Saturday, November 28, 2009

[LINUX_Newbies] Teaching next semester

 

Just wanted to say, that unless something drastic happens, I'll be
teaching the Intro to Linux class in the spring semester. In the
past, I've encouraged the students to join lists like these to ask
questions before presenting them to the class... but no one ever seems
to get the hint that they actually have to do work outside of class.

THIS time, I am going to REQUIRE that they all join LINUX_Newbies and
post questions here as part of their semester grade. Im toying with
the idea of grading them based on the number of posts, or maybe
requiring at least 1 or 2 posts per week of substance (not "me too"
posts).

Anyone from the Powers that Be have an issue with that??

I have also found out that I will be required to hand in 3 writing
assignment samples from each student, so I've got to come up with
writing assignments. As usual, my dept chair and the lady who
compiles these assignments, are not Linux people, so their
suggestions all seem to revolve around religious arguments (Linux vs
Windows, emacs vs vi, etc). Anyone have some GOOD suggestions for
small writing projects for my class?

Some ideas I've had so far:
Find a CURRENT news article from a REPUTABLE source and write one page
summarizing and offering your opinion for or against.
Explain the history of Linux from Torvald's first post to today
Explain the Pros and Cons of Linux in the corporate environment
Write a brief HOWTO teaching how to accomplish a basic task in Linux,
formatted in the standard HOWTO format.

Any other ideas?

Class doesn''t start until the first week of January, so I've got some
time to come up with more... Now just hoping the book they use this
time is CURRENT, and not 5 years out of date. Last semester's book
was based on Fedora Core 3, at a time when Fedora 10 was available.

Hope everyone is having a good weekend...

Jeff

--

Pablo Picasso - "Computers are useless. They can only give you
answers." - http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/pablo_picasso.html

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