Re: Workshop to save M$ Windows users - help needed

[Jean Louis]

* Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com> [2021-10-03 07:28]:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am preparing a workshop that will be a kind of an introduction to
> Free Software to people who don't even know how programmers think but
> who are curious to learn... It will happen by chat - initially on
> Telegram, but I will try to teach people how to use rcirc - and my
> main focus will be on:

OK, though here is short opinion:

- if you advertise channel or anything through Telegram it is vendor
  lock network, promoting the network, not your own service or
  organization. If anything happens to Telegram, you will lose
  connections. It is centralized system.

- to make your own XMPP server is not much, it could be US $2.50 per
  month on Vultr VPS

- to have your own domain for 1 year is also not much, I will gladly
  assign you subdomain for ever, at least I got XMPP.CLUB, I can give
  you eev.xmpp.club if you wish or anything similar.

- if you wish to have your own video chat, that is also possible, why
  not use Jami, https://jami.net and there are other solutions.

>   1. How in Elisp we can do lots of programs that are useful and that
>      fit in just one or two lines,

It is great idea to promote it. Though one or two lines will become
very very long...

>   2. How we can share complete short programs with the other people in
>      the workshop via chat.

If you are promoting Elisp, then best solution is to use your own XMPP
server such as Prosody installed on US $2.50 and the program named
`jabber.el' that enables Emacs to communicate by XMPP, which I use
everyday to coordinate our teams.

That way you will be sharing communication straight Emacs and be able
even to evaluate straight in the Jabber/XMPP buffers.

> What I described above is the part of the workshop that I already know
> how to teach, or to coordinate - "coordinate" because if everything
> goes well then I'll have ten people speaking on the chat all at the
> same time.

I just say, XMPP through Emacs is better for text transmission and
speaking could go unlimited with your Mumle server. URL:
//www.mumble.info/

To install server software is easy, and I can help.

Client software is easy and people can connect easy. It has better
latency, thus better speech and connection then other solutions I have
tried. 

> I don't know how MWUs think.

I suggest not to label people with "MWUs".

Everybody thinks different, is not even useful to try to analyze it,
and there are many programmers on Windows including Emacs Lisp users.

You want to teach people, provide lessons, don't worry how they think,
there will be interested people, that is what matters.

> I don't know how they memorize actions that are made of sequences of
> mouse clicks, I don't know how they take notes, and I don't know how
> they can deal with programs without having a clear mental model of
> what they do. I don't interact with them in person close to
> computers often, but practically every time that they see me using
> Emacs on my laptop they say "I don't have any idea how you can use
> that", so they also don't understand how I use the computer and how
> I think - it's reciprocal.

I had computer club for 2 times, and it will now be third time. You
can teach ANYBODY with or without previous computer experience in
computing. That is up to you to kind of align to the other person. I
have been teaching people who have never see a computer before and
came from agricultural fields straight to club. I remember the funny
typing movements with the fingers first up and then down, like a hawk
that is catching a mouse on the field. After few weeks the guy was
programming. That is what matters. We had children of 7-8 years
programming, and of 11-12 years programming in machine language. Don't
complicate. You can teach people anything.

Larger problem I see simply in the general environment of people such
as their country and culture of learning, reading books and
similar. If there are a lot of books in the generally spoken language
in the country, and there is culture of reading and learning, then you
should not have any problems.

There countries where there are almost no books, people don't keep
books at home, don't read, and don't teach their children to read. 

> I talked to some MWUs who are interested in the workshop and they
> don't have any idea of how to use terminals - they think that in order
> to use a terminal one has to have a prodigious memory and prodigious
> typing skills. Terminals are COMPLETELY alien to them, and for several
> of them this is the main reason why they never tried to make their
> computers dual-boot and to install a GNU/Linux in a partition.

Instead of analyzing hypothetically, simply ask if they wish to try it
and help with the installation. 

I never encountered your problems and I have helped many people switch
to GNU/Linux. It was in Germany.

> I believe that I can use a part of the workshop to show them how we
> can use something similar to the items (1), (2), and (3) above to run
> Bash in a shell buffer in Emacs, and to follow a basic tutorial on
> Bash... and that will make terminals far less alien to them.

Ask yourself "why"? Do they really need a terminal or Bash? I don't
think so. 

If you teach Emacs, use TUTORIAL as your starting point, but even more
fundamental is knowing how to use keys on the keyboard. Majority of
people will get stuck with proper usage of special keys.

1. Talk about proper usage of keyboard and special keys;

2. Going through Emacs Tutorial;

3. Use Emacs Lisp introduction and go through it;


-- 
Jean

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