Hands-On Working Meetings
09/30/04

Good news! We’ve got the go-ahead to begin our hands-on working meetings. We’d like to have our first such meeting in October. We expect to hold these meetings five to six times a year. These working meetings will probably replace our monthly meetings since we anticipate them to be much more effective than the format they will be replacing.

We will be holding the meetings here in Laurel Heights in the computer lab. We have chosen this location because it can accommodate up to fifteen students at a time and is budget-friendly. In addition, it will get you away from your desks and the minute-to-minute demands of your jobs, so that you can focus exclusively on getting your web-work done and out of the way. In other words, these meetings will provide you with a dedicated time and place to work on your sites as well as assistance and coaching.

We envision replacing the current monthly meeting schedule with extended working meetings to be held 4-5 times a year. Meetings would be held approximately every other month over a morning or an afternoon. We will review or present a learning topic in the first hour of the meeting and will be available to assist the web workers with actual tasks (including content-editing and image-creation) throughout the rest of the afternoon. Those who wish to participate in the tutorial section may come for the first hour and stay on to work. Other web workers may drop in throughout the rest of the morning or afternoon for the hands-on assistance portion.

Traditionally, we have held our web worker meeting on the second Monday afternoon of the month. However, we are not wedded to that time frame and would like to know if a majority of you prefer other times. We are looking at Mondays, Tuesdays or Thursdays, with either a morning or an afternoon session. It is also possible that we hold each of these meetings at different times, in order not to exclude anyone. Would you get back to me with your preferences for meeting times, please, particularly for October?

In addition, we would like to know what topics you would like us to cover in the teaching portion of the meeting. They can range from the basic to the more complex, but should be directly applicable to your websites. We are more than happy to review any of the topics from our tutorials, of course. Would you please let me know what topics you would like us to review in the teaching portion of the class?