It's clear from people's responses to the first task that we're using a wide variety of approaches, and are trying to help a wide variety of people. For our second task, let's drill down on that a bit:

1. Who are you trying to help? In order to sharpen your answers, try writing a blog post with mock biographies of a couple of your intended learners (like the ones on the Software Carpentry site). Cartoons are not required, but I will award a prize to the best one :-)
2. What will they be able to do (or do better) after learning what you're trying to teach them? Again, to make it specific, try to describe the simplest task they care about that they'll be able to do (or do better) after you help them. I've underlined "they care about" because there's a lot of evidence that people learn best when they're working on things that actually matter to them—see Mark Guzdial's chapter in the PDF readings I emailed you for some discussion of this, and of what happened when Georgia Tech reorganized their introductory programming course around this idea.
3. How can you tell during the scope of your teaching that they've learned what you hoped to teach them? Most of us don't get to set a final exam, or to follow our learners' growth over months or years; instead, we have them for a few days (or even just one day), or we're working with them online. Given that, how can you tell what they've actually learned before they go back to their regular lives? Some of the answers we've already seen in first-task blog posts include looking over their shoulders or having them mail in solutions to some simple programming exercises. What else do you do? Or if you're not a teacher, how else has your learning been assessed, and how effective did you think it was? (Again, please try to be specific—including examples in your blog post would be great.)