Hi! At my university, we're been replacing hundreds of old Sun machines with Linux boxes. Now it's time for us to finally replace the old Solaris with TWM environment with a more modern GNOME one (for the curious, it's GNOME 2.8 on top of Debian Sarge). Yes, it's not the latest, but things are moving slowly here. The focus is on long time stability and testedness rather than the latest bells and whistles; important aspects when you're managing computer labs for the many different courses of computer science students over a long period of time.
This change makes us find a documentation problem. The old training for freshmen on the old environment was based on us offering a few hours of training classes in the computer rooms at the very beginning of the first semester. In these classes, all freshmen could sit down in front of a machine, and were not only given the needed access credentials but also a relatively short paperback tutorial on how to get started with this environment, which obviously in most cases was a different one to the one they were used to from home. At these special classes, an assistant (in most cases a more experienced student) would be present in the computer room, ready to answer any questions. This would be the only time during the student's entire time at the university that there would be some training on the Unix computers themselves. After these few hours of special class in the first semester, the student would be expected to be fluent enough with this Unix environment to be ready to participate right away in ordinary laboratory exercises in other courses in these very same computer labs. The old tutorial we used for these training classes would start with the very basics; how to log in, and explaining what you would then see on the screen in front of you. Then it would move on to describe ways to accomplish different tasks, like using one of the mouse buttons on the desktop background to get to the Application menu to be able to start XClock, and how to kill it by using the Window Ops menu on another mouse button, and so on. Everything was combined with plenty of screen shots to illustrate the instructions. To make things more exciting, and to make sure that there was some actual comprehension going on rather than just skimming the instructions, there would be some relatively easy questions to answer inbetween the instructions, like "now you know what buttons A and B do, but what does button C do? Test for yourself and write it down below." There would also be some lines for actually writing down the answers and to make notes as you moved along. Of course noone would actually check the correctness of the answers, the questions and room for answers were just there to make you think about what you were doing. The tutorial would also gradually increase the difficulty level, and move on to more advanced topics and tasks, with the most advanced and not very important ones being last. This was by design; clearly not all students would be able to finish the tutorial in the few hours of the class. All freshmen have a different background, some have never used a Unix-like system before, while some others have already used Linux for several years at home. Obviously, all students would finish the tasks in the tutorial at a different pace, while some would never finish it at all. By placing the most elementary stuff first, we would make sure that all would still be able to perform the most basic stuff when the class was over. If you've read this far, you probably realize that the current User Guide probably isn't very suited for this. The User Guide is more suited as a reference, and not as something you would give a class of students and tell them to read while at the same time trying to familiarize themselves with the user interface in front of a workstation. What we need is some tutorial of the "teach yourself GNOME in X hours" kind, that would step-by-step try to teach the basic tasks with a "learning by doing" approach, with a gradually increasing difficulty level. Some experience with working on Windows can probably be assumed from start, however. Is there someone working on something like this? Is anyone interested in working on this? We know of the Intro (http://www.gnome.org/learn/intro/2.2/), but the pictures are broken, and the text could probably need some improvements. What's worse is that it hasn't been updated since GNOME 2.2. Cheers, Christian _______________________________________________ gnome-doc-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list
