On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 10:11 AM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote: > On Sat, 18 Sep 2010, Eduardo Grosclaude wrote: > >> On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 5:06 AM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote: >> >> > p.s. one stupendously trivial idea i had was to give each student >> > a cheap USB drive and use that as the vehicle for playing with >> > filesystem utilities. with an $8 2G drive, i can demonstrate >> > concepts like hotplugging, udev, LVM and so on, knowing i'll never >> > risk the contents of the hard drive. >> >> That reminds me of a sysadmin course where we set up minimal, >> console-only QEMU virtual machines with two virtual disks, and >> taught fdisk, mkfs, RAID, LVM and the like. > > interesting ... is this course publicly available? be fun to take a > look at it. The course materials were just the labs, along with succinct syntax notes. Exercises were just "partition that drive according to the following criteria", "create a PV/VG/LV that size", "build a level 1 RAID volume", "declare that RAID component invalid", that sort of things. Theory was kept at a minimum and was orally exposed. When managing educational efforts, I have encouraged instructors to concentrate in hands-on training, write minimal labs guides, and take the "Internet is already filled with info" approach wrt other docs. Of course, guidance was given about where and what to read: look for docs from your distro, learn to know when docs are out of date, etc. My experience is that non-academia students, while enthusiastic, lack studying muscle, and handouts you throw at them are seldom read or understood. Face-to-face is different; that's the place where your theory should go. However, they can build up a practical understanding of the task they must accomplish, so they can attempt to read documentation later. The labs should pull the theory, while University does the other way around. I found out this while being an instructor for Cisco CCNA program -- it wasn't an easy switch. -- Eduardo Grosclaude Universidad Nacional del Comahue Neuquen, Argentina