[Omaha.pm] Lightning Talks from UNO on Perl! :)

[Robert A. Fulkerson]

Hello,

On 12/7/05, Bob McCoy <bob at mccoy.net> wrote:
>
> Truth be told ... I thought your presentation was the only coherent one
> of the lot (don't even get me started on gaming consoles).  I missed the
> first round of talks during the previous week.  Obviously they didn't
> set a very high bar for the students.


     The gaming consoles talk was a special guest lecture I offered to Mr.
Cavanaugh as he was trying to recruit students for a just-added-on-Tuesday
special topics course on the "History of Gaming".  Just because a topic may
not be of interest to you specifically does not make an irrelevant or "don't
even get me started on ..." topic.  For the audience of CSCI 2850 students,
it was a perfect topic though it had nothing to do with Perl.

     Frankly, the first week's presentations were better organized and
presented than this week's lectures, which was disappointing to me,
especially with a larger audience.

     The technical glitch of the computer rebooting and wiping people's
presentation slides off the computer at the beginning of class didn't help
matters much.

     Part of the disappointment rests on my shoulders, as I threw this idea
of lightning talks at them only three weeks ago and they didn't have a long
time to prepare on top of their other classes' end-of-semester work.  Having
never seen a lightning talk of my own but having only read about them, I was
able to give some guidance but not much.

    This semester's talks have given me much to think about in how I present
the assignment to my students next semester.  They will at least know about
the assignment from the first day of class and will be more focused in
topics they can cover.

I was also shocked that, as we are now at the semester's end, that no
> one in that group had any OO exposure.


     Most students in the class have had two or three semesters of OO
exposure in C++ and probably Java before getting to the course.  The course,
however, is structured to be a crash course in Perl including regexes (6-7
weeks), the Apache web server (2 weeks) and CGI programming (the
remainder).  We do some OO stuff here and there, but that's not the focus of
the course.

Here's what I liked most about your presentation -- even though it was
> ostensibly about operator overloading, the Date example was really
> useful at showing the power of Perl modules to solve really thorny
> issues.  It was like getting a bonus presentation.


     It was a great presentation, if a little long, Jay.  :)  At 10 minutes,
it _was_ like a bonus presentation ... :)

     My goal with the talks was to have them investigate something of
interest, something exciting to them and then try to excite the audience
about those things, too.  It became apparent to me last night that not many
of the presenters were excited about what they had chosen, which is a shame
since there's so much to get excited about.  Perhaps next semester as we go
through the semester and they _know_ they're giving a talk on something,
they can be looking for topics along the way instead of last-minute.

Sandy Vlasnik's class was in there because we had some database projects
> based on the MovieTickets.com site.  I think that title caught her eye.
> So we had a "field trip."  And while the speaker did manage to munge
> together information from MovieTickets.com and IMDB, his talk really
> didn't give any insights into the efficacy or the vagaries of the
> process.


     It's difficult to compare Jay's presentation -- by a guy who's been
doing Perl for as long as he has and professionally at that -- to the
presentation of a student who has only been doing Perl for about 13 weeks
and who's just getting his feet wet.  I thought that the Google and
IMDB::Film presentations were, while rough around the edges, ones that may
have sold a few more people on what they can do with Perl.

     It's a learning process.  I expect next semester's talks to be better
than this semester's, and once the ball gets rolling and students have seen
what's come before them, who knows how good they'll be a year or two down
the road.

     Consider that an early invitation for next semester's talks ... :)

     -- b
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