Veldof and "Creating the Workshop"

Starting out this article was a bit funny for me, as it seems to speak to experienced librarians who have been doing workshops--somewhat wrongly--for years and need to get out of old bad habits to create new ones.  As an LIS student in a rather cutting edge SI school, it's always odd to read literature that seems to be intended for an audience with old conceptions, rather than a fairly blank slate such as myself.  On the other hand, it's relevant to me as someone who as been exposed to and works with a library that offers a lot of 1 hour or so workshops, which I always felt were in some ways designed to teach people just enough of what students need for a foundation, allowing them to pursue more advanced questions with the knowledge they got from the workshop and to get in contact with the instructor on further questions.

In a nutshell, the introduction stresses the importance of planning, with a lovable acronym for the process suggested by this book.  It's actually very simple in a way--perhaps in part because I've been cultured to follow similar processes throughout my education regarding all sorts of projects beyond educational projects, and in part because any overview like ADDIE doesn't necessarily betray the complexities and hard work that go into each step.  But the fact that one should analyze (conduct some sort of user study to figure out what should be done) design (formalize the objectives and perameters of the workshop) develop (create the content) implement (do the workshop) and evaluate (consider the project and how it can be made better with help from user input) is on some level extremely intuitive and simple.

Of the reasons given to go through planning like an ADDIE process, I think "plug and play" and "consistency" are most important and interesting.  Having a structured process saves a lot of time in allowing one to take out one piece of a workshop and replace it with another, or follow a basic layout for different topics.  Design should make future workshops quicker and easier, it should allow us not to need to reinvent the wheel for every lesson.  Related to that is consistency, which is important for teachers with lots of different classes and things to teach, and difficult to achieve.

With regard to the mixes suggested for building teams for workshop creation, I'm very much in agreement with all of the considerations, but tempered on needing a "mix of personality types."  Especially in small groups of say 4 or less, conflicting pesonalities can be good to make sure things are well rounded and balanced, but they can also restrict progress in a given direction that may be very fruitful.  In general I think that in group work balance is great, but compromise is not necessarily great, since in education creativity and innovation can be extremely effective, and conflicting personalities can stifle that in favor of compromise.  Not to say conflicting personalities are bad, just that in some groups, especially small ones, one might not always need to go so far as make sure vastly different personalities are present, and might even consider in what way a group of like-behaving individuals could work with more synergy.

As I know this course will cover a great deal of group work on creating educational tools and teaching plans, I think it will be interesting to try the guidelines set out in the remainder of the introduction to see what is most effective and what might be a bit more formal than needed.