Research and development with the help of your tutor or guide
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2011-07-09 16:29:42 - Graham Ellis
"If it's Friday, it must be Italy". We're in the middle of four days of seeing four different new places; call it "broadening the experience" if you like. Broadening the experience is like research - you don't know what you're going to learn until you learn it, and you don't know what use (or unuse) what you learn will be either. You can (and we did) make some elements of choice as to what we were going to do, in order to tune the research to ensure a good outcome both in terms of interest and of future use. After research comes development where selective elements are taken forward and developed; you may have noticedthe blog a few days ago that used list slices in Python and compared them to the elevators on the boat that I'm on board as I write this.The Horse's Mouth was slightly non-technical over the last few days ... no doubt that will swing around again as I try to mix the Open Source technical, the Melksham business, Hotel, Railway and personal stuff all up in the same set of strands, with none of the elements getting left out so that people switch off, and none of the elements taking over so that people don't switch off for the opposite reasons. And here's another non-topical / offtopic post. Being the "Horse's Mouth" I do, of course post pictures of horse's mouthes from time to time!
Although it's fun to look and learn on one's own, learning can be much more efficient in a group, with a group leader who will stop the whole group at pertinent points and describe what's to be seen and learned. We do the sme thing at work at Well House Consultants as we introduce people to Open Source programming languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby and Lua.
Sometimes what we see / show on our course is right in front of our customer's eyes, but at other times we have to encourage them to turn around, to look up, in order to see an understand something that's very important, but not necessarily obvious. And we have to choose to stand in what might be quite a surprising place in order to point out this important feature too. This is one of the true values of learning from a tour guide, or from a professional IT Trainer such as we have giving our course.
At the end of the day, though, the beauty is in the subject and not in the guide or tutor; that tutor or guide is merely a facilitator to help the customer find the features adn places of the subject or place that are most relevant and enjoyable to them. And it's the talks and lectures which are the enablers allowing enjoyable and efficient use of the subject at hand.