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Subject: Proposal for Intro to CouchDB Coding class
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Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 01:24:33 -0500
From: Joan Touzet <joant@atypical.net>
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Hello CouchDB Developers,

Based on an informal survey of CouchDB users who are interested in
contributing to the project, two key items tend to hold people back:

   1. Knowing Erlang (and the CouchDB coding style)
   2. Knowing the CouchDB code base

So I decided to further my own grad research in Education, and
contribute back to CouchDB, by volunteering to coordinate a class for
6-20 students.

** I'd like to propose an Introduction to CouchDB Programming course,
kicking off January 5, 2012, and ask for support from the current devs
on this list.

This won't be a traditional classroom course! Students themselves will
be shaping the direction of the course, the topics covered, and will be
expected to lead at least one week of online discussion. (I'll be
providing the pedagogical framework for this Collaborative Learning
model. This is my area of active research.)

The idea is that, by the end of course (10 weeks or so), participants
will have learned enough Erlang to have basic competency, and enough
about the CouchDB code base to contribute. The "final exam" would be
completing and submitting some number of patches from the outstanding
bin of bugs in JIRA.

** I NEED YOUR HELP in two ways:

   A. Suggestions for good reference material (e.g. learnyousomeerlang)
   B. Volunteers from the current devs to conduct a "guided tour" of
      1 or more parts of the code

The "guided tours" are the essential bits for this class to be
successful, and I'd like them as much as possible to be accurate and
accessible to newbs. These tours could take many forms:

   * A screencast of you talking about some code, e.g. ScreenFlow
   * A live walkthrough over Adobe Connect video (time donated by my
     University dep't for the class)
   * IRC-based runthrough
   * "Ask the developer" - respond to questions about code on the class
     forum
   * You fly everyone out to your house for dinner :) Etc.

** If you're willing to help out, please reply on or off list and let 
me
know. Let's grow the contributor community!

All the best,
-- 
Joan Touzet  |  joant@atypical.net  |  wohali most other places