Emerging Technologies, Emerging Teachers:
Collaborative Workshops at Simmons GSLIS
The Series Grows: Fall 2006
Due to its success, the workshop series was expanded for the Fall 2006 semester. Some of the instructors changed, and new instructors were encouraged to use the materials from spring semester and edit or change them as they see fit. In addition, during the call for volunteer instructors, a GSLIS student who spent 15 years working in the field of user interface design offered to conduct workshops on that topic. More instructors who were not TRAs or ASIS&T board members also volunteered. Fifteen workshops, broken into two series, were offered for a total of 30 sessions:
Tips & Tricks Series
- Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, in three separate sessions)
- Managing Digital Photos
- Using Macs
- Websites with Dreamweaver
- Wikis
- Navigating Photoshop
Emerging Technologies Series
- XML
- Wikis
- Google Earth
- HTML & CSS
- User Interface Design
- Podcasting & Internet Radio
- Setting Up an RSS Aggregator
- Tagging & Social Bookmarking
Changes to the Series
In order to collect feedback more systematically, two short surveys were created: a six-question survey for the Tips & Tricks Series, and an 8-question survey for the Emerging Technologies Series. Attendees at all workshops were asked to include their email address on a sign-in sheet, and were emailed shortly after the workshop with a link to the appropriate survey. Ultimately, more than 70 survey responses were collected. Respondents offered useful feedback regarding the workshop series as a whole, as well as more specific criticism of the individual workshops. These responses were shared with the instructors, who were encouraged to incorporate the feedback into their sessions if they intended to participate in the Spring.
In Spring 2006, workshop instructors were responsible for publicity—creating and posting flyers and sending e-mail announcements. This proved to be an unreliable method. In one case, due to an oversight, the instructors did not do any publicity at all, and attendance at their sessions was extremely low—no attendance at one, and only three students at the other. However, workshops where the publicity was done consistently and early had higher attendance. For the Fall 2006 workshop series responsibility for workshop publicity fell to the workshop coordinator, Alison Cody. A dedicated email account was created for the workshop series and a system of email announcements and posted flyers was developed. This helped to ensure that most workshops were well-attended.
During the spring semester TRAs were required to work on at least one workshop. A few TRAs were not interested in doing so, and as a result the sections of workshops that they presented lacked some of the enthusiasm and depth that other sections had. In the fall semester, this requirement was dropped. However, most TRAs did volunteer for one or more workshops. Making instruction voluntary helped to insure that instructors were truly interested in the topic and willing to present.
One workshop was dropped in Fall 2006—"Buying a Technology Gadget." The topic did not lend itself well to a workshop format. However, more workshops were proposed, and it was harder to find enough volunteers to instruct all of them. In fact, the series was announced and dates and times were released before all of the sessions had coverage. Within a couple of weeks, volunteers were found for some of these workshops (most of which were scheduled for later in the semester), and they did not need to be rescheduled. In the future, we are uncertain as to whether we will drop workshops from the series if we are unable to find additional help. Most of the instructors from fall semester workshops will still be able to present, so this will likely be discussed on a case-by-case basis.