Meetings, MSU facilities, and membership

[Mark Szidik - Michigan Library Consortium]

Sean,

This is a very interesting idea.  I think we should get a
volunteer(s) to do some preliminary investigation work on this topic and
then present the options to the group.  Any takers?

______________________________________________________________________
Mark Szidik
System Administrator           Ph: 517.694.4242 x17  Fax: 517.694.9303 
Michigan Library Consortium    http://www.mlc.lib.mi.us

On Mon, 6 Mar 2000, Sean wrote:

> 
> 
> Andrew R Keen wrote:
> <snippets>
> > I'm NOT in favor of splintering GLLUG, but I think that it would be convenient
> > to have a twin organization on campus for scheduling MSU facilities and PR
> > purposes (SN, anyone?).
> 
> I agree, that there are some benefits of being associated with a college
> be it msu or lcc. Student involvement, publicity, and money come to mind.
> 
> *throws out a wierd 3.30 am maybe more for the sake of argument than validity.*
> 
> Considering MSU student organizations consist of MSU students and the
> sponsering faculty/staff person. The breaking up of the club into twins
> would also imply that in a non-sensical way that the anyone belonging to
> the non-msu portion would be all professional users, which it is far
> from the case nor is it the clubs goal to be a professional organization
> for (free-)Unix professionals. This implies that everyone in the non-msu
> affiliated portion is both a professional user and has professional
> level knowledge. We all are pretty much aware that this is not the case
> and we want to keep it open to all-levels of users from the community. 
> 
> In my eyes, the goal of the club is really about education. Whether it
> be a hardcore Linux user, a cross-over FreeBSD user, a new unix person,
> or just someone who wants to learn about computers or even have it be a
> social organization. The educational value of this organization varies
> by level of user and the aggregated knowledge of this community. The
> aggregation and disemination of the knowledge is the key concept. 
> This in educational terms really falls under life-long education.
> 
> In order to tie in with the university, (if we really want or need the
> affiliation,) would it be a plausible idea to create a life-long
> education non-credit course?
> 
> This essentially gets around a lot of obstacles since technically we
> would all be MSU students. We could have a small course fee, which would
> be waived for guest lecturers who would be welcome to attend any of the
> "classes", the classes would be a lecture series consisting of guest
> lecturers. It could be expanded at a later date into several "series" of
> classes focusing more intensely on different topics. These could include
> intro-linux/bsd, Perl, PHP, Python, SQL, C, kernel hacking,
> administration, security, etc  with or without some sort of
> certification of class completion.
> 
> As a side-effect, it could nuture the growth of various "free"
> technologies. Part of the problem with the adaptation of "free"
> technologies is the lack of available instruction. I can goto LCC and
> take a class on visual basic, where do I go to take a class on Perl?
> This might kill two birds with one stone. First it would give a place
> show people how to use various technologies, eliminating, the "I want to
> learn it but no one teaches it. I'm going to stick with M$, I can learn
> that at LCC".
> 
> It could also allow the development of a curriculum to be used by other
> educational institutions, like schools, or LUG's. It would already be
> semi-tested on real people.
> 
> The whole idea would also introduce several other problems and as I said
> its just an idea.
> 
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