[plug] Hacker Nights - newbies

[Leon Brooks]

On Mon, 26 Jul 2004 18:06, Jay Warwick wrote:
> Does this mean that the newbies will be sending emails to newbies
> for help?  Doesn't seem to be much point in that!

Actually, there is.

The old one-room schoolhouses had a big advantage over the more recent, 
age-segregated style in that the more experienced children helped with 
teaching the less. This worked in two ways, one of which speaks for 
your argument, and one against.

The more experienced children were forced to recap and package their 
knowledge for delivery to the less experienced. This meant that gaps in 
their knowledge showed up fairly rapidly. This speaks against 
segregation.

The less experienced were recieving instruction from people closer to 
their own age, worldview, experience and expectations. This meant that 
the information was more often packaged in ways that they could relate 
to. This speaks for segregation by experience, it's just that the 
modern systems take it too far, and are too thoroughly keyed to the 
(anti-FOSS) idea that wisdom is _only_ reticulated from a central 
source (the teacher, who in turn derives it from The Approved 
Curriculum).

So... it's not as cut-and-dried as you might think, either way. I'd be 
tempted to add a guru list but make membership on the newbie list a 
condition of membership on the guru list, and make acceptance into the 
guru list (modulo a grandfather clause) require sponsorship from (say) 
three gurus and three _newbies_. Sure, you can route the newbie list 
to /dev/null, and some people will, but by and large I think it will 
keep gurus in the loop.

Cheers; Leon