[PD] [OT] successful methods for PD seminars

[Sam]

Hi,

Former Novocastrian and past Electrofringe attendee here:

I was taught max last year, and in a short space of time over at the Uni of
Sydney. The group that was taught were all pretty much novices, and were all
pretty confused about what to do with this knowledge. The approach was
pretty much to talk us through setting up a very simple patch and then show
us pre-baked large scale patches and explain the critical concepts behind
them. This managed to cover getting midi into Max and getting audio out, and
a couple of other things about messages moving through the patch and
subpatching etc.

The main good things that the lecturer did was to explain the important iput
and output things fairly transparently and quickly.  The main thing he
could've done better is show how easy it is to build up a bigger patch from
smaller building blocks. We were presented with enormous patches that did
wonderful things as demonstrations, but we learnt how to do very simple
things with patches we built painstakingly slowly as we learnt concept by
concept. Time constraints (3hrs) were the main reason for this of course,
but I think a good PD tutorial would hopefully finish with the students
feeling that they could easily build something big if they had an idea for a
patch. It would've been a bit more effective if the two concepts (small
simple patch, big complicated patch) had been related effectively...

I do think that fiddling about and asking questions is the only good way to
get an understanding of the program, because there really is a lot of ideas
that aren't immediately obvious from the user interface and a lot of the
ideas are fairly abstract at first. I also think the debugging process is
one of the best ways of learning the inner workings of the program. But it
can also be the most painful if you don't know how to go about debugging
properly and can lead to getting stuck and giving up.

Anyways October hey, I'll make sure I'm there again this year....

Sam









----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Heckenberg" <daniel at bogusfront.org>
To: <PD-list at iem.kug.ac.at>
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2003 1:15 PM
Subject: [PD] [OT] successful methods for PD seminars


>
> Hi All,
>
> Related to the current thread about PD tutorials - I'm involved in
> organising a series of seminars about patching software.  The audience is
> likely to be a mixture from non-patchers through to experienced users of
PD/
> Max / jMax /Reaktor etc.
>
> The conference in question is Electrofringe, a yearly electronic arts
> festival in Newcastle, Australia.  www.electrofringe.org
>
> Whilst I think that workshop/ tutorial style approaches definitely work
best
> for learning PD or patching in general, we don't have the facilities or
> sufficient time to offer this.
>
> Instead I'm curious whether people have had interesting and useful seminar
> or lecture style sessions with patching software.
>
> If so -  what was the content and approach?
>
> We're hoping to run sessions which offer something to non-users,
experienced
> users and the presenters... perhaps not at all in a single session
> obviously.
>
> So far, and based on previous years' experience, we're looking at doing
the
> following:
> - An intro session to explain the patching paradigm and give a quick tour
of
> software options
> - A laptop gig/jam where patchers can turn up, plug in and produce audio
and
> video... exchange data, ideas and patches and where others may mingle,
> examine running patches, ask questions and so on.
> - Various special purpose sessions exploring particular topics - focusing
> more on what's possible than on patch implementation
>     - surround sound
>     - video
>     - interconnection (OSC, net streaming etc)
>
> Any ideas, experience greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Daniel
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> PD-list mailing list
> PD-list at iem.kug.ac.at
> http://iem.kug.ac.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pd-list
>