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HF Design pattern book - School textbook

 
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hi,Elisabeth Freeman , as design pattern getting popular and useful, i was wondering why not this book bring for college textbook , or perhaps some powerpoint slide will provide for ease on teaching , would your plan for this step in future ?
 
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i was wondering why not this book bring for college textbook , or perhaps some powerpoint slide will provide for ease on teaching , would your plan for this step in future ?


I read some posts at another forum here, stating that there are EJB instructors who teach EJB using HF EJB as the textbook.

However, as the book is already self-explained, I guess the instructors might do the PPT on their own, as different people might teach different concepts in different ways.

Nick
 
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I guess use of powerpoint slides would violate the fundamental ideas behind the HF series. The biggest advantage of the HF series is that it is very engaging and in a dialog fashion. The reader can just read from start to end to understand the concepts.

Use of power point slides would put the emphasis more on the lecturer's ability to explain the concepts than the authors'. Moreover, the dialogs would have to be reduced to bullet points, which would take the fun out of the book!
 
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biggest advantage of the HF series is that it is very engaging and in a dialog fashion. The reader can just read from start to end to understand the concepts



How about some animation there?
 
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Originally posted by Pradeep Bhat:


How about some animation there?



HF videos! Great idea!
 
Alvin chew
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there is a need that to get a new way to convey message to student
 
Nicholas Cheung
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there is a need that to get a new way to convey message to student


But the workload of the authors will then be increased a lot.

I guess this should be delicated to the course instructors.

Nick
 
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Very interesting ideas javaranchers... ones that we've definitely been thinking about!

As far as using HF texts as school texts, there are several schools currently using HF Java as the main text (including Eric Freeman's Java class!). We have heard a rumour that U. Maryland might be using HF DP as a text. We definitely agree, we'd like to see HF texts being used for teaching.

I also agree that I think it's necessary for the instructor to write their own slides based on the books. For other styles of books (ie, "text" books) it's very nice to have a set of slides to start from - I have done in the past for courses I have taught: found slides that other instructors have made, but I have always rewritten them to match the topics I want to teach and in the way I want to teach them.

I think for HF books, this is a little different - each page or two pages of the books are almost like "mini-presentations". So I really think an instructor could start from the book and pretty easily come up with their own slides. But of course, I haven't had the experience of teaching from a HF book yet. I'll ask Eric about this and see what he thinks.

Elisabeth
 
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Originally posted by Sathya Srinivasan:
I guess use of powerpoint slides would violate the fundamental ideas behind the HF series. The biggest advantage of the HF series is that it is very engaging and in a dialog fashion. The reader can just read from start to end to understand the concepts.

Use of power point slides would put the emphasis more on the lecturer's ability to explain the concepts than the authors'. Moreover, the dialogs would have to be reduced to bullet points, which would take the fun out of the book!



Given the fact that I used to teach a community education class on using PowerPoint, it really irks me when people think that all you can do with PowerPoint is present bulleted text and read them to the audience. Is your audience illiterate? Honestly, you can do a lot with PowerPoint to "emphasize" what you're talking about. You know that old saying "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words"? Yeah, that's what PowerPoint is all about.

(Off topic - never, ever use the Race Car or Typewriter sounds in PowerPoint. If you do, the world might implode.)

Okay, now that I'm done ranting, I'd have to say that I'd really like to see the HF books being used as school texts. I've read a lot of dry books in the past and they can be just plain difficult to read. The HF series does an excellent job of maintaining interest and that can only be a good thing when it comes to learning something. I wish these had been around when I was in college. :roll:
 
Alvin chew
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I've read a lot of dry books in the past and they can be just plain difficult to read.



agree with you,Corey McGlone , even worse, when you meet some lecturers who is inexperience and blur on their teaching and end up with keep reading the slide ..then you know what is means by bible reader
 
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Originally posted by Corey McGlone:
Given the fact that I used to teach a community education class on using PowerPoint, it really irks me when people think that all you can do with PowerPoint is present bulleted text and read them to the audience. Is your audience illiterate? Honestly, you can do a lot with PowerPoint to "emphasize" what you're talking about. You know that old saying "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words"? Yeah, that's what PowerPoint is all about.



Jutta Eckstein recently gave a keynote at the XP Days germany, and every single slide did contain nothing more than a cartoon. The content was in what she said to the slides, but the slides made you remember it. It was quite impressive - and fun!
 
Sathya Srinivasan
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Originally posted by Corey McGlone:


Given the fact that I used to teach a community education class on using PowerPoint, it really irks me when people think that all you can do with PowerPoint is present bulleted text and read them to the audience. Is your audience illiterate? Honestly, you can do a lot with PowerPoint to "emphasize" what you're talking about. You know that old saying "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words"? Yeah, that's what PowerPoint is all about.



Relax!! All I was trying to get across was that powerpoint slides are to be used as 'reminder' points or 'salient' points that the instructor can use to grab the audience's attention. Powerpoints implicitly put emphasis on the instructor's ability to explain the points. You cannot learn anything just by reading slides (without any explanatory notes or without an instructor explaining them).

This kind of beats the narrative nature of the book, which can be treated like an 'offline' copy. The attraction in the HF book is its ability to talk to the reader. It's like an instructor hidden in the book.

I was in no way implying that slides are useless.
 
Corey McGlone
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Originally posted by Ilja Preuss:
Jutta Eckstein recently gave a keynote at the XP Days germany, and every single slide did contain nothing more than a cartoon. The content was in what she said to the slides, but the slides made you remember it. It was quite impressive - and fun!



Now that would have been a great PowerPoint presentation to see.

PowerPoint, when used well, is a lot like the Head First books - all those little pictures in the margins or the Tiger that seems to appear in every intro. Those things are like the PowerPoint slides while the actual lecture is the text of the book.
 
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