Hi, Most of what I want to say has already been covered by Daniel, Jamie and Perry while I was enjoying a weekend at the beach, but I'll sum up anyway and address a few other comments that came up further down the thread. On Sun, 2004-02-15 at 00:01, Mark Grimshaw wrote:
It's unclear from your email whether this is just for CS students or the wider university population at large. I'm assuming the latter. If it's the former then don't bother reading on and apologies for wasting your time....
The seminars are heavily focused on teaching 2nd (and 1st) year CompSci students the very basics of what they need to know to operate in the lab environment. Other people are most welcome to attend, including students from other parts of the University, and other WLUG members who want to beef up their linux knowledge.
What is the aim of it all? It seems to me you wish to turn 1st. and 2nd. year students onto Linux and suggest that there are other operating systems other than Mac and Windows - dare I say even to convert some of those students.
The primary aim as Daniel said is to give students the knowledge of the tools that are available to stop them from having to repeat mundane tasks over and over again. I think a lot of the "geek" image comes from people expecting linux and other unix like OSes to be Windows. The fact is they are not, they come from quite a different model of operation and getting students to recognise that is a secondary aim. Hand in Hand with that is the fact that things will be done in different ways in linux (ie. using the command line, rather than a GUI for managing files). Perhaps we should state that we are not directly trying to convert people to linux through these seminars, our primary goal is to enable students to survive in the labs. If through that they come to see linux as a better operating system for their daily tasks then hopefully we will have exposed them to WLUG where they can find many more resources to help them move to linux.
I'm a tertiary level lecturer of over a decade (including at present Waikato University) and most of that teaching has involved the use of computers (audio, video, web applications mainly and some Perl- scripting etc.) Assuming that the seminars are aimed at students not just from the CS Dept. (where one can safely assume they know one end of a mouse from another - do they?), I think the ordering of your seminars is back to front.
I've also had this comment (ordering of the seminars) made to me off list as well. I guess on reflection it does make sense to start with the "basics" (Mozilla / OpenOffice, etc) before we get down to the really useful (but more complex) things like bash and process control. Do you think the following order would be more appropriate? 1. Intro to Linux / GNU / OSS 2. Applications 3. Emacs 4. Bash 5. Processes 6. Summary / Q&A On the topic of installfests, We (the committee) have been actively discussing organising one for quite a while now, and it is on my list of things to start planning for in the next week. I wanted to get the bulk of the organisation for the Intro to Linux Seminars out of the way before I started on something else. But while people are talking about it I guess it's worth sharing my current thoughts. 1) We will hold the installfest seperately to a regular WLUG meeting, most probably on a Saturday, simply because it gives us much more time and hence more capacity for installing / troubleshooting peoples machines. 2) It will be held after the Intro to Linux Seminars and after the Intro to Linux March Meeting. So probably early April sometime. Perhaps the first weekend. 3) We should standardise on a distribution to install on peoples machines. Dangerous territory here, it's not worth starting a distro war over, but I think having a standard platform for new users is an excellent idea, then when they have a problem we can know how their system is meant to be configured and make much better guesses as to how to fix it. Besides the standardisation we also want to make sure that it's something pretty like XD2 or Fedora. Obviously we still need to discuss a lot of this and work out a lot more details, but we do have ideas in planning. Phew, that will do for tonight. Regards -- Matt Brown Email: matt(a)mattb.net.nz GSM : 021 611 544