Now that the workshop is over I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I still wish we had had more time to prepare them, but over all I think it went well. Areas that I felt our probably could have been stronger were pacing and perhaps some of the content. I would have liked to boil things down a bit more so that we wouldn't have had to move through our content so quickly to fit it all in.
I really enjoyed getting to see what everyone else chose to do as well. Some things I noticed we that while a visual presentation to go along with your workshop does help, it isn't necessary. One other group aside from us used a visual presentation aid (Powerpoint), they did a really great job using the visuals as an aid, but not as a crutch and I felt that their presentation was very well done. The other two workshops didn't make use of any visuals, but they were still well organized and were able to make their points clearly.
The biggest issue I noticed with the workshops in our group was that you have to be really careful to manage time and expectations when asking your audience for feedback. The two groups not using presentation software both had a section of their workshop where they asked the audience to read over some materials and respond to them. Both groups did a very nice job and I think that having this exercise was a good idea however, I noticed that with one of the groups we were asked to review a much longer piece of material and the framing for the response we were asked to give was much less focused. This isn't necessarily a bad thing I think by it's nature that workshop needed the broader scope, but I found it a little difficult to focus in on anything. Having had this experience I think that if I am in that kind of situation in the future I might ask each group to look at a section of the materials and respond to that. Smaller pieces are easier to digest and form opinions on when given a limited amount of time, and acting as a participant helped me to see that in a way I hadn't before.
I really enjoyed getting to see what everyone else chose to do as well. Some things I noticed we that while a visual presentation to go along with your workshop does help, it isn't necessary. One other group aside from us used a visual presentation aid (Powerpoint), they did a really great job using the visuals as an aid, but not as a crutch and I felt that their presentation was very well done. The other two workshops didn't make use of any visuals, but they were still well organized and were able to make their points clearly.
The biggest issue I noticed with the workshops in our group was that you have to be really careful to manage time and expectations when asking your audience for feedback. The two groups not using presentation software both had a section of their workshop where they asked the audience to read over some materials and respond to them. Both groups did a very nice job and I think that having this exercise was a good idea however, I noticed that with one of the groups we were asked to review a much longer piece of material and the framing for the response we were asked to give was much less focused. This isn't necessarily a bad thing I think by it's nature that workshop needed the broader scope, but I found it a little difficult to focus in on anything. Having had this experience I think that if I am in that kind of situation in the future I might ask each group to look at a section of the materials and respond to that. Smaller pieces are easier to digest and form opinions on when given a limited amount of time, and acting as a participant helped me to see that in a way I hadn't before.
I had a similar experience when preparing for my workshop. There was so much information that we wanted to include, but the time limitation really shaped how much content we were able to present. And I agree with your thoughts on the handouts-- we originally had a more text-dense version, but cut it down considerably in order to keep from overwhelming anyone.
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