Re: things I'd like to see discussed

[email protected] wrote:

> The sorts of things I'd really love to discuss on this list include:

> How do you advertise/publicise your courses? 

The college advertises them, we get support from the Houston 
Geophysical Society and the Energy Related Unix Users Group.
I give papers at a lot of petroleum computing conferences and I
always plug the classes there.
 
> What requirements/prerequisites do you set for your courses?

I tell the college I'd like them to require our Unix Introduction 
and Unix Intermediate classes, but being continuing education,
we just take their word for it that they have "equivilent 
experience".  They rarely do.  

> What sort of course materials do you use?

My own handouts, which is a 40 page write up, kind of a half
fleshed-out outline.

> What platforms do you teach Perl on?

The GTTC (Geoscience Technology Training Center) has two labs.
The one I usually use has a Sun 450 and six Ultra 2's.  They
are Solaris 2.5.1 but they are going to upgrade to 2.6 just
after I finish my Korn Shell class.  I teach the class using
fvwm2 and bash as the environment, partly because I want the
students to get out of the rut of "whatever the vendor 
provides".  I also push nedit, but if they want to use vi
that's okay too.  I should mention that the workstations
have two monitors, for the geophysical interpretation classes,
so I take advantage of these having them write the program
on one monitor and run it on the other. 

> Do you teach any third-party software with Perl?

No.  I do start out with a short module on vi and nedit.
I try to work in examples from the major geophysics packages
(Landmark/SeisWorks and GeoQuest/IESX) when possible, and adjust
this to the makeup of the class.

> What do you find hardest to teach about Perl?

I can't for the life of me figure out why, but the concept
of a loop seems to really throw a lot of my students.  Once
we get past that, most students do pretty well.

The other area is that some of the students have been away
from math for a while and have trouble with the domain and
range for trig functions and the trig identities.  They also
have trouble with radians instead of degrees.  Since this is
not a math class, I try to arm wave this by (we don't really
have time to stop and explain these)

> Do you use analogies and metaphors, anthropomorphisation, 
> puppet shows?

Well, I get pretty animated and make a lot of outrageous 
statements to keep the students paying attention.  I do
a lot of colorful drawings on the white board.  I sometimes
make the students go to the board.  That works really ell.

> Do you get your trainees to evaluate your training?  What do you ask?

The college has an evaluation form but it mainly asks if the
room is comfortable and the books were available.

Will


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