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@bogusfront.org To: PD-list@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
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