[nzlug] HBCLUG GNU/Linux Initiative - initial success!

[Simon Bridge]

Some people thinking along similar lines may find this interesting...

Under the auspicies of HBCLUG I am presenting  night-school course
called
"Open Source Computing (Free Software Techniques for Normal People)"
at Orewa College through their Community Education programme.

The course is slated for 4 weeks each term, covering core concepts in IT
from a FOSS perspective. It is targeted at people on a low or fixed
income.

I convinced the college to allow me to run an introductionary seminar,
free of charge, last Thursday, and followed this with an installfest on
Saturday.

I advertised 1 week ahead of time with posters in the smaller IT shops
around the place, as well as DSE Orewa and Albany. I also stuck a card
up on the New World notice board :)

Six people booked the seminar in advance, with two of them committing to
the course. Nine people showed up to the seminar itself which turned
lively and went well into overtime.

Of the advertising, it was the supermarket board that drew the most
people!

At the installfest, I offered Ubuntu 7.10 and openSUSE 10.3. Seven
people showed - despite the weather. Installed Ubuntu to four machines
(3x pIII and one custom quad-core). Another custom computer refused to
deliver the POST, so nothing could be done there.

Everyone present expressed enthusiasm about the course - we'll see.

One of the students turns out to be a professional programmer. His
company sells software rather than related things backed by software -
which leads to discussions about different tools and licenses. Also
about how Vista is doing quite well these days thank you... I don't know
what he's doing on this course though.

I'm going to chalk these first two events up as successes.

Could use some pointers vis:

* I don't know enough about Vista to talk abouts possible suspicious
points - I concentrated on lock-in and licensing. (a la badvista.org)

* C# was suggested as good for a beginner programmer over Java or C/C
++ ... this seems to be one of those "vi-vs-emacs" debates, but doesn't
C# tie you to the .net framework? How careful do you have to be to end
up with FOSS C# code?

I suggested Java or Python for the kinds of things I learned in BASIC
and Pascal. But I've used neither (of the former). I also pointed out
that people who think they want to "dabble" in programming under linux
usually end up trying much more than the same person would attempt in a
closed environment... so lets provide the tools huh?

There are more experienced folk about - what's good for someone who just
wants to potter around?