On 8 Dec 2008, at 09:41, Philippe Bruhat (BooK) wrote:
I agree with brian: yet another web site with information about Perl
will not have as much impact as people actually going to their local
university, arranging something with the teachers/administration and
actually delivering a few hours worth of introduction to Perl and the
way we use it to solve problems.
Students are very happy to hear a person with years of real-life
experience telling them how things work, and showing actual scars. ;-)
For the last two years in London we've made a point of doing beginners
courses
at the workshops as a thank you to the university hosting. And of
course it's thanks
to Dave Cross for giving his time to do this. It's literally 4 hours
or so in a side
room to introduce people, it also helps the university contact grease
the wheels of
administrivia by being to demonstrate some sort of benefit.
It's not enough, but given how many workshops and conferences use
university
facilities it's a nice attempt at this form of advocacy and also is a
nice thank
you to the facility.
One note of caution is, the first time we did this only 2 or 3
students signed up
but on the day the room was packed out. Typical lazy students ;-).
DHA's mum was also
in the tutorial ;-).
In other fun advocacy news, Leon and I attended the N.London British
Computing Society's
Christmas talks tonight. My talk won the award for best
presentation ;-), and
did so by a country mile <-- the reason to mention this isn't to
stroke my ego,
well i'm still a little chuffed, but it showed me just how good the
presentation
skills the Perl world has these days, i'm going to try and pitch them
a case study
talk of how Perl took on a testing culture, looking at the early days
of unit testing
to the world we now have of CPAN Testers, TAP output Visualisation and
all sorts
of POD/Test hybrids. (Anyway thought you guys might like a success
story). And they are
also a good vehicle for going outside Perl and also going outside Perl
to students as
most university's with CS courses have a relationship with them.
G.
