Introductory GNOME Basics Tutorial

["Christian Rose" <menthos gnome org>]

Hi!

At my university, we're been replacing hundreds of old Sun machines
with Linux boxes. Now it's time for us to finally replace the old
Solaris with TWM environment with a more modern GNOME one (for the
curious, it's GNOME 2.8 on top of Debian Sarge). Yes, it's not the
latest, but things are moving slowly here. The focus is on long time
stability and testedness rather than the latest bells and whistles;
important aspects when you're managing computer labs for the many
different courses of computer science students over a long period of
time.

This change makes us find a documentation problem. The old training
for freshmen on the old environment was based on us offering a few
hours of training classes in the computer rooms at the very beginning
of the first semester. In these classes, all freshmen could sit down
in front of a machine, and were not only given the needed access
credentials but also a relatively short paperback tutorial on how to
get started with this environment, which obviously in most cases was a
different one to the one they were used to from home.

At these special classes, an assistant (in most cases a more
experienced student) would be present in the computer room, ready to
answer any questions. This would be the only time during the student's
entire time at the university that there would be some training on the
Unix computers themselves. After these few hours of special class in
the first semester, the student would be expected to be fluent enough
with this Unix environment to be ready to participate right away in
ordinary laboratory exercises in other courses in these very same
computer labs.


The old tutorial we used for these training classes would start with
the very basics; how to log in, and explaining what you would then see
on the screen in front of you. Then it would move on to describe ways
to accomplish different tasks, like using one of the mouse buttons on
the desktop background to get to the Application menu to be able to
start XClock, and how to kill it by using the Window Ops menu on
another mouse button, and so on. Everything was combined with plenty
of screen shots to illustrate the instructions.

To make things more exciting, and to make sure that there was some
actual comprehension going on rather than just skimming the
instructions, there would be some relatively easy questions to answer
inbetween the instructions, like "now you know what buttons A and B
do, but what does button C do? Test for yourself and write it down
below." There would also be some lines for actually writing down the
answers and to make notes as you moved along. Of course noone would
actually check the correctness of the answers, the questions and room
for answers were just there to make you think about what you were
doing.

The tutorial would also gradually increase the difficulty level, and
move on to more advanced topics and tasks, with the most advanced and
not very important ones being last. This was by design; clearly not
all students would be able to finish the tutorial in the few hours of
the class. All freshmen have a different background, some have never
used a Unix-like system before, while some others have already used
Linux for several years at home. Obviously, all students would finish
the tasks in the tutorial at a different pace, while some would never
finish it at all. By placing the most elementary stuff first, we would
make sure that all would still be able to perform the most basic stuff
when the class was over.


If you've read this far, you probably realize that the current User
Guide probably isn't very suited for this. The User Guide is more
suited as a reference, and not as something you would give a class of
students and tell them to read while at the same time trying to
familiarize themselves with the user interface in front of a
workstation.

What we need is some tutorial of the "teach yourself GNOME in X hours"
kind, that would step-by-step try to teach the basic tasks with a
"learning by doing" approach, with a gradually increasing difficulty
level. Some experience with working on Windows can probably be assumed
from start, however.

Is there someone working on something like this? Is anyone interested
in working on this?

We know of the Intro (http://www.gnome.org/learn/intro/2.2/), but the
pictures are broken, and the text could probably need some
improvements. What's worse is that it hasn't been updated since GNOME
2.2.


Cheers,
Christian