Re: student outreach
In article edcafa7d0812120417q14ca238fm5e04ed29517c2...@mail.gmail.com, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: Which is quite cool, but there is more than that - it's hard to pick up practical skills at uni because the coursework and any projects of your own will be contrived and greenfield, so very 'unreal', I think Uri tried to solve this with Perl mentors, or something like that, and Google Summer of Code is similar. Having taught in universities, I think the problem is that no one encourages students to look outside the classroom. In the world of open source, there is plenty of opportunities for students to work on real projects with real industry people. Nothing in the Perl community cares who you are or what you do, so being a student doesn't limit anyone's participation. What we need, if anything, is something that tells students (and everyone else) how to get involved/ There are also lots of things that students would be interested in that won't interest the rest of us as much - places offering placements, graduate fairs, university courses, uni society events, field trips, etc that only people with links to local uni's will be interested in. That's the sort of thing I designed Perl Mongers for---directed local knowledge.
Re: student outreach
2008/12/5 brian d foy brian.d@gmail.com: In article edcafa7d0812050227i36b9b4cev1c6fe4e130daa...@mail.gmail.com, Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com wrote: If we can organise a mailing list, and maybe a web page or wiki we can provide some resources aimed at students based on what they needed More power to you, but I also have to ask what is different about a student and a non-student in anything the Perl community might provide? Matriculated students are the only ones who need to learn Perl :) It sounds like anything you would do would be useful to everyone. Furthermore, we live in a world where everyone virtually has access to the same information as everyone else. ... I don't think that there is any lack of content, but getting it to new people is always a challenge. :) Kind of. Students (from what I remember of uni) have some slightly different needs to fresh gradates and people in industry. At uni you have the chance to try stuff out that you probably won't have time to in work - especially if you end up in a less than enlightened organisation after uni. There is some advice at http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/studentdevs/index.html Which is quite cool, but there is more than that - it's hard to pick up practical skills at uni because the coursework and any projects of your own will be contrived and greenfield, so very 'unreal', so you won't really feel so many of the benefits of the kinds of practises you need to learn for the real world, like designing for debugging, logging, preventing SPF, unit testing, etc. One idea for a talk I ought to write would be : Unit Test your coursework, which I'd base on some of my old uni notes - the C++ and C classes were ripe for unit testing and I really wish I knew how to test properly at the time. Bascially, how to use unit testing and specification/requirement checking to ace your coursework :) There is a huge ammount of info on programming practise, but a lot of it is either crap, very specific to something that isn't applicable to anything you would see or touch at uni, or really hard to grok without having relevent experience to put it in context. There are also lots of things that students would be interested in that won't interest the rest of us as much - places offering placements, graduate fairs, university courses, uni society events, field trips, etc that only people with links to local uni's will be interested in. A. -- http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Hosting
Re: student outreach
this might be relevant. http://mailman.bristolbath.org/mailman/listinfo/freeperlcourse Gabor
Re: student outreach
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.
Re: student outreach
On 5 Dec 2008, at 17:28, Gaurav Vaidya wrote: Singapore.pm is still way too small to take on these sorts of projects, but there are two major universities within easy reach; once we've grown a bit, I'll want to try this out here. left field idea [1] : if you need ideas/work that can be committed remotely, you could always try and 'twin' with another .pm group for a period to achieve the project. slide review, brainstorming, etc can all be done remotely. especially if there can be a common language for the period. Greg [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_field
Re: student outreach
On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 09:18:28AM -0600, Andy Lester wrote: On Dec 5, 2008, at 4:27 AM, Aaron Trevena wrote: I'm guessing some you noticed ovid summoned the meme-that-will-not-die once more on use.perl. If you give me a bio to use (or do I have one for you somewhere?) I'll post this under your byline on Perlbuzz. If you'd like me to. Wouldn't it have a little more impact if the buzz started after some Perl Monger groups actually started to talk to students? Kind of Perl Mongers go out and evangelize Perl to students! with a summary of what was done, rather than Wouldn't it be nice if we talked to students?. -- Philippe Bruhat (BooK) There is a lesson to be learned from every bit of misfortune. (Moral from Groo The Wanderer #76 (Epic))
Re: student outreach
On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 12:17:04PM -0800, brian d foy wrote: If we can organise a mailing list, and maybe a web page or wiki we can provide some resources aimed at students based on what they needed More power to you, but I also have to ask what is different about a student and a non-student in anything the Perl community might provide? Matriculated students are the only ones who need to learn Perl :) It sounds like anything you would do would be useful to everyone. Furthermore, we live in a world where everyone virtually has access to the same information as everyone else. 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. ;-) Of course, this is very different from what most of us love to do (writing code to make up a new web site), but not so much different from other things some of us love to do (writing and delivering talks, organizing a conference). The peoples and the skills are available, why not just do it? Locally? Sure, a website and a mailing list would be nice, but I see them more as a tool to communicate experience and information between the speakers/organizers than as a way to give the same information to new people. I don't think that there is any lack of content, but getting it to new people is always a challenge. :) Yes. And my personal feel is that we have to use our feets rather than our fingers to reach these new people. -- Philippe Bruhat (BooK) Treat those you outrank well... you never know when they will outrank you. (Moral from Groo #7 (Image))
Re: student outreach
On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 10:27:12AM +, Aaron Trevena wrote: how about something more useful, a TPF backed student outreach program. If we can organise a mailing list, and maybe a web page or wiki we can provide some resources aimed at students based on what they needed Also, think of the foreign students! All original material on the site should be translated (provided we have volunteers for that translation job, of course), and since students are often geographically linked to a university, you can think of them as yet another kind of local users group. Links to resources in the local langage would be nice. Anyway, in the south west of the UK we have 2 perl monger groups and 5 universities, what we could do with is trying to establish a liason at each uni (in the computer club, comp sci department, bio-informatics, wherever) and a couple of people in local mongers who will try and to look at what students are doing, coordinate talks, socials and trips to workshops. In Lyon, we are holding our tech meetings in a school that trains librarians (I think), and have started to talk about opening the meetings (our biggest attendance was 9 people, and we only advertise the meetings on our mailing list). We also have started to talk to a local engineering school about coming over to make some Perl presentations to their students. They are interested, but we need speakers and material! A joined up effort could make it easier, we could share information about what uni's are using perl and how, and also ideas about what we could have done with at uni, Yes, sharing the information, the documents, and reporting back what happened would be great. For example, if someone has written a great introduction course/set of slides, maybe others could use it and translate it, so even more people can use it. a shared wiki, both for the mongers and students could help, and could also make it easier to hook up graduates or placement students interested in Perl with employers looking for trainees. I think the main point anyway is less the web site (students come to us for information) that actually going to the neighbouring university and present stuff (we go to the students and spread knowledge). The web site/wiki/resources you propose is not just yet another Perl web site; it is a tool to help the Perl evangelists who are actually meeting the students. -- Philippe Bruhat (BooK) The learned man makes a mistake but once... but the truly stupid keep practicing until they get it right. (Moral from Groo The Wanderer #75 (Epic))
Re: student outreach
On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 12:50:56PM +, Aaron Trevena wrote: I've added a page to the wiki to outline what I was thinking about. Do you have a URL? It's a work in progress so far though. Of course. Could really do with a perl.org mailing list to coordinate it - maybe a global students.pm ? Good idea. However, it's not aimed at students but at coordinating the people who want to advocate Perl to students, so maybe there's a better name to be found. -- Philippe Bruhat (BooK) Wisdom cannot be bought. It can, at best, be rented until you can find your own. (Moral from Groo The Wanderer #66 (Epic))
Re: student outreach
On Dec 5, 2008, at 4:27 AM, Aaron Trevena wrote: Hi All, I'm guessing some you noticed ovid summoned the meme-that-will-not-die once more on use.perl. If you give me a bio to use (or do I have one for you somewhere?) I'll post this under your byline on Perlbuzz. If you'd like me to. xoa -- Andy Lester = [EMAIL PROTECTED] = www.petdance.com = AIM:petdance
Re: student outreach
Hi everybody, On Dec 5, 2008, at 6:27 PM, Aaron Trevena wrote: If we can organise a mailing list, and maybe a web page or wiki we can provide some resources aimed at students based on what they needed - I found my contact with london.pm introduced to loads of stuff that would have really helped me at uni, and I suspect most computing students would find guides on practical programming using perl (amongst many other things) immensely helpful, and it would help fill the skills gap of graduates with useful skills rather than Java-by-whiteboard-and-mouse-click. I think this is a great idea. I'm not sure how many university students here in Singapore are interested in or have even heard much about Perl - there's plenty of excitement in the Ruby, Linux and even some in the Python communities, and Perl programmers don't seem to get invited to those sort of parties. But if somebody was just looking for a quick way to convert FASTA-formatted files into Malign-formatted files and this new wiki had a neat, clean, ten-line script to do exactly that, we might get more students giving us a try. Anyway, in the south west of the UK we have 2 perl monger groups and 5 universities, what we could do with is trying to establish a liason at each uni (in the computer club, comp sci department, bio-informatics, wherever) and a couple of people in local mongers who will try and to look at what students are doing, coordinate talks, socials and trips to workshops. I'd love to hear how this goes. Singapore.pm is still way too small to take on these sorts of projects, but there are two major universities within easy reach; once we've grown a bit, I'll want to try this out here. A joined up effort could make it easier, we could share information about what uni's are using perl and how, and also ideas about what we could have done with at uni, (If I had Perl Testing Handbook, Perl Hacks, and the Perl Cookbook in my first year at uni, I'd have kicked ass, ok, if I had them, and actually read them maybe) - a shared wiki, both for the mongers and students could help, Agreed. and could also make it easier to hook up graduates or placement students interested in Perl with employers looking for trainees. This would be particularly awesome: my current company is a really small startup, and we use internships to help with all our development. It would be fantastic to have a way to find college students already interested in Perl - and for them to find us. One last question though: Could really do with a perl.org mailing list to coordinate it - maybe a global students.pm ? Why a @perl.org or @pm.org mailing list? Does this tie into your plan of doing this under the aegis of TPF? We could just as easily start this as a Google Group or whatever. And, offtopic: I'm guessing some you noticed ovid summoned the meme-that-will-not-die once more on use.perl. What an absolutely lovely sentence :-). cheers, Gaurav
Re: student outreach
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Aaron Trevena [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If we can organise a mailing list, and maybe a web page or wiki we can provide some resources aimed at students based on what they needed More power to you, but I also have to ask what is different about a student and a non-student in anything the Perl community might provide? Matriculated students are the only ones who need to learn Perl :) It sounds like anything you would do would be useful to everyone. Furthermore, we live in a world where everyone virtually has access to the same information as everyone else. From my experience as an educator in many environments, students need to learn to use the resources that are already out there. The lack of that skill is across the board, not just with Perl. I don't think that there is any lack of content, but getting it to new people is always a challenge. :)
