[vox-outreach] Holding a Linux class (Was re: New to the area)

[Bill Kendrick]

On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 05:31:56PM -0400, Harold Lee wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> I'm a long-time Linux user and OSS fan, new to Davis. I'm 
> also interested in volunteering to teach classes. I'm a 
> C/C++ database programmer by day, and I plan on coming to 
> next week's social meeting..

Thanks Harold!  Henry House and Rod Roark are two other people
still around and active who I can think of that can help with this
(at least insofar as explaining what we've done in the past).

Here's my brain-dump, to get things rolling... :^)


In the past, our contact to the Davis Community Network (DCN) was
Richard Lowenberg, who has since moved away.  DCN were the ones who
hooked us up with a meeting room (full of computers, which we normally
booted off of Linux live CDs like Knoppix, or ran VNC on the Windows
installs to talk to a remote Linux server).

The room is the City of Davis Computer Lab, located at 600 A Street.

It looks like we haven't done a class for a few years now, so we'll need
to do a lot of work to get ramped up, including:

  1. Figure out who to contact at DCN or the City of Davis
  2. Find volunteers to help run the class
  3. Advertise the class (perhaps with help from DCN and/or the City)
  4. Decide what kind of content to talk about
     (in the past we've done "Intro to Linux," "Linux for the Office"
     and "Linux for the Home & Small Business Network.")
  5. Figure out HOW to present the content in a hands-on way
  6. Create and duplicate handouts (info sheets and/or CDs to give out)

Classes have been on a weekday evening, for a few hours, if I recall correctly.
So it's good to keep it focused.

One interesting datapoint to share:  people who came to classes were almost
always people who have never come to a LUGOD meeting before.  People who
came to classes rarely attended LUGOD after the fact, sadly.
(Perhaps something we should do is ask them if they'd like us to sign them
up on the 'vox-announce' mailing list :^) )


Thanks again and good luck!  Enjoy the social gathering tonight!


-bill!