Learning Content Section

Show & Tell
#1

Hi Django Forum,

I’m wondering if folks are ok with the idea of adding a category for Learning resources. It could have sections on the Polls tutorial, official DRF tutorial, DjangoGirls tutorial, and other resources in the community.

There aren’t that many current Django books/videos out there and creators, like me, @adamchainz @pydanny, and others, spend a lot of time answering the same questions over and over. To the point that I’ve been asked about having a private Discord for my content. But I would rather have it on the Django Forum honestly where more people can see/use it instead of on StackOverflow and other places.

What does everyone think?

  • Will
2 Likes
#2

+1 from me on the general idea. Maybe separate categories for printed vs video resources as well.

#3

I think this is a very good idea Will.

#4

I’ve been asked many times to put this together as a private service, but am not inclined to do it because of the administrative overhead. Having this here would be useful.

#5

Forum topics are a bit rough for discoverability in my opinion, but it wouldn’t hurt to try it. Although it could be that I don’t understand Discourse’s features well enough to grasp the vision here.

What does the user experience look like for someone who wants to start? We send people to this new category and then what? Is there some sticky forum topic that guides them to different resources?

How would content be curated/assessed?

I think this idea has a lot of merit. I’m murky on what the execution might look like.

#6

+1 as well

Same/similar questions do come up a lot. Part of the problem is that beginners don’t really know how to search for the problem they’re currently having (don’t know the terms, tools, etc.). Having an obvious place on the forum to look would be good - maybe we could also update some resources such as the polls tutorial to include a paragraph like “if you have problems, check out this forum section.”

This is a valid concern, but I’m not sure it’s a reason to not try. If it works well, great. If it becomes a murky swamp of dated/crappy answers (a bit like the Django wiki…) then we can always archive/delete it.

#7

Curated? Interesting question. My first thought is that if it is a publicly available resource, there should be some kind of external reference - website, etc. (A book list could refer to the publisher, videos to YouTube or whatever, training to the trainer’s web site, etc.) I don’t think it would take much effort to just click through the link to verify it.

Assessed is a much different issue - not all resources are created equally, yet different people have different needs regarding how some material is presented. I may not find a particular video to be of any value to me at all, but that doesn’t mean it won’t help someone else.
Again gut reaction, we would need to avoid / discourage / moderate comments like “this blog sux”, but there’s a fine line between “this book is bad” and “this book is only helpful when…”.

Ok, so that’s my typically wordy way of saying I agree with @adamchainz here, whose response I probably should have read completely before putting hands to keyboard. :grin:

#8

Great idea - happy to help in anyway I can.

I was one of the beginners desperate for good resources a few months ago. Fighting the google algo’s for hyped up, but not so useful resources was quite the challenge.