[group-organizers] Teach me X

[Brad Allen]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Brandon Craig Rhodes
<brandon at rhodesmill.org> wrote:
> David Christian <david.christian at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Has anyone had success duplicating this at their group?  My concern
>> would be that the group, not being self-selecting in the same way,
>> might have trouble finding a topic about which to do the "teach me"
>> session.
>
> My fear would be an even larger one: that there would not be experts
> present in the audience to *do* the teaching!  A Teach-Me session is
> often successful at a conference because the authors or proponents of
> the framework or topic in question see the announcement and show up to
> give instruction, answer questions, and make their product look good.
> At a local group meeting, on the other hand, experts won't just show up
> for free; you'll have to carefully choose a topic that you have local
> expertise on, or else risk having the blind lead the blind. :-)

If no expert is present, sometimes a source code walkthrough and/or
tutorial walkthrough can work for user group meetings, provided you
have a projector available. Instead of calling it a "teach me"
session, it could be called a "let's explore" session.