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20090516workshop

On May 16th, 2009 near Ottawa, Canada, a Tiki workshop was held.

We had 30-35 participants.

Lessons learned

  • When users pick their preferred languages later on, it makes it difficult for people to follow.
    • The trainer will tell people to turn on feature X, but it has a different name (and possibly location) in another language.
    • AD: Yes, I experienced that too.
  • Collaborative profile was helpful to get started but too crowded for beginners
    • AD: Given that we knew this crowd was made of translators, we should have started with the Multilingual profile, or the Collaborative_multilingual_terminology profile. Choose a profile that is closest to what the particular audience will want to use in their actual job.
    • General File Gallery and General forum inclusions were not working during the workshop
  • All advanced features (like staging & approval) should be off
  • We should have Workshop profile which is optimized for teaching/presenting Tiki.
    • Should use profiles with self register but no validation (otherwise, people take time going to check their email).
    • Note from AD: This worked very well for me (I used the Multilingual_Collaborative_Terminology profile, and it was configured that way).
  • Very difficult to cope with the various skill levels.
    • Presenter should not be helping individuals that are stuck. Roaming helpers
    • AD: Yes, but you have to target difficulty level to competence of the audience. Trying to teach those guys how to install tiki was the wrong choice.
  • On one hand, it's great that each participant build their own Tiki so they can do things like change logo, change title, play with admin panels. OTOH, it's great that everyone participates on one Tiki because they get to collaborate
    • IMO (Alain Désilets), it's better to get people to work together on one site. Tiki is a collaborative tool, so we need to give people the experience of having collaborated with it to do something. If you know the audience (as we did in this case), you can come up with a specific collaborative task that they can work on. In this case, we shoudl have started them early on the task of collaborating on multilingual terminology. When you get people to collaborate on a task that they care about, there are lots of opportunities to show the flexibility of the tool. For example, you find that the default profile for that particular task does not work exactly as people would want it, and you can show them how to activate and configure features on the fly to accomodate their real time feedback.
  • Large groups need to be divided into subgroups for complex tasks like installation. Five people could probably do it in half an hour, while the whole group takes multiple hours and it discourages them.
  • Do not have 35 people install 35 Tikis at the same time (4900 queries x 35 = 171 500 queries)
    • When advanced users have finished a section, they can be asked to help their fellow students (learning by teaching)
  • Some users don't want to learn to install. Perhaps advanced users should install twice (once for them and once for other user)
    • AD: I couldn't agree more! Unless you have an audience made up predominantly of tecchies or people who like to "tinker" with technology, you should not teach how to install tiki. Most of the people in the audience would not be allowed to install server software anyway, and it will have to be done by their sysadmin anyway. So why bother them with that kind of arcane details? If you think that tiki is "easy" to install, consider this. Most people in the audience are highly educated and competent in their own field. Many of them have a special interest in translation technology. We had a ratio of 1 instructor for 5 participants. Participants could follow Marc's steps. Yet, I would say that about 10-20% of the attendees were unable to install the thing. I understand that the aim was so that people could tell their sysadmin that tiki is easy to install. But I think the opposite was achieved. If a sysadmin tries to install tiki and reports that he was not able to do it cause it's too complicated, the end user who has participated in this workshop will probably agree with him and sympathise with him.
  • Have a profile-course which lets people go at their own rhythm, and thus advanced users could just go further.
  • Link to this page should be emailed to participants for feedback
  • When you are teaching large groups, have them work in pairs, with one computer for two folks (in pair-programming style). That way, the pair can figure some things out without having to rely on the floating instructors.


Page last modified on Friday 20 September 2019 15:37:25 GMT-0000

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