From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2007-02-20T10:13:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Adopt-a-newbie? Based on actual experience.

On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 06:14:23AM +0900, Ruben Medellin wrote:
> 
> And, to avoid quoting all way back -I'm too lazy to do that-, I'll just 
> say I find great the idea of small "study groups". Of course, the term 
> may seem scary for all of us who hate school, but enjoy programming :P , 
> but the idea is to make it on a enjoyable, relaxed and productive way.
> 
> Should we let the newbies do it? Of course, that's the best way to 
> learn.

An infrastructure for prompting the "study group" approach for Ruby
newbies would be (relatively) easy to set up.  All you'd really need is
a very simple bloglike and mailing list interface.  With the blog
someone starting a group can create a blog for posting something akin
to "progress reports" and otherwise archiving what's going on for
reference, including some "this is the task we should attempt to
complete by the end of this week" scheduling stuff.  There'd be one of
these for each study group, that lasts only as long as the group does,
so the software need not be very complex.  For the mailing list, there'd
be a mailing list created at the same time, with the list archives
attached to the blog, so that anyone registered with one of them is also
registered with the other, and can post to both.

Archives for both should probably be kept in perpetuity so that they can
serve as examples of how various study concepts work out, and so that
people too shy about their Ruby learning can use the example of study
groups to provide some structure to their own autodidactism* rather than
leaving them flailing about trying to sort out which online resources to
use, what constitutes a reasonable learning schedule, and so on.

I'd set up something like that myself for the Ruby community -- could
probably get it put together in about two days, with some web software
packages that are available so that little or no actual programming
would be required to set them up initially (thus speeding up the
process, though of course ultimately it should be written in Ruby for
maximum relevance to the community) -- but since I'm already putting
together something more centralized and less Ruby-specific, I'm afraid
my attention is directed elsewhere at the moment.

Wow, that was a long sentence.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);