[oak perl] (fwd) 12 lessons

[George Woolley]

Phillip,
You have answered all 4 of my questions clearly
and directly.
Thanks.

Your project sounds like an admirable one
that addresses needs actually expressed 
within your community.
The project sounds somewhat ambitious,
but I gather you have a fairly large group 
to draw on for support 
and that people in your group 
want something like this fairly badly.

Best wishes on this venture.

      -- George

..........................

David A, 
If you are able, down the road 
it would be very kool to hear 
about the progress of this very interesting project.
   -- George

....................................................................

On Friday 07 March 2003 8:31 am, Philip Hood wrote:
> Hi -
> 	Here's a rough sketch of answers to your
> 	question - as much as possible I'd like this
> 	to be a "group project", but I'll give my
> 	vision for this:
>
> 	1.  The format of the course is 1 meeting
> 	per month that went "as long as it needed to" -
> 	I think that people's attention spans can
> 	go no longer than about 3 hours, but I have
> 	seen some meetings go 4 hours or more, but that
> 	would be left up to the "instructor" and the
> 	"students".  I also think that a good deal of
> 	the work will actually be done in discussion
> 	on a mailing list on the months subjects.
>
> 	2.  The impetus comes from the fact that the
> 	only thing that we all here seem to universally
> 	agree with is that all want to increase our
> 	perl knowledge and meetings that are actual
> 	tutorials or increase knowledge in some way
> 	or other are preferred over social type of
> 	meetings.  We've had meetings that cater to
> 	different types of programmers, at different
> 	levels and many folx, new and old to the group,
> 	suggested that a coherent "track" of meetings,
> 	that were structured around a twelve rung
> 	learning ladder, that lasted a year in time,
> 	would be helpful.  It would probably turn more
> 	people out to meetings than does our "hit and
> 	miss" method of organizing meetings now & it
> 	would probably keep people coming back.
>
> 	3.  The teachers would be group members of dc.pm
> 	who are interested enough in making a presentation,
> 	or we could structure something where groups of
> 	members collaborated on research and a collection
> 	of materials for each segment and a presenter
> 	gave the information.  There is no necessary level
> 	of "expertise" necessary, more so than each
> 	individual should realize that they will be asked
> 	questions, maybe of an indepth level and they
> 	will want to be able to answer.  Everyone is going
> 	to realize that the people giving of themselves
> 	are doing it for the collective betterment of the
> 	dc perl community, so I think most people are
> 	going to be happy that we organized this up &
> 	they have something to learn.  The 12 rung ladder is
> 	thought up as a "programmers helping programmers"
> 	scenario that should be open to the widest possible
> 	audience at the beginning and lead everyone towards
> 	the highest level of development we can muster.
> 	It should be free to all, that is, no one should
> 	be turned away, although I can see it fair that a
> 	collection could be taken by the "students" for
> 	the "teacher."
>
> 	4.  "expert" is used in, I guess a relatively
> 	loose sense, & I guess we make some suggestions
> 	about what a "well rounded" perl programmer should
> 	look like (excuse my puns all) - but by setting
> 	up a structure to the series, we're saying that
> 	an expert should, for instance, know the history
> 	of perl and some indepth stuff about unix and
> 	operating systems, they're
> 	going to know how to use regular expressions really
> 	well, they'll know all about perl and the web,
> 	cgi, dbi, apache, mod-perl, they'll know about
> 	perl internals, they'll know how to use OO with
> 	perl, they'll know how to use modules from CPAN and
> 	create modules for use on CPAN ... they should be able to
> 	participate in the
> 	development of perl and understand the internals
> 	of perl 6.  They'll know about the perl community
> 	and resources and people in it, etc ...  Again,
> 	my break down is a fairly "political" one, I
> 	mean, it attempts to suggest what a perl programmer
> 	should know ... and
> 	I've opened it out to the wider community for
> 	comments, refocusing, development, agreement or
> 	disagreement, as the case may be.  Some may feel
> 	that this list isn't entirely relevant & would
> 	like to suggest another course & they should
> 	feel free to suggest that.  All it really
> 	is is tool to help organize the group.  It takes
> 	on more life the more perl programmers take
> 	part in it, agree to take responsibility for a
> 	specific months class, etc ...
>
> 	Does this answer your questions ?  Let me know.
>
> ml
> pth
>
> On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, George Woolley wrote:
> > David A.:  Thanks!   -- George
> >
> > .....................
> >
> > Ladies and gentlemen,
> > the Oakland.pm ambassador to DC has made a request.
> > What say you?
> >
> > ....................
> >
> > All, My initial thoughts are that the outline is
> > generally a coherent suggestion given the stated aim.
> >
> > Personally, I'd want a lot more context
> > before saying much more than that.
> > For example, I'd be interested in knowing:
> > 1. What's the format of this course?
> >     E.g. One session a week? One session a month?
> >     E.g. Two hours per session or what?
> > 2. Where does the impetus for this class come from?
> >     E.g. People who wish to take the class?
> >            People who think that other people should learn these things?
> > 3. Is there a pool of teacher prospects for teaching this course?
> >     What kinds of backgrounds do they have?
> >     Are they eager to teach such a course?
> > 4. What is the working definition of expert being used?
> >    How do you determine if someone is an expert?
> > (Hm, perhaps this context would be known to me,
> > if I were part of DC.pm.)
> > In any case, if the context has not been explicitly stated,
> > my #1 suggestion would be to do that.
> >
> >       George