Teaching Experts is Harder
Teaching is hard! you have to know the subject very well, you have to be prepared. You need very good presentation skills to "sell" the matter to the audience and you need to know how to act when they ask you something that you're not so sure what the correct answer is. I work at Sela since 1995. I used to teach a lot, and I love it. In these days we are having a series of courses for our own professional experts. I gave the very first lecture in this series, A C# 3.0 course. I wrote at the beginning of this post that teaching is hard! Imagine a class full of knowledgeable people, most of them read about C# 3.0, about half of them are using Visual Studio 2008 and C# 3.0. How do you teach something that your audience is already knows? I made it informative to the people that don't know C# 3.0 and interesting to those who know. For each of the new features, I talked about the motivation, the syntax and what the compiler does behind the cover to implement the feature (Reflector to the rescue). Then we had a conversation about the feature, and we heard many different opinions. The interesting thing is that I had also learned one or two things about the subject.
At the end of the evening I have showed some of the open source project that Sasha and I have implemented and I asked people to join us.
These are the projects:
http://www.codeplex.com/NonPagedCLRHost/
http://www.codeplex.com/JobObjectWrapper
http://www.codeplex.com/UACHelpers