Duncan wrote:

> Wow!  I know someone whose kid is just getting into *ix and asked for
> recommendations.  This could be right up their alley as the kid is high
> school age.  Regardless of what Gentoo does with this, I know one person
> that's getting a link to the class site (the etec150 dir) sent to them.
> =8^)

This is the kind of person I am trying to reach, every 13-20 year old in the
world that has an interest in computers but has no good way to start learning
about them.  I have tried teaching beginners on some of the other distros (
including Redhat, Ubuntu and Linux From Scratch ) but they did not have the
balance between difficulty and simplicity that is needed by a beginner.

Another interesting thing here is that I think a significant number of Gentoo
users and developers know a kid or two who would like to learn the fundamentals
of computers and Linux :-)

Instead of just making the ebook available on the Gentoo site, my thought is
that a free online class based upon the book could periodically be offered by
the Gentoo foundation to anyone who is interested.  I have had some experience
teaching free online software classes over the Internet to hundreds of students
at a time and this works quite well if done correctly.




> I'm impressed to see this use of Linux in the educational system happening
> in the US, not just everywhere else, as it sometimes seems from the news.
> When you are done developing the coursework, I'd love to see pieces on it
> in LWN and/or sites such as Linuxwatch and linux.com/newsforge.  I've got
> the site bookmarked and may be mailing you offlist, as well.

My first choice would be to have pieces issued to the Linux news sites that
indicate that Gentoo is offering a free course to newbies based on these
materials.  If Gentoo ends up not taking this route, I will probably pursue the
idea on my own, but I really think that Gentoo would not have much to lose by
at least trying this idea as an experiment :-)

Thanks,

Ted
tkosan@...


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