Greg Wilson's presentation at SciPy 2006 was one of the most sane things I have heard regarding what really should be the basics for an introductory programming course. His target audience are scientists who must do a lot of programming these days. But I thought his problem description exactly matched what I see in professional software development. I suspect if you have any interest in educating programmers, you should look at Software Carpentry and get in touch with Greg Wilson.
I'm kinda surprised that I haven't already seen this in my RSS feeds. I'm just coming back from giving a presentation at SciPy2006 . During the discussion following Greg Wilson's presentation about Software Carpentry, Guido made a stronger pronouncement for django. Greg Wilson broke the news immediately but apparently his social network and mine don't overlap much. So here's another nudge to spread the meme. Guido picked django but would like to see some convergence between django and turbogears. As Greg put it in his post, django will be as “standard” as PIL or NumPy
-- not distributed with python, but blessed as the right place to start.