Bits of Learning

Learning sometimes happens in big jumps, but mostly in little tiny steps. I share my baby steps of learning here, mostly on topics around programming, programming languages, software engineering, and computing in general. But occasionally, even on other disciplines of engineering or even science. I mostly learn through examples and doing. And this place is a logbook of my experiences in learning something. You may find several things interesting here: little cute snippets of (hopefully useful) code, a bit of backing theory, and a lot of gyan on how learning can be so much fun.

Monday, August 21, 2006

MS Ramaiah Polytechnic Talk

Last Saturday, I got a good experience of giving a lecture on 'Advances in Software Testing' in MS Ramaiah Polytechnic.

The invitation came from Mr. T. Shankar, a scientific officer in our department who was also one of the organisers of the Training the Trainers workshop in February this year. I had given a talk in that workshop which was received quite well.

While I was in middle of preparing for the lecture, I got this input from several sources that I could expect a fairly frigid audience. It was quite demoralising as I was hoping to present something really different than the usual stuff. It was quite ambitious and I was quite excited in the beginning. However, thinking about the possible response I would get for all that effort, I got quite psyched. I aborted the slide preparation in middle, and decided to make the whole thing impromptu. Going by what I expected, the lecture would be around 35-40 minutes long.

However on reaching there my experiences turned out to be quite to the contrary. I was warmly welcomed by the principal of the college. On entering the lecture hall I found a bunch of bringht young faces waiting for me. Quite gratifyingly, I could strike up a comfortable and friendly interacative conversation with the students. The lecture, that I thought wouldn't survive beyond 30-40 minutes, flowed smoothly for nearly two hours! It was such a terrific experience to evoke so much interactiveness with the students who'd been alleged to be uninterested. I felt like having won a victory in a battle. Added to this pure joy, my eog was also gratified as I was given a very generous thanks and a memento -- a clock, a bouquet, and a shawl. I felt really honoured.

Here are the slides.

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