OO.o classes

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 11:38 -0700, der.hans wrote:
> Am 25. Aug, 2006 schwätzte Craig White so:
> 
> > On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 09:31 -0700, Craig White wrote:
> >> On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 02:45 -0700, der.hans wrote:
> 
> >>> do we have anyone in town who can do a great job teaching OO.o classes?
> >>>
> >>> It needs to be someone who teach to those who don't know anything about
> >>> office suites and their components and also teach to those very familiar
> >>> with other office suite components.
> 
> >> formal fixed classes fell out of style many years ago in favor of
> >> self-paced instructions that led people by the hand - much as evidenced
> >> by your question (those who don't know anything and those who are very
> >> familiar).
> 
> Out of style or not, we have at least one company ready to pay someone to
> show up and give good training.
> 
> >> I taught the Sun spreadsheet to APS employees like back in 1989/1990 or
> >> thereabout and it was something I don't think I would ever want to do
> >> again.
> 
> Was it the topic or just doing training?
----
As you say - one company ready to pay someone to show up and give good
training.

In this day and age, one would expect someone to come in with a
reasonably developed course and I have no such thing nor am I inclined
to spend the time to create one - I have enough irons in the fire.

More importantly though - I think the classroom as an educational tool
rather sucks - I only need to relate my daughter's experiences just 3
weeks ago...

She is at a local Junior High School (name not relevant). The parents
group raised $100,000 for technology purchases for the school (not an
insignificant amount). This amount was matched by Intel and it was to
purchase a laptop for each teacher, a projection system, whiteboard,
software and of course...training.

Intel sent in 2 teachers who spent a week with the teachers - supposedly
a 40 hour curriculum apparently designed to be done 2 hours a week over
20 weeks. Each days lesson apparently covered 2-4 hours and the rest of
each day was wasted and they were all bored and angry at having to spend
the entire time there but apparently the course was designed with lots
of dead time to try to cover ground over and over again for the
technologically challenged.

I used to be the point person for a local Apple dealer who would send me
for all of the training classes and it used to make me crazy to sit
there while they were covering stuff that was too basic because they had
to cater to the less knowledgeable.

The point is that there are very few firms doing any kind of live
training anymore - including the Microsoft Office Suite. The only
training that seems to be done is vertical market software and that is
typically controlled by the software vendors themselves. Most of the
companies that used to do classroom training have all gone out of
business.

Self-paced is the only way to go any more.

Craig