Tag Archives: social learning

Benjamin Evans 12:39 am on August 27, 2022
Tags: , , social learning   

Documenting the Successful Launch of Japanese Online Workshops

On August 17th and 24th, @piyopiyofox and I co-hosted the Training Team’s first Japanese Online Workshops. These were also the team’s first non-English Online Workshops! The workshops received positive feedback, and we’re already seeing people sign up to the third and fourth workshops happening in September!

This post documents the process we took to plan, publicize, and execute the first non-English Online Workshops. We hope this will give others some ideas as to how they can host Online Workshops in their locales, too!

Preparation

Destiny and I had both previously been vetted as Online Workshop facilitators. Anyone interested in hosting Online Workshops can submit an application here: Applying to facilitate (handbook page). We had also conducted Online Workshops in English, so we were familiar with the general processes behind Planning an Online Workshop.

The process of scheduling the workshop was mostly the same as scheduling English workshops (Scheduling an Online Workshop). A few things we did differently were:

  • Created the meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. event in Japanese: ブロックエディターでホームページを作ろう！(English: Let’s make a homepage with the BlockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. Editor.)
  • Included information in English that the event would be hosted in Japanese.
    • We added this information to the event thumbnail on Meetup.com, and in the event description itself.
  • We published the event a few weeks in advance so that we had enough time to publicize the event to the Japanese community.

Publicity

People can find out about upcoming Online Workshops in a few different ways:

None of these would get the word to the Japanese community about the workshops, though. So, we took some time to spread the word through other means.

We were particularly excited to see the organic publicity the tweets generated!

Results

We were interested in finding out when the best time to host workshops would be for the Japanese community, so we hosted the workshop twice spaced out over two weeks; both on a Wednesday, but one at 2 PM and another at 5 PM JST. We had a total of 14 people attend the two sessions, with a slightly higher number at the session hosted in the evening over that hosted early afternoon.

The feedback submitted in the Zoom chat was greatly positive with many mentioning they learned something new from the session! We also noticed some attendees tweeted that they had a positive experience in the session.

At the end of the second session, we took time to announce the next Japanese Online Workshops we’ve scheduled for September. This seems to be a success, as one participant mentioned in the session that they would be back, and we see a couple have already signed up to attend! These next sessions are being planned and tracked on the Training Team’s GitHub repository.

Post-session Processes

In English sessions, we generally turn Live Captions on in Zoom, and use these to generate subtitles for the video recording we submit to WordPress.tv. Unfortunately, Zoom does not yet have live caption capabilities in Japanese. While we weren’t able to turn live captions on during the session, we were able to generate good quality subtitles through Sonix.ai after the session concluded. You can now find a recording of the workshop on WordPress.tv: ブロックエディターでホームページを作ろう！

Conclusion

As a team, we are excited about growing the non-English resources we provide on Learn. The experience documented above shows it is possible to host Online Workshops in other languages, too! 

The biggest hurdle we had to cross was publicizing the event to the Japanese community. If you have any ideas as to how we could do this better, we’d love to know!

The Training Team Faculty members are ready to help launch Online Workshops in other locales also. If you are interested in hosting an Online Workshop, come apply to become a facilitator! Faculty members are ready to help you facilitate in your locale, too.

#localization, #online-workshops, #social-learning

Sarah Snow 1:12 am on June 23, 2022
Tags: , social learning,   

Discussion: Tracking Social Learning Spaces

As we get more comfortable settling our content into our team GithubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/, I thought it might be time to start tracking our social learning space topics. Another facilitator and I recently very nearly scheduled the same topic for a social learning space–simply knowing where to look to see if another similar topic was in the works would have immediately fixed this situation for us.

So, how should we track Social Learning Space topics?

How do we all feel about creating a Github template with the title and description that would appear on MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. (similar but not as extensive as a lesson plan) for social learning space ideas?

To be clear, this would not replace Meetup, but it would allow us to see which spaces are in progress and which have already been created to avoid an unfortunate overlap. Adding these as issues/tasks in GitHub also allows us to better track team contributions and award badges.

Some thoughts:

  1. Some social learning spaces occur more than once (they can be repeated!), so I’m not sure the best way to track them. 
  2. It may help to have a “Planned” column, “Scheduled” column, and “Past SLS” column where frequent or semi-frequent contributors can move issues from one stage to the next… would it be okay if they moved back into “scheduled” if they’re a repeat topic?
  3. Once an SLS is complete, It would help to provide links to the recording of the SLS in this same space.

Important: It’s important to note that just because a social learning space has been taught online before, doesn’t mean it cannot be repeated for a new audience, or that a new facilitator cannot run the same social learning space on the same topic. New facilitators bring new knowledge, new audiences bring their own unique perspectives and experiences. Especially as these spaces become more and more interactive, each discussion will shed new light, attendees will build their own projects, and it will allow us to stay current with the most recent WordPress developments.

The ask: Is Github the right place to track social learning space topics? 

What is a useful way to track it–what I described, or something else? 

Please leave your thoughts in the comments. We would appreciate them!

#learn-wordpress, #social-learning, #training-team