Re: [PLUG] [Event report] Introduction to Python: Maharashtra Institute of Technology, Pune, India
Do you think it would make sense to repeat this in other colleges? What is required - an enthusiastic faculty member? A strong student group? All of the above and, a method to continue the follow-up to encourage 'applied' discussions. For example, once the basics of programming It would be excellent to be able to continue the follow up with either discussions or projects, on the applied aspects of Python programming. I have tried to do this in different contexts with students as well as employed programmers, but unfortunately those efforts have not been very successful. I am sure there are many reasons for not being successful, and it's entirely possible that I need to tweak my ways, but I have noticed a few things, which I will share. Perhaps others have noticed them, and have answers about how to approach the issues: I have noticed that people will show a lot of initial enthusiasm. To put it in context, there will be a lot of initial enthusiasm for a Python workshop, for example. But if you try to encourage follow up discussions or projects in the applied programming, then the enthusiasm will drop by more than 90%. My theory is that, to be able to do anything over a sustained period of time, the only way to get it to work is to tie it to tangible rewards. Unfortunately, tangible rewards for students - are grades, and for employees - are appraisals. Please do not take this as a negative remark for either students or employed programmers. I am just stating what I have observed, and perhaps things are such because of the way our system works. The fact that improving skills will indirectly increase knowledge and performance, which will lead to better jobs, appraisals, is something I have found hard to get across. Even if I am able to get the point across, I have definitely found it close to impossible to get sustained participation. In defense of students as well as employed programmers, I will say that they often work under crazy workloads. Our colleges have a ridiculous number of credits which a student has to earn in a semester, which makes it impossible for them to really work on anything outside of the curriculum. This may be somewhat of a chicken-egg problem, which is hard to resolve... I believe many good universities in the US, do not teach programming per se. They have applied programming courses, in which students learn programming in the process of building something. I also believe that students are allowed to build what they want to. As wonderful a concept as this is, it is very difficult to grade the work done by students, in an objective manner. We have such a heavy focus on grading, that such a course would be a non-starter in the academic context ... I do not have answers about how to tackle this problem... but I am hoping that a discussion will follow, and we might be able to come close to some answers... -- Thanks Regards Parag Shah http://blog.adaptivesoftware.biz ___ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List
Re: [PLUG] [Event report] Introduction to Python: Maharashtra Institute of Technology, Pune, India
On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 3:38 PM, Parag Shah adapti...@gmail.com wrote: My theory is that, to be able to do anything over a sustained period of time, the only way to get it to work is to tie it to tangible rewards. Unfortunately, tangible rewards for students - are grades, and for employees - are appraisals. Please do not take this as a negative remark for either students or employed programmers. I am just stating what I have observed, and perhaps things are such because of the way our system works. And, I often say that unless the students are motivated enough to apply their knowledge for mere pleasure of finding things out then we are missing out on the opportunity to build capable employees and entrepreneurs. Let's face it, in each life there is hardship and difficulty. And yet, if one doesn't take it upon oneself to rise above it all, then what's the point ? -- sankarshan mukhopadhyay http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog/ ___ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List
Re: [PLUG] [Event report] Introduction to Python: Maharashtra Institute of Technology, Pune, India
On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 3:43 PM, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay sankarshan.mukhopadh...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 3:38 PM, Parag Shah adapti...@gmail.com wrote: My theory is that, to be able to do anything over a sustained period of time, the only way to get it to work is to tie it to tangible rewards. Unfortunately, tangible rewards for students - are grades, and for employees - are appraisals. Please do not take this as a negative remark for either students or employed programmers. I am just stating what I have observed, and perhaps things are such because of the way our system works. And, I often say that unless the students are motivated enough to apply their knowledge for mere pleasure of finding things out then we are missing out on the opportunity to build capable employees and entrepreneurs. Let's face it, in each life there is hardship and difficulty. And yet, if one doesn't take it upon oneself to rise above it all, then what's the point ? -- sankarshan mukhopadhyay http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog/ From my own experiences, I must completely agree with Parag and Sankarshan. Unfortunately, the only kind of motivation we see in the rare individual is self-motivation. This is not enough in our society, with peer/family/socio factors involving one's development, many students lose their own focus towards a goal, and end up on a totally miscalculated path. Students should be given much more freedom (and time) to think, explore and question, which is what I have seen commonly in the West. It's not difficult to realize how Python can vastly improve an engineer's problem solving and coding skills. It also has the power to convert non-programmers to programmers. Clearly the problem is systemic. Our stress and math and science in school, and college entrances can only take us so far. Engineering solutions to real world problems is something that not many think about, and once we do start thinking that way, then there would be more of Bill Gates, Larry Page, Steve Jobs (and Woz), Torvalds, and the likes from our country. ___ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List ___ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List
Re: [PLUG] [Mini DebConf India] Fwd: Debian Project News - August 15th, 2011
On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 12:47 AM, Muneeb Shaikh iammun...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, 2011-08-16 at 00:25 +0530, Praveen A wrote: Congratulations Muneeb! Congrats Muneeb! अभिजित अ. मी. Abhijit A. M. Phone: +91 9422308125 ___ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List
Re: [PLUG] Linux from scratch
On 08/15/2011 04:18 PM, Mayuresh wrote: On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 09:53:06PM +0530, Pravin Sonawane wrote: Hello all, I am new to Linux and this is my first mail too. I want to learn Linux in and out and was thinking the best way to do this would be to build our own distro from scratch. I know we'll have some pre-requisites to it like learning make first. But that's what we're here for right? :-) So what say? Reference: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ 1. If you are really new, it will be good to start with a distro that will get you going fast and then you can start your experimentation. Perhaps keep a stable installation handy on one partition and use an experimental on the other. 2. Decide what your focus of learning is on. Some of the areas to learn could be (roughly in increasing order of exposure): - Basic familiarity with a Unix style environment. Learning a shell, several basic Unix tools, editors like vi or emacs, common applications (mail clients, browsers, window managers etc.) : choosing and customizing them to suit you the best etc. If you are indeed new, you might want to spend some time with above focus before venturing into other things. This learning is what will mostly dominate your life as a user once your technical curiosity of how things work is satisfied. - System administration You get a good feel of how it all works questions, if you really get to see, tweak, mess up and recover several configuration files etc. Try insisting on using system administration by editing config files etc yourself rather than using some cosy GUI utilities. This way you can familiarize yourself with better with overall personality of Unix style systems. - Building applications and kernel etc from sources. Creating minimalistic configurations. You mention learning make etc. But make as a skill doesn't matter much for above focus. But overall you'll get to learn about typical Linux application development environment, configurability, deployment etc. You can do this on almost any Linux system, though Arch Linux and *BSD systems are slightly more inclined towards encouraging a user to build things from sources. (LFS? We'll come to that later.) From personal experience I can say, this desire to create everything custom or compile everything from sources easily turns into an addiction, though after a while you might feel you are not getting enough returns for the effort, as you don't seem to derive much value add as a against a vanilla build (often). - Creating applications / participating in OSS projects etc. A background with previous point will give the right perspective and some of the skills to participate in such development. - Creating distros focused on certain goals. LFS perhaps, but preferably with hands on experience on most of the above aspects. I'd say, let's not confuse creating a distro from scratch motto with learning linux from scratch. Mayuresh. ___ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List Thankyou Mehul and Mayuresh for your replies :) Yes I am finding my way through the system. I use Ubuntu 11.04 and I am learning shell scripting. I am still far from tweaking configuration files though I've successfully installed Drupal and many other softwares. As rightly pointed out by you, I should first focus on learning/understanding the system in its depth and breadth first. I very much like the idea of being associated and participating in OSS projects (through SourceForge,Google Code, etc). I would like to know if PLUG develops applications.. I would be very much interested in being a part of the development team. Regards, Pravin ___ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List
