Wednesday, June 21, 2006

ITEC

Spent the day at ITEC in Seattle. I saw a couple people there, one from Seattle Wireless. It was dead slow, it seemed like there were more exhibitors than antendees, and many of the antendees I saw were actually my vendors there just for networking. Kind of a waste of time, but Mark and I gave a presentation on the IT industry and on staying up to date by working on projects, joining user groups, attending classes, etc. Maybe we'll get a couple customers from it, but the presentation had probably as many people in it as had stopped by the booth all day, so it was better than expected. My random public speaking is getting better, certainly teaching classes has helped that, since it might as well have been a class. Except that I was talking about what I thought, more than how I've seen things work. I guess they're pretty close.

I'm sitting here drinking a beer trying to decide if I should goto hack night. Eric said nobody's really showing, and since "nobody really showed" last time either, I think my tiredness and continuing cold is going to aim me towards the couch and a movie instead. Come by ITEC tomorrow and make things interesting.

2 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Does that mean the presentation went well?

A long time ago (in a time I like to call "Back in the day") I taught a basic internet course to a vacation rental place in Bar Harbor. Involving mostly just email and web browser, with some tangents into shit they asked like printing and some basic networking.

It made me decide that I never wanted anything to fucking do with teaching ever, ever again. I don't think you can take someone moderately technical and put them in an environment on non-technical people and say "Teach them.". Or maybe I'm just not good with people, I don't actually know.

Just wanted to relate my own teaching story, I felt left out.

Wed Jul 12, 06:53:00 PM PDT  
Blogger btm said...

As long as there's a commitment to learn, it can be done I think. It's odd, thinking about my inability to get into artistic things, even though I have a lot of interest in how they work (there's a lot of camera geeks about too).

But if it is to be done, there has to be a foundation to start from. At my school, we try to put a lot of students through A+ before anything else. It doesn't really matter if you are a system administrator, or a programmer, or a web developer. If you don't know what the difference between a relative and absolute path is, you're going to have a hard time with those conceptual pitfalls.

The biggest problem I have is with people who won't let go, or just shut up. They're more concerned with something else than learning. Maybe what they know, talking about it, why it doesn't make sense, excuses and avoidance. etc.

Insert devmotivational poster here.

Thu Jul 13, 06:41:00 PM PDT  

Post a Comment

<< Home