As I promised, here goes my presentation! :)

Finally i finished to translate all the presentation! Watched the video a lot of times, pausing and playing to write all I said translating to english. :)

Fortunately I had a big help from my friend Victor Goff, that corrected all my grammar errors and typos.

I’m posting below all i have about the presentation, slides from Slideshare and a translation pasted here, but you can find the translation at Google Docs too. Enjoy! :D

First Words

My name is Willian Molinari as Marcelo said, I participated of 3rd Batch of Rubylearning at the beginning of the last year. Since the finish of the course I was an Assistant Teacher, and i’m a Mentor since the beginning of this year. I attempt to show to you a bit of what Rubylearning is and how does it work, what is the course idea. It is a short presentation, you will see that I’ll “run” with the content, but the presentation idea is to show you a bit of what RubyLearning courses are.

Slide1

Fist, lets start with “What is Rubylearning?” The course itself is Rubylearning.org, and Rubylearning is divided into Blog, Website and courses. Blog is where Satish post some of his interviews with Ruby community guys like Matt of Merb project or Dr. Nic. And on blog have other cool posts too. On Website Satish maintain a Ruby tutorial, a Ruby Book and post other ruby contents.

And on Rubylearning.org the course happens.

Slide2

To answer the question “What is Rubyleraning.org” I was helped by the other teachers of Rubylearning. One of the good answers was made by George Thompson, this guy that you see in the large photo. After telling a funny joke, saying that Rubylearning is for everything since it will “allow you to grow wings to fly” and will “help you in the bedroom” He gives these topics to speak about. The first thing is that Rubylearning is for everyone that has an interest in Ruby, if you are a experienced professional, or just learning now, Rubylearning is here to help you. It is a framework to your first steps with Ruby, so you will not depend just from Google or online tutorials, on Rubylearning you will have more people to help you to participate and discuss your answers and so on… Rubylearning is not just for who are starting with Ruby. If you work with Ruby for a long time, you can participate to help the students that are starting, returning to the community what you received. And you can participate with other Rubylearning intermediate courses (Rubylearning doesn’t have just the Core course, we have other courses for those who already have knowledge of Ruby) And of course…Rubylearning is a place to have fun! To code for fun, to know different people of other countries, or maybe of your country, and you didn’t know that this person was programming on this language.

Slide3

Rubyleraning is based on Moodle, as you can see, the image is strange here, but the first screenshot is the screen after you sign up, and you can see all the courses that you can subscribe to, and below you can see the screen inside the course, all the material is divided by blocks, the forums and so on.

Slide4

More interesting informations about Rubylearning:

We are the declared winner of shorty awards in education category. Unfortunately we couldn’t participate of ceremony in USA because only Satish can participate in the ceremony, and the price to travel from India (Satish is Indian) to USA could not cover the costs…But anyway, we are the winners!

The number of participants get over 7200 mark, and maybe now we already pass the 7500 mark, because this information is from 1 month ago, more or less.

Another cool thing, more than 40% of Rubylearning participants are from Brazil, so you don’t have arguments to say: “I can’t participate, because the course have people that from other countries and i don’t speak english very well”, because always you will find a Brazillian to help you there.

Slide5

And who is the main teacher? Who is behind Rubylearning?

Slide6

Satish Talim, as I said, lives in India. He is a programmer, teacher, consultant, working on some companies at India and USA, is speaker and has more than 30 years of experience with I.T. He has these two domains: Rubylearning.org and rubylearning.com. On .org domain we have the course and on Rubylearning.com is his site. And he have a personal website domain, too.

Slide7

Ok, if Satish is behind Rubylearning, who are these guys that help on forums? So… I asked to Satish by e-mail, because I didn’t know about how he divide us. The assistant teachers are people that come from the core course and enjoyed the course, so they are invited to help, and whomever accept comes as assistant teachers of the next core course to help on foruns, answering the students that are having doubts and helping on other things.

Mentors are experieced professionals that are working with I.T for a long time and more time on Rubylearning, too. They help not only on Core course, but on the other courses ( intermediate courses ) too. The Patrons, this guys are on Rubylearning since rubylearning is coming to be international, on the 2nd batch more or less, on the last months of 2007, and they have more time on rubylearning, so the way that Satish has to classify teacher is time on rubylearning.

Slide8

For who is this course appropriate? Well… Our focus is the people that already know something about programming, some other language and wants to know Ruby, and not those people that do not know how to program and want to learn on Rubylearning, This is not our focus. Our focus is to teach Ruby for who those have a notion about programming.

Slide9

How does Rubylearning work? Well…The course is slotted into weekly study material blocks. Every Saturday, Satish posts different sudy material with important notes, so you can review quickly all you already read; Some exercises, 10 or 5 exercises depending on how extensive is the material, for you to solve and post on forums, to view the answers of teachers too.

For example, you have a method and you are using return to return the variable on the PHP style for example, but can be other language, so somebody replies to you saying that you don’t need to specify this return because the Ruby language returns the last statement by default, and so on… The Quiz, is for your own benefit, so you can see if you learn all the content.

And the Extras! The extras take to you some good material as links to good content, a screencast related to the weekly study material, and others!

Slide10

How do quizzes work? As i said, Quiz is for your own benefit. A lot of people are questioning me about the importance of quizzes on the course participation, “if we don’t answer the quiz, are we kicked out of the course” or we don’t receive the certificate. The quiz idea is auto-validation, so after you read all the content, you will know with the quiz if you really learn all you need to learn about that content, if you got a good result with the quiz, you probably really learned this weeks content.

Slide11

Is necessary be active on Foruns? Humm…Yes! The main focus of Rubylearning is the participation of everybody, so, if you really want to get the best of the course you must to post your exercise answers, to receive from more experienced people feedback about your solution. If you don’t participate so much.. it’s okay too…You just lost the chance to learn more and more.

Slide12

This is one of the things that everybody speaks about…“Ohhh…The course is in english, from India, i will talk nonsense words, i don’t speak english, my english is bad”…Humm…My personal English, i’m a assistant teacher, is not so good, but i can communicate with others! If you can communicate with other people is good enough! You will read and understand the content and post your code on forums, if you are not comfortable to write english, you can just post your code, somebody will reply to you, you will understand the reply and it is good enough to your learning. If you can talk is really better, because you can help on discussions, but the english is not a big barrier to participate of Rubylearning.

Slide13

How is the course pace? As i said, Satish does weekly content posts on forums…Not forums…the study materials. You don’t need to follow this weekly pace, if you decide to view all the course in the last week you can, but we recommend you to follow weekly because you can talk with other people that are studying the same lesson and you have more focus on your studies making it easy to learn different things.

Slide14

What topics the course cover? Well…We cover all the Beginning with Ruby, from Ruby installation through…

Slide16

basic classes like numbers, blocks, variable scopes, constants, methods, manipulation of text files, Regular Expressions, but only the basis of Regular Expressions, how to work with RE with Ruby, working with classes, inheritance, exceptions… We can’t cover tests (the Ruby test/Unit class) on the core course just a bit of it, we want to create a course just to cover test/unit itself, so it is not a core part of Ruby in this course.

Slide17

Other questions that are often made to me when I recommend Rubylearning couse is: “I will receive a certificate?”. The important thing on the Rubylearning course is how much you can learn with the course, the certificate is not the course focus, but…The answer is YES!

Slide18

This is my certificate from 3rd Batch that i participated, really beautiful, signed by Satish, you receive in PDF, is not received in paper, but you can print and store.

Slide19

As i said, Rubylearning is not made of only the Core course, we have a lot of other courses that we call the “Intermediate courses”, and is appropriate to who that already have a notion of what is Ruby core, if you know core, you can move on to these other courses.

Slide20

The merb course, now merb team are joining Rails team, maybe this course will be extinct, but this is one of our courses for now. Git / GitHub is a course of one week. Git is not directly connected with ruby, but all the Ruby community are using it, so we decided to prepare a course about it. Ruby with database, using MySql and sqlite, you learn on how to use activerecord to manipulate a database from a script Ruby. FXRuby as Marcelo said in another speech. Sinatra for web development, maybe will get the Merb course place, because Merb and Rails will be one. Shoes, as Marcelo said too, for Desktop development, very interesting. Ruby and Twitter, is a course that will be released now, i don’t know when it will start, maybe april 14th or 16th, for who those already have a ruby knowledge, will be very interesting. They will show how to play with “Twitter API” and make some interesting things with it. And Rails 3, Satish promised that when Rails 3 is comming out he will create a course about it to everybody.

Slide21

This is some screenshots of shoes course. The application of the screenshot on the Right was made by Satoshi, that was the main teacher of Rubylearning shoes course, and is is a clock that show all the assistant teachers and mentors timezone on the world, all teacher have a photo placed on with their timezone. I asked Satoshi to send a message to all of you, and he sent to me a message with a “Google translation” Phrase in portuguese saying “Oi todo mundo” that probably is “hello everybody”, and he says that you don’t need to care about your english because we can communicate with Ruby, and he wants to see you on Rubylearning Forums. Here you can see other screenshot of a little game that they do with shoes, each student have your own game, you can see a “questions and answers” game on the next screenshot. Very interesting and a lot of fun!

Slide22

Here you have a message from Satish Talim, i asked to him to send one, and he is saying thanks to all Brazilian friends, Locaweb and Fabio Akita, that are sponsors of the course, the locaweb is a Sponsor of the core course, and saying thanks to you that are helping to spreading ruby around the world.

Slide23 - Questions

My presentation idea is to be very quick, just to show to you a bit of what is Rubylearning and how you can participate, what you will learn and so on… Somebody have some question?

Hugo: This courses that you show, all of them are free? Or have some paid courses too?

Willian: Yes, the core course is free. The other courses you need to pay to get in, but the cost is very low, something like 5 dollars, 3 or 5 dollars, just to maintain the website, Satish put a lot of his time on Rubylearning, so he need a way to maintain all of this, and he is making it with this paid courses and some sponsors, but is not high price, just 3 or 5 dollars with paypal.

Some other question? I trampled some content because I have little time.

Marcelo: Lets thank Willian, no more questions now…

slide23

Thanks! =)