On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 11:41 AM, Robert Mark Wallace < [email protected]> wrote:
> These individuals would also need guided practice sitting at computers, to > make sure that they "get it." > That's really the thing about the meetings. They aren't so much a tutorial as they are a "look what you can do". Sometimes they are kind of tutorial like and move quickly so it can be difficult for the unfamiliar to absorb the knowledge. To give a comparison I'll use two talks from Sean Dague. The Ruby on Rails talk was structured in a tutorial fashion in that Sean built a small website from the ground up before us. Sean showed us how things were structured and what was contained within the files. This was awesome but for someone who knows very little HMTL and no CSS experience I had nothing to really compare it to. Then fast forward to Sean's January talk on Drupal, this was presented as "I had this problem and this is what I used to solve it". It did not contain as much of a tutorial feel but more of a method and thought process. I am still only in the learning stages of using Linux and there are many basics that I overlook in trying to solve problems that many would be bored with reviewing if they were presented at meetings. Bruce gave an excellent presentation on top and other tools to try and figure out what is going on. To some this could be very valuable information, to others it may be a meeting that is spent catching up on emails and talking in irc. Also it is difficult to present something that others can learn for the first time without having them follow along doing it too. This would slow things down to a crawl. I definitely think the basics are necessary in teaching in order to grow but in my opinion this is better served in either a workshop or a tutorial on the mhvlug site. Maybe having a forum where people can paste outputs and errors they get and people can reply with what to look at next. Then maybe these could be cleaned up to be a sticky and would help new comers to learn the basic troubleshooting steps. -- Matthias A. Johnson
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