Things I have stumbled over while developing and presenting course material on UNIX/Linux, TCP/IP, and information security.
"I found out then that writing is a kind of therapy. One of the few ways I can almost be certain I'll understand something is by sitting down and writing about it. Because by forcing yourself to write about it and putting it down in words, you can't avoid having to come to grips with it. You might be wrong, but you have to think about it very intensely to write about it. So I use writing as a learning tool."
— Hunter S Thompson, March 1990, in "Songs of the Doomed",
If you're interested in HST, you might want to see my pictures of places he lived in New York.
"I don't mind using rhetoric," Friedman said. "I get criticized for that a lot: it's 'too cute,' too this or that. But I've never had a reader come up to me and say, 'That book was too easy to read. That anecdote went down too easily.' To simplify something accurately, you've got to understand it deeply."
— Thomas Friedman as quoted in "Profiles: The Bright Side", Ian Parker, The New Yorker, 10 Nov 2008,
How much detail should you include in a one-week technical course?
A better question might be how much detail must you include?
It's bad when the lab section of a technical course asks the student to type some complicated magical incantion unexplained in the course material.
I'm not talking about things that are mysterious to the all-too-frequent unprepared student. I mean things that are well outside the range of expected background for students coming into the course, and which use commands or command-line syntax that hasn't been and will not be explained in the current course. Worse yet, if they are obligated to run those commands for reasons that are not explained!
Now that the operating system has been installed, type these commands:
# dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 of=/bkupbigkrnl
# bzcat $(ls -1s /boot/vmlinuz-* | sort -nr | awk 'NR==1 {print $2}') >> /bkupbigkrnl
Okay.... Presumably there's some reason that we will need a file named /bkupbigkrnl that consists of the system's primary boot block with the largest installed Linux kernel uncompressed and appended directly onto it.
If something is necessary, they need to know about it.
If something is not necessary, they do not need to do it.
The exception I'm willing to make is bonus steps beyond the necessary ends of exercises. But they are bonus sections — material added to keep the faster ones occupied while the slower ones plod through the needed main steps. Unless you have far too broad a range of backgrounds and abilities in the course (and that is the fault of the training directors who so frequently send inappropriate people to courses), the people who do the bonus steps are those who likely know those out-of-bounds things already, or who are willing and able to quickly investigate the one-line manual pages to figure them out.
This is connected to the last one above. There is a limit to how much an adult human can take in during an hour, a day, and a week.
Four-day courses of about 6.5 hours each seems to be about as much as is really useful.
Yes, you can get people to occupy space in a classroom for longer than that every day and during a week. You may even be able to keep them conscious. But they are not going to learn very much at all after the 6th hour on each day and after the 4th day of that.
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