I have always been interested in computers, and would find myself hanging out with the Computer Science students instead of the Aviation Management or Business Management students I was a part of. At home and at work I have been largely self-teaching myself using computers starting with Excel and Access with VBA through ASP and SQL at work. Thankfully my current employer values education, and so I have been taking classes and not only learning the technology, but un-learning what I have been doing wrong over the years. At home, though, I have been teaching myself Linux, system administration, networking and the overall method of migrating our system from Windows to Linux. I am involved in the Danbury Area Computer Society (DACS.org) I have the opportunity to take what I've learned the hard way and hopefully help others.. I have been enjoying Open Source for a while now, and I am hoping to get a better understanding of the entire model and application.
Authored Comments
This is a good start, and I hope the response they received will inspire them to generate and open up more courses for varying degrees of expertise in the future.
Funny thing I found when I introduced Linux to the family, with Gnome (and now Unity) looking so different from Windows, the family members have no problem going between Linux (home) and Windows (school).
I think a factor of that is that the desktop environments are so very different that you don't expect the desktop environment to act at all like the other.
When you sit down in front of a (non-modified-KDE), you are immediately of the mind set of doing things the desktop-environment way, or will have to figure out who the desktop environment accomplishes the task.
This is instead of clicking and going through the menus, expecting a setting, a program or some feature to work one way (the other desktop environment's way) and finding it doesn't work as expected. This leads to frustration and frustration leads to abandonment.
Now the kids are used to non-Windows desktop environments, they are better about not expecting any Linux environment to act like Windows.
My wife, however, takes a little longer, but she's a trooper and goes with the flow.