[PD] Teaching Pd

[Andy Farnell]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:18:23 -0500
"Kyle Klipowicz" <kyleklip at gmail.com> wrote:


> Hi List~

> I'm curious about teaching Pd to interested people, and know that a
> number of you have given workshops on the subject. I could really use
> some collective wisdom on this.

Teaching Pd is something I really enjoy.
What I've seen so far are great differences in audience
goals and the need to prepare and research exactly who you
are talking to and why, because Pd has such wide applications.
Look for your own niche skill that Pd allows you to express and
use that as a guide.

> What methods do you use to structure and communicate your course
> material? How do you market it within the city that you are teaching?
> What sorts of materials do you use?


Often people bring their own laptops and headphones.

The best format imho is lots of practical elements, short exercises
that can be done individually or in small groups, keep dove-tailing
talk time with hacking time.

If machines are available but are administrated workstations 
it helps to take live CD environments so you aren't treading on
anyones toes having groups of students install stuff. Or make
sure whoever invited you or organised the talk has done
the groundwork for any practical element.

A copy of PureDyne is useful, with the patches used in a workshop
handed out on thumbdrive, by web-site or burned into the distro. For 
the cost and time it takes to run off a dozen copies it's worth
it for everyone to take home a workable Pd environment for the PC.

I guess it depends on whether you're teaching audio, video or
physical computing what needs and priorities you might have. 
For audio I always want a good stereo sound system and a pocket
mixer is a useful gadget. For Gem/Visual presentations I suppose
you'd spend more thought on the beamer resolution and framerate.
For physical you need desk space where people can play with
components and wires.  

Often it's requested that laptop users install
Pd on their machines and get it running before coming to
a session, that way everyone is ready to go *and* they can take
their work home with them.

What makes it fun imho, and possible to make focused
presentations, is the flexibility of Pd as 
a teaching tool... it's almost designed for the job!
Using Pd itself as the presentation tool, making folders
of patches that are linked as "slides", and having it self
document to pdf handouts and html resources are things I've
put a bit of thought into. 

It's nice if you have a LAN available so you can go into
the network parts of Pd. A good finale is to get everyone jamming
with some OSC net-pd type patches linked together.

For finding audiences, I think the same as Alexandres advice, technical
and art colleges and universities doing interactive design, music
technology and courses like that. I specialise in audio so I try
to use Pd as a vehicle to teach it, rather than generally
"all about puredata" which is quite beyond me. And also try to get groups 
of producers from standard industry roles interested too, Pd is obviously
very enabling in radio, TV, film, animation, games and theatre.

To teach Pd generally, finding colleagues is as
important as finding audiences. I don't think anybody could tackle
the entirety of Pd and it's applications alone without it being a
very dull, highly structured and long exercise. I sometimes pair with  
someone who is teaching visuals or composition or something else that 
complements my stuff on audio synth. Work together to put on events.
With groups of more than 15-20 having a buddy as an extra demonstrator/helper
in practicals is essential or you can't give everyone enough 1 to 1 contact 
time. Best all round Pd presentation I have attended was organised by goto10 at
space studios as a summer school with several specialised Pd users
teaching individual areas in a structured programme so that the whole 2 week
event became more than the sum of its parts. 




my waffling 2c... hope that helps

Andy

-- 
Use the source