Thanks to everyone for their comments - I'm enjoying this thread, but I
disagree with the "do it the hard way first" approach:
1. Research tells us that people at all levels learn more, faster, if
they're given on-ramps rather than asked to climb cliffs - see Sweller
et al's work on cognitive load, which we discuss in instructor training,
or Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, which we really ought to.
When we *do* ask them to climb cliffs, it should be because we're
teaching mountaineering, not because we're teaching botany and the wee
shrub we want them to look at is twenty meters up a sheer rock face and
what are you waiting for, lad, get on with it, we hardly ever have any
actual fatalities as such in this leg of the field trip... (That wasn't
the best day of my academic life...)
2. Most of our learners are already pushing themselves as hard as they
can to master ecology, economics, or whatever else *they* have chosen to
focus on. When we say, "Here's some stuff you have to wade through
before you can do anything useful with a computer," we're prioritizing
our interests over theirs. We don't just use a "most useful first"
approach in our lessons because it's more compelling than delayed
gratification; we also use it because it's more respectful.
3. And if people really *do* have to wade through a bunch of stuff
before they get to what's useful, it's usually a sign that the tool's
designers didn't think about learnability. Git's wildly inconsistent
command-line syntax is one example; Python's "if __name__ == '__main__'"
is another, and, well, the list isn't a short one. Every time we ask
our learners to wade, we should file a high-priority bug report and
figure out how to rearrange things so they don't have to. I mean, hell,
we're trying to change the way people do science: why not change the way
they build software while we're at it? :-)
Thanks,
Greg
--
Dr Greg Wilson
Director of Instructor Training
Software Carpentry Foundation
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