This weekend I attended Drupal Camp, organized by the New York City Drupal Gommunity, including and especially my spouse Eric.
My overall feeling is that it was great to see such a large and motivated group in action--providing two days of training and peer learning, friggin' delicious bagels, and pizza, all for free.
INTRO
The first day of the training I spent most of my time in the Intro to Drupal session, skillfully and patiently led by Peter Dowling. It was a thorough step by step download and hands on installation of modules, introduction to theming, and preview of drupal 6.4. It was a little too beginner for me, since I've already done all that stuff, but surely closer to my skill level than the geek sessions. I wonder if there's a home for intermediate or even advanced non-programmers in this kind of setting. There's plenty to tell beginners, but as soon as you get any skills, I feel like the gloves come off, and they expect you to figure things out on your own. But this is just a theory.
Fortunately/unfortunately, before we could get to the Drupal part, we had to install, extract, and edit various applications and files. In my windows case: 7-Zip and WAMPServer, plus of course Drupal 6.4. That part took forever and I think scared away the programmer types who happen to be new to Drupal.
It's a bitch trying to teach a class where the students' skills, knowledge, and comfort levels are so broad. And teaching beginners is really hard, especially when it's a topic about which you are extremely knowledgeable and that you have strong and complex feelings about. Peter handled it admirably, but not everyone at the conference was as generous. This session actually taught me a lot about teaching. So here is my advice for expert presenters teaching novices:
- keep it simple--don't explain all the whys, unless you're asked.
- no commentary and opinions.
- no chiming in from geeks in the class or helping with the class unless the primary
- instructor says something egregiously wrong
- check constantly to see if people are still with you
- keep things hands on, we drift off as soon as you start talking to much
The best analogy I could come up with is to think of it like teaching someone who has never driven before to drive a stick shift in San Francisco. Your telling them all of the cool things they'll be able to do after they learn to drive, or about all the fancy features of the car is nothing but annoying and extraneous.
DRUPAL IN LIBRARIES
This was a really good discussion, attended by systems librarians, programmers, and me. Also attended by men, and me. It was the second day of the camp, and there was significant drop-off, I suspect particularly among the non-programmers (i.e. public services librarians). (Which is not a criticism, just an observation!) The session was led by Jay Datema of NYPL. A lot of it was interesting, but there were definitely times when I was in over my head. The highpoint for me was Jay (a different Jay) looking over my shoulder at my computer--I thought he was interested in the site I was looking at or the cartoon that is my desktop wallpaper, but what he said was, "I can't believe you're really running Windows on that machine." (It's a work laptop, and I had meant to see if we could partition it and run a dual Windows/Linux boot last summer, but I never got around to it, and then completely forgot.)
RADICAL REFERENCE WORK SESSION
We didn't manage to restore the missing attachments or fix the way the questions and answers appear on the site, but we got closer. Maybe tonight. While all that was going on and I was all empowered, I downloaded and installed (including a wee bit of command line action) two new modules: Admin Menu and Tagadelic on the Rad Ref site. The latter is already on this site, but I don't think I'll need Admin Menu here.
Okay--that's it, so I can go home and work with Eric on finishing the work on RR.
Btw yesterday we also had help from Joe Golden, Greg Lyle, and Benjamin Melançon.