XPages Workshop for Students. Need some input!
As you may know, we recently created a little team inside LUGTR and we are planning some activities targeting university students with coordination of IBM Academic Initiative. Our primary aim is te raise brand awareness within these students.
We are currently discussing about organizing series of technical workshops for senior students. XPages seems like a very good idea for such a workshop. We are going to present students how easy to develop fancy applications with XPages.
I blogged about this issue because we need some inputs about it. The easy way is to use a usual proof of technology workshop in the class; everything is ready, no need to deal with the content anyway. But I have some doubts on efficiency. PoT workshop is targeting developers with the former Notes/Domino development background. So it would be very bad idea to use it on people never heard anything about Lotus.
I am waiting for your inputs about it. What could a student workshop include? We should go with an outline or attractive scenerio for participants?
If anyone seen or heard of a similar activity, please contact me. It would be extremely useful.
Comments (6)
Howard,
Thanks. We will :)
Serdar, feel free to use our Intro. to Domino Designer course we have at our website for your workshop. It should be good for newbies to both Designer and XPages.
Howard
Excellent start, Nathan...
I think it's a good idea to have such an introduction. The first day may be reserved for the ground rules of Domino.
Thanks for the feedback.
Since these people will be new to the Lotus platform, I'd suggest starting with a history lesson. A lot of the strange behavior of XPages can be attributed to the long history of Domino compatibility, and there may be students who weren't even born yet when v1 came out. Knowing that it doesn't just predate the web, but it predates the proliferation of TCP/IP, the open source movement, XML as a general standard, 32-bit operating systems, multi-threading, multi-core processors, widespread use of relational databases, Java, and Windows itself helps put some context to questions like "why is there a 32K limit on summary text?" or "why can't I include content from more than one NSF in a view?"
The I'd spend some time on the structure of the NSF itself, showing how security & replication are built into the data store. Almost all the serious trade-offs for XPages are based on how NSF works. So if you show the features of it first, then issues like calling .recycle() become a lot more understandable.
I was a one of the students who attended the Lotusphere 2011 conference this year. We were all excited to learn about Lotus products and how to develop for them. The IBM people just assumed we knew what everything was all about. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, had any flipping idea what Domino, Symphony, Xpages, or whatever 12-15 other packaged suites IBM was mentioning. IBM seriously underestimates their brand penetration among university students. Nobody would take even a minute to explain what any of these products did.
When the general session was over they slipped us out the back door to a tent, and spent the day trying to pick our brains about social networking. I felt a little like a lab rat. We had no interaction with anyone. Security locked us out of the main building.
Long story short, If you really want capable college students to take interest in IBM software development, you have to supply them with easy access to development tools and documentation. Like Micro$oft. I have over $35k in free dev software from them. IBM wouldn't even license me a COBOL compiler.
IBM is a little out of touch with academia, and its sad because a lot of students wanted to learn about their products. If you want to see just how far out of touch they are, check out the Lotusphere twitter feed set up for us (students) #ls11u, it has like four tweets.