Education Program Ideas

New Course Ideas

• Advanced Adoption Courses (Open Office, GIMP, Tech Support Courses)

• Staff and Volunteer Teacher Training (Teaching the Teachers how to Teach!)

• Keyboarding Classes Using Free Online Software (This could help to prepare for typing tests required for certain lines of work, and prepare students for various educational opportunities at FREE GEEK)

• Problem-Based Command Line Course (To Follow Basic Command Line and Advanced Command Line...Rob Love said he would be interested in teaching a problem-based course every other time he is here) In Progress! Yes!

Advanced tech classes grocery list

Please prioritize level of interest/importance/need using exclamation points (!, !! or !!!=ultra important; for example: !!! Problem-based command line course)

• Disk Management
  • RAID
  • LVM
  • Disk encryption

• Security Best Practices
  • Secure passphrase hygiene and management (!!!)
  • SSH (!!)
  • GnuPG (!!)
    • OpenPGP Best Practices
    • monkeysphere

• Why secure web browsing is broken
  • convergence
  • perspectives
  • certificate patrol
  • monkeysphere

• Miscellaneous
  • screen and byobu

• Free Software Development
  • Bug reporting
  • Basic Debian Packaging
  • Debian_Package_Repositories
  • Version Control Systems
    • git
    • svn
    • bzr
    • hg

• Administration Basics
  • Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (!!!) I taught a workshop on this last year and have notes I believe paulm 01:51, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Intro to vi/vim (!)
  • User/Group Management, sudo, and sudoers (!!)
  • Reading and configuring system logs (!!)
  • Compiling from source (!)
  • Commands you should know (!!!)
    • tar, du, df, mount, watch, find, shred, rsync, route, nslookup, host, ifconfig, iwconfig, dmesg, ps, pstree, pgrep, kill, pkill, w, lastlog, faillog, lspci, lsmod, modprobe
  • Intro to bash scripting (!!) (I taught this class a couple of years ago and still have it all ready to go again (see http://www.gatheringstorms.org/wiki/doku.php?id=bash_course) paulm 01:51, 26 January 2012 (UTC)).
  • Scheduling events (at, cron, anacron) (!!)
  • Configuring Apache and Hosting your own Webpage (!!!)
  • Troubleshooting using logs & stderr (!!!)

• Power User Goodies
  • Advanced vim usage (!)
  • Terminal multiplexers (screen, tmux) (!)
  • IRC (!!)
  • Life in the Console (e-mail clients, task managers, calendars, web-browsing, etc) (!)

• Tech Support Trainings
  • Network backups and restores (!!!)
  • Fundamentals of Troubleshooting (!!!)
    • Envisioning this as a multi-part training starting with concepts and then a series of example situations and problems, culminating in an exam-like session
  • How to Root a Box (Or 'Why We Never Need to Know a Password') (!!!)
  • User Relations (Or 'How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Phone') (!!!)

I would like to Work on/Improve

• Follow-up:
  • Certifications/Graduation/Sense of Accomplishment for Students
  • Retention - we keep them coming back, and they keep the knowledge acquired
  • Surveys - I am interested in the response to the prompt: What did you learn? How do people explain what they have learned? How does Free Geek prepare people for different jobs/educational opportunities/hobbies?

• Curriculum - Can our substitute teachers step in and teach a course with ease?

• Classroom Space
  • Stock of Paper/Pens in classroom
  • Aesthetics and acoustics of classroom
  • Course Objectives in each learning area – The objectives posted in pre-build are wonderful. I want to post station-specific objectives throughout FREE GEEK.
  • Explanation of flow-charts and how to use them! For those who have NEVER used a flow chart before, mastering a new tool and new vocabulary at the same time can be overwhelming. If we teach the tool (flow-Charts) using familiar vocabulary, then the learner can plug new information into a familiar tool and feel less intimidated. (See Ali's sample flow chart on her wiki page...something along those lines could be helpful)
  • Spell out Colors on Color-Coded Flow-Charts This is just one more tool to help people know where they are supposed to be looking! I want to spell colors out because some people are color-blind and some people are just not very observant (example: I didn't notice charts were color-coded until it was pointed out to me).
• Use Moodle for Course Syllabi

Some Questions

What do we have to offer people who finish build? How do we keep them at FREE GEEK and challenge them appropriately?

• we currently have 4 options: (they all take there own type of special person)
  • Advanced testing, testing harddrives, memory, procs & mobos, cdburner & dvd players, and various cards.
  • laptops, set up just like build, the hardware is much more intricate
  • Macs (apple), also set up just like build, the hardware is easier to teach and deal with.
  • build teaching, assisting: this is an option in all the build areas.