Tobi Waves

Yesterday Tom Limoncelli said that he thought that one day tutorials were probably the best method for learning new things. Today I did the 'self experiment' and spent the whole day in Richard McDougall's Solaris tutorial. Only minutes after the tutorial has finishes I can confirm that I really do feel exhilarated and would like to try out all the thing Richard touched upon. But looking more closely at what exactly it is, that I learned from today's slew of slides and explanations, all that remains are my notes, a headache and quite a number of areas I would like to investigate. I have not yet learned anything in the sense that I have tested and applied what Richard has been explaining in the real world. So even though I would have never "learned" as much as I heard today, I guess I would have profited more from less information and more hands-on training on real world problems. Or if hands-on was not possible, then probably paper exercises where I had to think up solutions which then would have been discussed later on.

The main problem with this more thorough approach is, that it would be way less sexy than the information blast method and people who pay for these tutorials want something out of them. At worst people might complain, that while they had learned how to make their Sun run faster they effectively had figured it out on their own and wondered why they had to pay so much for an instructor to only ask them questions.