NOW PLAYING: Hey, Teach!
26 October, 1998
I've done these before, but never the same way twice. The first one I did at the Southern Short Course in News Photography was a "hands-on" class that lasted for over three hours. It involved eight folks of varying computer proficiency and Windoze 95 machines. I guess the participants left with more knowledge than they had before the class, but I seem to recall spending a majority of the time helping people figure out how the damned computers worked. That's not a slam on the students; unless you're used to it, Windoze doesn't make a whole lot o' sense. And three hours is nowhere near enough time to teach HTML basics, image optimization, some design theory, browser compatibility, and all the zillion other things that go into making a single web page, let alone a cohesive site. Anyway, I don't have a three-hour slot this time (it's two hours), and I'll be in a room full of Macintosh machines (praise be to the gods!). I suspect, however, that there will be more than eight people in the class this time. Which makes me wonder if I should even try to do a "hands-on" version again. Seems like a Disaster Waiting To Happen™ to a large degree, even if I use some sort of WYSIWYG editor for the HTML. Yes, the computers will be Macs, and therefore a lot easier to deal with (epecially since the majority of the crowd will be familiar with them in this seminar) but the tools and the terms won't be. And there will always be Those Who Will Fumble no matter what computer they're on, while the Speedy Ones will be sitting around bored. The Wife is giving her perennially popular "Photoshop for Photojournalists" class, too -- which by definition is a "hands-on" sort of thing. But at least that's a program that her audience has used quite a bit (if not exactly in the ways she shows them) and so the fumbling is kept to a minimum. Yet it does happen. So it would seem that the better part of valor would be to do a kind of "lecture with examples" and then a Q&A at the end. That way I'd avoid playing Tech Support for most of the time, and maybe the people would still learn some good stuff. 'Course, I suppose I just could put Netscape Composer on the machines, say "Make a web page -- it's easy, just Drag-n-Drop!" and then go have lunch for two hours. Hmmmm..... UPDATE: view the Online Outline I used for the class
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