At the end of last year, we invited the Tech Learning Collective community to our year-end conference, Hackers Next Door. It was an incredible event, with over 100 participants and more than 25 speakers who inspired and challenged us to find new and more effective ways to build power in our communities. After a much needed break to recuperate but also to celebrate, our team is back with an expanded lineup of workshops and events, and more opportunities than ever before for you to take your skills to the next level, with remote/virtual/online-only webinars on topics like collaboration with Git, system administration basics, and more!
New Webinar (Remote) Workshops
One unexpected but wonderful thing about the Hackers Next Door conference was how many people came to New York just for our event! Attendees arrived from places such as Michigan and Colorado and as far away as California. And although the conference still focused on the local issues facing New Yorkers, with speakers from advocacy groups such as the Atlantic Plaza Towers Tenants Association who are fighting the installation of racist facial recognition software in their apartment complex, these otherwise “remote” attendees brought value and perspective all their own.
Moreover, we regularly heard from folks that they would love more opportunities to participate in Tech Learning Collective events, if only they could find the time or, y’know, lived in New York City in the first place! Well, we’ve been working hard to harvest two carrots with one fist (and stop throwing stones at birds). That’s why you’re invited to our upcoming workshop webinars!
Tech Learning Collective workshop webinars are 100% online events. There are no physical classrooms and so there’s nowhere you need to go, and no need to find clean clothes! Although, y’know, maybe wear clean clothes regardless. Anyway! All you need is access to a modern Web browser such as an up-to-date copy of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox along with a fast Internet connection. In other words, if you can Netflix ’n’ chill, you have all the equipment you need to level up your h4x0r skill by attending a Tech Learning Collective webinar.
Like all our in-person events, our webinars are facilitated by our team of technical experts and expert teachers. This means that when you sign up, you’ll be joining a video conference with a human instructor, not a bot or a dated recording. You’ll be able to interact with the instructor via voice and video as well as with other students to tackle challenges, solve problems, and learn together. The bi-directional, real-time screen sharing options makes it easy to follow along as the instructor demonstrates how to do things like sniff packets, create Web sites, manage virtual machines, and much more.
And just as with our in-person events, we’ve retained our tiered pricing structure to help ensure queer-identified, femme, PoC, and other people who have traditionally been overlooked in the tech sector have access, too. What’s more, since our own overhead is lower for webinars than they are for physical venues, we’ve decided to pass these savings on to you by dropping the price of tickets for our “remote” events by almost 30% across each price tier. There’s never been a better or less expensive way to learn the foundations of computer technology as solidly as this!
Visit our events page and subscribe to our calendar to see what workshops we have coming up and to sign up for access. For more information, consult our Workshops and Webinars FAQ.
Free, Self-paced Beginner’s Courses
Speaking of learning the foundations of computer technology, we’ve also been hard at work preparing our first ever self-paced course that we’re calling the Tech Learning Collective’s Foundations series. This is a series of introductory learning modules that you can use to jump-start your learing before you ever join us at one of our events, because they are all offered via our Web site. This means the Foundations courses are available anytime, day or night.
What’s more, since we’ve designed our Foundations series to be entirely self-paced, we’re offering the whole course completely free of charge.
Since our Foundations series is free and always available, you can take as long as you need to work through it. Start with our Foundations: Command Line Basics course, which introduces you to a computer terminal, one of the most important foundations of the rest of our curriculum. We’re launching with a limited selection of free materials, but are planning to expand the free courses with more labs over time, so check back regularly.
Free Practice Labs of Advanced Scenarios
Finally, we’ve decided to reuse the same infrastructure we deployed for our self-paced courses to put together some more bite-sized learning modules of additional, more advanced scenarios such as Scaling SSH Authentication with Certificates. If you’ve been on the fence about whether or not you should come to one of our instructor-led workshop trainings or have questions about the kind of material we teach in our intensive courses, you can try your hand at these sample scenarios to get a taste for the rest of our curriculum.
Of course, nothing can compare to learning directly from a teacher whom you can actually see and ask questions of in real time. That’s why we’re looking forward to continuing to partner with groups around New York City to expand our in-person training, and invite you or your organization to contact us about booking a private group training for your volunteers or colleagues. In the mean time, though, we hope that these self-paced learning modules will whet your appetite until your next (or first) class with us.