Headache

I’ve gone cold turkey on caffine. No coffee or tea for me – no sir! The result is that today I have a splitting headache, I just hope I don’t kill anyone . . .

James on TechEd Day 3

James has posted up his summary of the third day at TechEd last week. He provides a pretty good analysis of the sessions that he attended. One thing that didn’t seem to impress was the “grok” session that was run as the last session.

I participated in this session and did a quick and dirty over view of some of the new improvements in the System.Diagnostics namespace and Paul Glavich did a kick-arse demo of how to host ASP.NET in your own process using the new HttpListener class.

While James liked the idea some of the execution lacked:

• Some folks didn’t present on .NET 2.0; rather than focusing on 2.0 features Adam Cogan presented on some of his favorite tools. I didn’t mind the content myself but I can understand that it didn’t necessarily match what the overall session was billed as.
• Whats with the presenter getting a gift? When everyone SMS’d their votes in the presenter that got the most votes got a bottle of wine. All I can say is that Paul’s presentation rocked and he was very deserving.

I think if we do a session like this year Dave should modify his program so that once the voting has closed it randomly selects one of the voters and calls them back. The person who has the ringing phone also wins a prize!

As an interesting aside the fact that Adam came a very close second to Paul means that his session was pretty well received even though James didn’t like it. Either way – James’ feedback is really valuable since this was a prototype session!

Course Delivery is like Software Project Delivery

Delivering training courses can be a challenge, and its not just because you need to keep a fairly large volume of information floating around in your head for instant recall, but you also need to manage the delivery of that content.

I’m talking about timing. Keeping to the timings outlined in an agenda is about as easy as managing a software project. Sometimes you can estimate that a particular activity will take a certain amount of time with a high degree of certainty.

For example, I know that the introduction to this course will take no more than an hour to complete and then we will be into the first lab. How long this lab will take to complete will depend largely on the class.

Sometimes students take longer than expected and I have to decide whether its appropriate to cut them off (cut features) or let them run long. Like most software projects however you are always borrowing time because I need to finish by about 5pm on Friday.

I wonder if there is scope for a course where the instructor goes in and stays until the team that is receiving the training groks everything that they need to know with now gaps instead of the standard approach where you make a best effort to convey concepts and practices in the time available.