Hi, Notwithstanding the fact that I suggested you ignore the rest of my email if the seminars were aimed at CS students, I think the order you suggest is much better. These are not yet (at least not all of them) computer professionals and, even if they have to do this as part of their course, a bit of psychology is involved in weening them from one OS to another. Might I even suggest switching the order of 1. and 2. below or perhaps merging them into two seminars so that you plunge straight into using the GUI aspects of Linux. This will have the benefit of persuading those who are more wary of non-windows OSs that, at least as far as the desktop is concerned, there is little difference for the average user these days. That will probably make the succeeding seminars more likely to hold their interest when they see that not only can they do everything Windows can do but they can do a whole lot more (at least far more easily) as well. Demonstrating Mozilla etc. will also allow you to introduce the students to How Tos and other sources of on-line help for less GUI-related Linux usage as required for the course. On 15 Feb 2004 at 22:01, Matt Brown wrote:
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....
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