- Was there anything that worked particularly well in the workshop?
- Was there anything that you felt was tricky to teach?
- If you could change one thing that you did in the workshop to make the sessions more effective, what would it be?
- What changes would make the workshops more accommodating to a diverse range of participants with different roles in the library and varying technology skillsets?
We incorporated more discussion questions into this iteration of the workshops and that seemed to go well. It gave participants the chance to talk and reflect, which was a nice break from looking at a screen. The questions could use further refinement, but I was pleased with how the conversations unfolded.
We were pressed for time toward the end. When we got to the more technical pieces in the latter-half of the workshop, it felt like we shifted gears too quickly and moved from material participants were easily grasping to that which they needed more time to work through. Unfortunately, we had not allocated enough time to let them dive into the more challenging material. Additionally, there was a wide range of familiarity with programming in the room, which made it especially difficult to target the content appropriately as we rushed through it!
In this iteration of the workshop materials, we tested out some content related to data management and learned that we had gone too far off-track with those materials. The nice part of iterating through the content is that we are able to test things out and then remove them when we find they didn’t work as well as we had hoped!
We continue to have an audience with diverse skillsets attending these workshops at our library. Improved opportunities for either paired workshop activities or adding “challenge” activities for people who finish quickly would accommodate our audience better. Hopefully that would make the time we provide to work through the hands-on material better adapted to a range of backgrounds and skills.