That is great Jonathan. * Jonathan Sandoval <[email protected]> [2020-08-10 03:35]: > Techela-emacs was a nice discovery and I'll surely give it a try. But, I > think it wouldn't be a good fit for our use case.
Probably not. You need small gradient, simpler approach. And do you really need too much of a distant software? We have been running Computer Club back in time and many interesting people came, so we made a schedule. At some time there would be game playing, at some time explanation how computers work related to hardware, at some specific time there would be courses of BASIC, some other time courses of LOGO programming language. That is how it was. Emacs is great learning resource, you could put schedule for Emacs Tutorial, at some time you could demonstrate what is IRC or you could enable XMPP server for your cultural club. You could help each of them connect with the world. For small kids there is QCompris software. > Because of COVID-19, our activites halted. As I mentioned, the people of > the cultural house are a mix of academics from univerties, but common > people without formal education and not much knowledge on computing. We > have a teacher of agroecology who is knowleadgeable about that topic, > but not much in computers. As I had a similar situation, I can tell you that common people, even farmers, they could complete course for BASIC programming language, if I would have LISP at that time, I would be using that one, it does not matter. There was no person that could not complete a programming course, none of them completed university ever. You can teach a teacher how to teach others, and teacher could provide course during the week, helping people to learn as I said, about hardware, CPU, input and output devices, then you give people time for games, time for communication setup, time for programming, anything, you can make the good time with people. > I taught them to use Jitsi Meet and BigBlueButton. It was not > easy. Jitsi was a little simpler, but not everyone could use BBB. I > suspect the reason is an old cellphone, but the preventive isolation > does not allow me to really diagnose the problem. It's an example. Other > guys have really slow computers and most of them have Windows. We're > just beginning with free software and I haven't had the opportunity to > make an installation festival. And other problems have arisen. I would setup XMPP server, I use Prosody, and I would help them each to setup XMPP chat for their own society from any device they have, and I would help them use free software regardless of their operating system. That would connect your own people together in a safe manner, network would not be proprietary but your own. US $5 per month is enough today to run your own website, chat server, and something more. > So, expecting them to learn emacs, in Windows and Git does not sound > like a very good idea. I understand. Yet you can teach them how to use Emacs. Then you empower them to teach them how to handle their life by using Org mode. Think about that, many things may improve in their life. Emacs is much better learning interface than just a browser alone, as Emacs can teach a person how to program, how computer works, and what is free software, it was for decades a good starting program to teach people about GNU, and today even more so. > For them, accesing a site with their browsers is more natural, > because all of them at least have an e-mail account. There is nothing wrong having people use browser, yet if you only focus on one interface, you would not teach, you limit them. Emacs is good for reading emails and good for understanding how emails work. You have plethora of other educational software, there is music software, there is chemistry software. Make a schedule of various activities, that is my proposal for you. > I doubt 30 minutes are enough for learning emacs (I recently tried > to show the basics to a friend who's a programmer and is used to > VSCode and he seemed really confused and kind of gave up). It is because you may have jumped over some misunderstood and he become confused. Emacs Tutorial is simple and can be done by anybody without any background of education. If person does not anything about computers of course that you would need to explain better what and where is Ctrl key or what is Meta or Alt key and so on. I have trained people in using Emacs without any problem within 20-30 minutes, just by opening the tutorial and telling them to excercise. After the tutorial those some people were opening files for me, they have been translating files into Swahili language, and saving files and later sharing with me. You could Emacs if not for anything, then for Tetris and promotion of free software. If you are not yourself Emacs user, you may need more experience to understand the usefulness. Even just for presentations, Emacs would be good resource, for the simple fact that size of fonts can be enlarged quick enough to make short notes to demonstrate to people. Many times I have helped people understand pieces of information even if they displace their glasses somewhere, just because fonts can be quickly enlarged. For games, you could use Tetris, or install Sudoku and already have a good time, teaching somebody Sudoku or working with 5 people together on one computer to play 3 session of Sudoku will already bring them good time. Jean _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
