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Linux and Distributed Learning: A New Paradigm

Even if a person possessed all the computer manuals in the world, it would still be next-to-impossible to become a programmer or networking specialist. First hand experience and practice is essential; often a manual simply can't point out an error in programming code or command line.

One can simply spend a lot of time playing around with it or one can call technical support (as happened when my printer wasn't working). Ultimately an individual needs the ability to consult an individual with slightly more experience, an individual who is always available and has experienced all the same difficulties. But even a skilled individual is insufficient sometimes. One needs the help of a wider community to guide him through the initial learning phases.

Computer user groups have emerged as one of the more successful experiments in distributed learning. A prime example (and one in which I have firsthand experience with) is HAL-PC , a Houston user group consisting of 15,000 members and considered to be the largest in the world. Its small group calendar , says it all. Besides a small membership fee, members have the ability to attend meetings of any one of about 50 special interest groups who meet monthly. Each small group consists of about 3 officers who provide enough manpower to sustain the group through months when others are out-of-town. The venture is purely not-for-profit, and one wonders why any individual would want to share his knowledge in such a public forum. Why would one lead a group on C++ when one could be teaching the same subject at a community college for $50 an hour? On one side of Houston exists a pricy technical training center costing $15,000 for 6 months of training. On the other side you have a HAL-PC SIG devoted to teaching the Microsoft certifications, where every two weeks one of the group members leads a review of the next chapter. It is after witnessing the phenomenal success of HAL-PC that I really have to wonder whether the 4 year university is even necessary in this day and age.

The online world of "computer support" provides a perfect example of a community whose knowledge is distributed all around the world. Newsgroups, chat, mailing lists and discussion boards have emerged as ways to share such knowledge. Newsgroups are ideal because they permit searching and serve as a public archive. One reason they arose was that the software or hardware company provided inadequate manuals, but later it appeared that no company could write a manual that could adequately take into account the problems associated with a variety of configurations.

Newsgroups offer global reach. Once I looked for information about a motherboard on a newsgroup. The manufacturer is in Taiwan, a factory is in Germany and their main sales were in America, so users were scattered all over the world, and so sometimes I could post a question in the evening, go to sleep, and get an answer in the morning. Also a conventional manual offers no ability to update the knowledge. Also, business and time pressures ensure that companies rush things to market before documentation or code is really mature. The typical user is expected to check the website for updates and patches.

It is one thing to understand how an operating system or a program works; it is quite another thing to understand how it might work on an Intel processor as opposed to AMD, or an HP machine as opposed to Dell. Users, not manufacturers, are more likely to have this knowledge about how a particular piece of machinery works with another.

The advent of the Linux operating system heralds the end of "technical support" and a beginning of a new type of "social learning." With Linux, the responsibility for making it work rests with the individual, not with a big company like Microsoft or Apple. True, one could pay for technical support, but the cost adds up, and no technical support could answer all your questions. With Linux, the individual expects no technical support, but expects that he or she is going to need to solve one's own problems. It is a somewhat painful transition. But it means that the individual needs to join a network of users to share knowledge. Interestingly, as little as two years ago, Linux online help was pitiful, as was the operating system, to some extent. But now, a substantial number of newsgroups and discussion boards and mailing lists have created a substantial "knowledge base" for answering questions. The documentation is as decentralized as one could imagine. The "Linux Documentation Project" is actually a standard for users to supply their own documentation in the form of "How-to's." Every website with a program or documentation will structure the website in a way to facilitate online discussion. The reason is not hard to figure. Volunteers don't want to be bothered with email, and the same is true with professional vendors who create forums so users can help other users (and cut down on the cost of support).

It is helpful to spell out the characteristics of the online user communities. First, there is the RTFM philosophy. People tend to ignore the pleas of a novice, especially if it's clear that the novice has made no attempt to read the f----ng manual or to view recent postings. Often I will post a question and get no response whatsoever, while other questions elicit numerous replies. This randomness points to one of the shortcomings of newsgroups, but often the questions that elicit no responses have already been answered elsewhere. Newsgroups have a role for "experts" to answer questions, but these experts are usually on the newsgroups because they are searching for answers to their own questions. In other words, for an expert to contribute something, he or she needs to find the question somewhat challenging and not too easy. Questions tend to attract comments from those with either the specialized knowledge that the original poster is seeking or from a person at a similiar proficiency level.

Another problem is that the individual must hunt for a solution, often for a long time. It is not really an efficient way to find the answer, but it is an interesting way to acquire knowedge. When people of different levels are posting and replying, it is hard to know which sort of posts are most relevant to the problem you are now facing. That is why searching through newsgroups is sometimes like searching for needles in a haystack.

Using newsgroups is sometimes bewildering for a "newbie" who has to confess his ignorance publicly. Finding the correct answer often means knowing the right question to ask and understanding the posts that others have made. A newbie may end up becoming familiar with topics too advanced for him (and only half-understanding it) while having little exposure to more basic topics. There is no preestablished sequence for learning about a topic and little guidance for how one should proceed. That is one of the pitfalls of unmediated learning. On the other hand, the series of problems that an individual faces and overcomes serves as a sort of "learning sequence." Instead of this sequence being planned, the sequence of learning things arises from the situation and problems one faces. That puts the individual in control of his learning and ensures that what he learns is always relevant. With teacher-controlled learning, it is not always clear which topics actually are going to help the learner.

It can also be said that newbie-learning is easier on newsgroups because there are more newbies than experts. Two heads are better than one, and indeed, there are more websites for the new learner of a program or programming language than for an advanced learner. This brings up the idea of altruism--why does an individual decide to post an answer or put up a website on how to use USB devices for Linux? For many expertise implies the ability (and even the need) to share the knowledge with someone else.

In my motherboard example, when I typed "A7V" and "Radeon" I was able to see all the postings about people using A7V boards and an ati radeon video card. But what if the video card had a generic name and I was looking for information about Windows 2000? The ability to find relevant information depends on the ability to construct precise query terms. With brand names or model numbers it is rather easy, but what about "Kafka" and "neurotic" and "absurd"? A lot of times success depends on knowing the keywords or the topic at hand having key words. That is not so much a problem with computers, but the softer sciences or the humanities might not accomodate such fuzzy searches. That is where mailing lists come in. They are for people less interested in searching and more interested in chatting (although a fair amount of asking questions gets done). Subscribers are more likely to read comments outside their field of interest and more inclined to talk about general topics. The contributor list is smaller, and less open.

This essay attempted to describe the learning characteristics of the newsgroup community, especially of Linux users. Finding knowledge online is not easy and often frustrating, but it can provide a means to learn esoteric subjects, especially when no experts are locally available. When individuals gain knowledge through these online sources, they lose touch with members of their local community, and educational goals never seem to be the same for any two individuals. Everyone is on their own path, addressing several narrow groups of learners without any commonality. Could the main problem be loneliness?