How many of you find seminars conducted here useful? Ever attended one? Do you find yourself slouching at the backseat for the heck of attending or looking forward to anything related to "IT" put together in local hotels? Recall any that proved a cut above?
From personal experience, seminars conducted to explain "internet security threats", "ebanking", "ecommerce in pakistan", and "digital divide" have rarely provided anything one hasn't come across on the net. The programs put together by most organization combine "basic definitions" with "case study"--an approach that comes off as very theoritical and dry. My pick: TMT Ventures once hosted a very good roundtable on "VC funding problems and prospects" where the audience was as proactive as the guest speakers.
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H: Seminar's are advertised [unfortunately on the *DAY* of the event and NOT before as should be the case] in dailies. You should keep a look out for them.
General public are not the majority at such seminars. Its people who are invited from companies, schools and the press who *should* be familiar with the basics [and are too!]. The culture of sermonising/lecturing needs a good rethinking as far as these are concerned IMHO.
Microsoft's 3-day Pakistan Developer Conference (PDC) 2004 held in Karachi, was extremely informative for both technical & non-technical IT professionals in Pakistan. Through this conference Microsoft provided a very good platform to actively discuss the emerging technologies. Here is a list of presentations which were delivered and to my opinion were very helpful.
http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/southgulf/events/PDC/presentations.asp
On the other hand PSEB consistently organizes seminars & conferences on different areas such as software, web design & animation; conducted by field professionals who discuss in-depth technical aspects of the relative fields.
But in my opinion, generally seminars are arranged in order to create a general awareness. As Hafsa said, "people don't go to the web", and the truth is that average people are not easy with the internet. They would prefer to read a book or brochure instead of skimming a web page.
Another perspective is that you can't get so technical in a seminar of approx 3 hours, because if you go in to those technicalities, things would get more entangled and confused instead of getting solved.
M Tabraiz Feham
www.tabraizfeham.blogspot.com
I really dont seem any harm in such seminars even if they are for newbies. Trying to increase awareness would eventually lead to an increase in awareness. The quality of some of these seminars may not be as good as some of the pros may desire, yet it is still something that is necessary to generate 'the interest' in IT, which should be evident 50 or so years from now.
I never had the chance to attend one here, though.
Talking about the interest of industry heavyweights, how is the Linux certification RHCE and RHCT that was recently advertised in Dawn? Don't know whether it is an authentic effort by Red Hat or some affiliated attempt, but it still is good to see some sort of Linux institute opening up in Karachi.
I attended a seminar by conducted by Microsoft on the SQL Server Yukon.There were two guys invited to give the presentation.It was mentioned in their intro that both have them has completed their studies abroad.Well the first guy went on & on abt the product's features but had no accent(not that it's a bad thing,but they lived abroad for like 4-5 years for crying out loud).The other guy who did have an accent got confused after like every 5 minutes saying that I was not prepared & let me compose myself.I mean the guy didn't have any confidence at all & here he was giving a presentation.
That was one seminar I would have loved to stay out of.
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