Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Is there an industry analyst that can help me with an idea?
Every Monday and Wednesday night, folks from several Fortune enterprises volunteer their time to teach local inner-city children basic computer skills. I am currently teaching the fundamentals of relational databases and in the future I will be teaching Java. The one problem I have noticed is that learning is slower when these kids don't have the ability to practice what they have learned at home. I was thinking there are some industry analysts that can help me solve for this problem...
I posted a call to several newsgroups and many wonderful folks have stepped up to assist. Java Developers Journal Editor Yakov Fain has agreed to supply copies of his wonderful book: The Java Tutorial for the Real World which is targeted at younger folks. If you have kids, I would seriously picking up a copy for them.
The folks over at OReilly have also volunteered several books to assist in our effort. Likewise, Microsoft has been generous in providing copies of software for our usage as well.
So, we got instructors, books, software but no computers for these students to take home with them. Of course, all of us instructors can drop out of our desire to give back to the community and spend time writing grant proposals but this doesn't feel agile nor does it leverage our strengths.
I wonder what would happen if we simply asked industry analysts that happen to read this blog for them to ping their respective hardware vendors and see if they would be interested in making a donation, what would happen?
| | View blog reactionsI posted a call to several newsgroups and many wonderful folks have stepped up to assist. Java Developers Journal Editor Yakov Fain has agreed to supply copies of his wonderful book: The Java Tutorial for the Real World which is targeted at younger folks. If you have kids, I would seriously picking up a copy for them.
The folks over at OReilly have also volunteered several books to assist in our effort. Likewise, Microsoft has been generous in providing copies of software for our usage as well.
So, we got instructors, books, software but no computers for these students to take home with them. Of course, all of us instructors can drop out of our desire to give back to the community and spend time writing grant proposals but this doesn't feel agile nor does it leverage our strengths.
I wonder what would happen if we simply asked industry analysts that happen to read this blog for them to ping their respective hardware vendors and see if they would be interested in making a donation, what would happen?
