vendor open source community (the education world needs more opportunities for technical creativity, not more lock-in). This code camp is the first of several they’ll be holding.

Attendance is free; just register on Eventbrite (or you can do it through the Facebook page). First 200 attendees get the free tee-shirt.

   Saturday, September 8:  9am  —        (Day 1 schedule)
   Sunday,   September 9:       — 6pm    (Day 2 schedule)
   (see session descriptions)

The location is exactly where you’d expect it to be — at the increasingly inescapable 1871 tech startup space:

   222 Merchandise Mart Plaza
   12th Floor
   Chicago, IL 60654
   USA

For teachers and parents:

• Common Core State Standards
• The Learning Registry
• Meta-Tagging Educational Content

For coders:

• Configuring a development environment for working with SLC
• Internals of SLC Sample Code and APIs
• Work sprints to get your Hello World completed
• Getting started on your first application

See the full event description for more.

Disclaimer: I’ve done some consulting work for SLC. This blog post is not part of that work, however; I just wanted to get the word out. If I weren’t traveling on the dates of the code-a-thon, I’d be attending it myself.