Contempt, not Content

When they say the name PSG, everybody evaluates it to a technical institute as good as IIT or at least the next berth. I too had a similar opinion as some of my relatives were from this institute and they have achieved great heights in their careers and attribute their success to the basement this institute had imparted in them. With this image, we made our trip to this prestigious institute, participating in a fortnight long Staff Training Program organized by the CSE department.

We were representing the NRCFOSS team, which is a mixture of NRCFOSS employees and the Chennai LUG members. It was the least day of the program and I was accompanied by Aanjhan and  Bharathi from ILUGC. Our original plan was Bharathi will handle Qt, followed by me handling Glade, followed by Aanjhan’s VLSI talk, then my Collaborative development talk and finally the day ends with a Panel discussion about FOSS and GNU/Linux in general.

We are expecting mainly staff and a moderate amount of students. Bharathi was there a day before us and evaluated the situation. We got a feedback that the interest amongst the audience was very minimal and they were still blank about the basics. So, we stopped our full fledged preparation and decided to manage with our current level of preparation.

I landed there yesterday morning, with a gentle drizzle making the climate seem awesome.  The hostel room where we stayed was ok, though a bit of cleaning up would have impressed us. We had our breakfast, in a steel tray and this made us remember central jail. Bharathi felt that taking both Qt and Glade would be way too much for the uninterested audience and hence we changed our plan to Qt, followed by VLSI and finally my Collaborative development. We finished the day by 3.30 pm and had a small chat with the organizer of the event. We were literally wondering why the basics haven’t gone into their brains with almost a week of interaction and talks preceding ours.

We then spent the next few hours talking random stuff, mainly dominated by Bharathi’s experience in IITM. In between, Aanjhan’s Deccan airways flight got postponed two times and finally his 6.45 pm flight was scheduled at 8.45 pm. We left the hostel by 7.40 pm and had a confusion of where to go first, drop me at the bus stop or drop Aanjhan at the airport. With high drama surrounding the next half an hour, we first enquired in a Conti travels depot whether I can board my bus there, then left Aanjhan in the airport, dropped in back to the same depot and rang the main depot to inform them of my change in boarding point. Bharathi then left to the railway station and I had to wait till 9.30 pm in gentle rain to get my bus back to Chennai.

Our expectations and preconceptions about PSG Tech got entirely negated during this trip. We rather started feeling that the private engineering colleges we usually visited are far better in many aspects (other than drawing monetary benefits from engineering education). Thus, this trip leaves us with a contempt of an otherwise highly thought institution and not a content of another good workshop.

After a small break

Its going to be 10 days since I posted last and it seems to be long. I have been literally doing nothing and hence nothing much to post (though I have been reading a lot).

Tomorrow am leaving for a day’s trip to Coimbatore, participating in a workshop at PSG Tech. on FOSS. I will be joined by Aanjhan and Bharathi. I plan to talk on “GUI Development with Glade3″ (as Bharathi wants to talk on Qt Designer) and Collaborative development tools. Then we also plan to have a Panel discussion to end the week long things, organized by NRCFOSS. The audience are limited to 15 staff members from CSE|IT|EEE|ECE branches and 15-20 ME students.

This time am not blessed with luxury of traveling in train, as I was a bit lethargic in booking the tickets due to personal uncertainties and hence have ended up with traveling in the bus on both ways. The ticket cost, am afraid, is more than what would have been in an A/C chaircar (A/C Sleeper Volvo to CBE is 530 INR). This is going to trouble my back, even though I have booked only in A/C Sleeper Volvo bus. God save this poor soul

VLBJCET Workshop - Experimentation Success

Every time we conduct a workshop in some college, we try to improve our method of delivering. We started years ago by taking our  own computers and trying to show things with them. With time it improved to they providing us some computers and we try to show with them. Things further changed that we have laptops and they just need to provide power supply, projector and other logistics, and indeed audience. With improving facilities we tried to improve the method, making it more interactive from what was once running through boring slides. Still we need to have a minimal presentation with slide for the basic introduction. What all can be shown interactively do not have slides.

When we were invited to conduct a workshop on GNU/Linux and FOSS by VLB Janakiammal College of Engg and Technology, we decided to introspect on our methods a bit and likewise prepare. We learnt from earlier experiences that doing is better than viewing. Second, having general topics first and deciding on specific topics during time of delivery depending upon the situation will also be better. Our last workshop wasn’t very much satisfactory as we were provided with a small projector while the hall was longer and had around 250 students packed, most of them would have been just sleeping all the day.

When we landed there we were told that we will be having only students from MCA and hence a very limited audience. Its better to talk to MCAs than BEs because [1] they already have completed 3 years of college education and hence are more molded, [2] they do not have the mind set that they are BEs and know things more than others do, and [3] MCAs know they have to do something extra to keep them competitive with their BE counterparts. We were also surprised that most of them had knowledge of Unix and their labs were running FC4 in dual-OS mode.

Hence we decided to try a new method, though it might reduce the total time available. We were more interested in making them understand and enjoy what we were to show them for the 2 days than the volume of knowledge we were to deliver. What we did was, after every topic we covered we called one or two volunteers from the audience and asked them to have an hands on experience. Thus, students actually tried out installing, using the desktop, networking, using Glade and QT Designer, database with PostgreSQL and some perl and python scripting as well. Though the first volunteer was hard to get, once he was able to do things the other were looking for an opportunity to try their hands as well. We got a very good feedback from the students as well as the faculty. They are actually looking back to do more things like workshops on specific topics, covering more depth in each one as well as even a faculty training program for all interested faculties.

We have decided to follow the same in our future workshops as we have found this experimentation to be really successful. In addition we will try to find where we might have done better and correct it out in our next endeavor. At last, landed on an occasion to feel contented for all the efforts we have been taking for the past couple of years. Got to carry the same spirit forward and enlighten more minds

Photos are already in my Flickr, do not forget to check them