Week 9: One-shot workshops

Our one-shot workshops this week were quite varied in form. Each of the four teams in my group prepared a different combination of presentation and reflection to teach us about something interesting.

My group decided to spend a bit more time on the Pew Study brought up in class a few weeks ago about people's aspirations and expectations for public libraries. We spent a brief intro period going over some significant points (vocally), and then we handed out a copy of the study's executive summary for each team to review in more detail. After 5 minutes, we asked the teams to discuss how they felt the findings might apply to their chosen career path, followed by a group-wide discussion facilitated by us. Participants were able to pull out some points they found surprising, though we had some difficulty eliciting responses with connections to future careers outside of public libraries. Much of our survey responses pointed out that the review and discussion times were too short, or that even the executive summary was too much information to digest in so little time. Overall, I think we tried to fit too many components into such a short amount of time; we could have easily approached this study the same way we did with the book club, with much more reflection/discussion time, and time for each participant to peruse the study itself before we met.

We received a library-centered introduction to paper preservation in the form of a Presi presentation. This workshop was very well structured, and the handout was a simple note-taking sheet with 3 section headings and plenty of lines for writing. It was very evenly-paced and informative; my only recommendation was that the various web resources shown in the Prezi visual be provided on the handout, so that audience members wouldn't have to worry about frantically copying things down.

We learned the procedure for ordering printed work from the University's Espresso Book Machine via a PowerPoint presentation. Our handout was a printout of the slides, six to a page. While I learned of capabilities I had not considered for this service I have never used, the annotated screen-shot step-through was a bit hard to follow. Rather than explain options available on the screen for each step, it might have been more coherent for us to have received an overview of the possibilities for each step, followed by a live demonstration with a narration that referred to the information we had previously reviewed.

Finally, we were introduced to CIPA, the Child Internet Protection Act. The presenters handed out and reviewed (vocally) a well-laid out report that combined the act itself, the ALA Code of Ethics, and some relevant developments from recent years regarding the act's application in certain libraries. We then turned the handout sheet over, and were invited to consider the two case scenarios we read and to discuss how well we thought they followed CIPA and/or the Code of Ethics. It was a very interesting discussion, and the timing was great.

Overall, one-shot workshops are a lot trickier than book clubs. There are a lot more possibilities for structure, and the amount of time you have to work with matters a great deal in achieving an appropriate pace. It is important to put yourself in the participant's place and consider how you might fare as an audience member: What would you want provided? How well could you keep up? Is this the best medium or method for explanation or demonstration?