The Learnometer
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If you missed our opinion on How to Spot a Good Instructor, we identified the critical role the instructor plays in the learning process.
In this article, we'll continue our look at the in-person experience. But this time, we'll flip things around, and talk about how you – the student/attendee – can tell if the class is helping you achieve your objectives, or if it's actually a colossal waste of your time.
We don't think paying for a class should be a waste of time. It should be a growing experience, and, dare we say, fun.
Measuring Workshop Effectiveness
It would be great if there was a learnometer. You know: something you could stick under your tongue to measure how much you learned.
If you simply gained knowledge of new facts, you've thrown your money down the drain.
Facts have been pretty much become a commodity. Learning facts from a live instructor is about the most expensive way to get them. In contrast, this is the sweet spot for blogs: as a fountain of facts. “Here's how you setup a Git repository.” “How to configure ActionMailer to send GMail.” And so on.
Indeed, if all you want are facts, just search the web, cargo-cult what you need, and you're done.
A great workshop isn't all about facts. At a Purple Workshop, you might actually be a little frustrated that we don't spend all our time giving out pre-made code examples that you can just copy and paste into your project.
We don't do that because it would be unfair to you, the attendee. It really would be a colossal waste of your time.
The Wake Behind Your Boat
Instead, a great workshop or classroom experience is more than getting new facts. You've learned how to learn. The best thing you can get from a class is learning how to learn more without the class.
A visual analogy might help here.
You're standing at the helm of a big yacht. It's time to leave the dock and travel to the other side of the ocean. You know enough facts about the big steering wheel to know how to use it. And no doubt, it's important to know how to steer a boat.
But if all you know how to do is turn the wheel this way and that, after an hour, you're still in the same place. Stuck at the dock.
Successful boat captains know how to move the boat. There's a direction. Even with a beginner at the helm, we might be moving slowly, but we'd be moving forward nonetheless. You could look back and see the wake being left behind. And now, steering the boat becomes useful.
But classes that are primarily about acquiring facts aren't useful. You'll get home from the workshop, start working on a project that's not exactly the same as the class example, and you'll be stuck. Dead in the water. And unfortunately, most people in this predicament start googling for more facts, in an attempt to solve their problems.
Learning how to Learn
Sometimes at a workshop, we'll start by doing things “the hard way.” More precisely, we'll make sure you understand the motivation and reason behind everything we do. So when that Rails scaffold generator doesn't generate the HTML you need, you won't be stuck, because you'll know what to do next and why. When your migrations fail, you won't be stuck, because you'll understand the relationship between schema versions and the migration architecture so you can fix it.
Perhaps best of all, you'll be able to learn more on your own without needing a lot more workshops. Indeed, once you get the hang of it, learning how to learn more becomes second nature.
You might even say, it becomes fun.