Place where I work has a couple of writing training courses coming up later this month — 23 and 24 March and 30 and 31 March. If you use the code BLOG10 when buying tickets, you can get 10% off.
Writing and editing complex content is about taking tricky, subtle or difficult material — often full of jargon — and shaping it for best effect. It’s facilitated by Kath Kovac, and she gets rave reviews.
Fundamentals of data literacy and visualisation is about working with data — finding it, evaluating it, analysing it (a bit) and expressing your conclusions in words and images. It is facilitated by me, and my reviews are not quite as good as Kath’s but they’re not too bad.
The place where I work, or at least where I go for some hours most days, is offering some training in writing and working with data. I am putting this here on this blog because it gives me a post!
I’ve been particularly pleased these last 12 months with the course we’ve called Fundamentals of data literacy and visualisation. Why? Because I proposed it, wrote most of it and present it. Further, I’ve developed (I would not say invented) a somewhat idiosyncratic way of presenting it online over Zoom that seems to be working quite well. (We do gather feedback, so I am not making this up.)
I wanted to move the training online in the year(s) of COVID but without sacrificing the close interaction with the skilled facilitator (or with me). We usually do not run huge courses — 10 people, say — and that allows us to discuss specific issues that pertain to someone’s work or communication needs. The courses are very interactive and hands on, and I wanted to keep the online versions as much like the live ones as possible.
We traditionally, and for good reasons, provide participates with a high-quality, professionally printed manual. This has several uses.
For it works as a useful reference, long after the course is over.
It includes exercises and answers, so gives people a place to make notes, tackle exercises and so on, and keep it all in one place.
For those with limited screen real estate, it acts like a second screen. They don’t have to flick back and forth between windows or anything.
(I believe that) sitting there with a pen in your hand, making notes, helps listening. If you listen with the intent of abstracting the key messages from what the speaker is saying and noting them down, you listen more actively. Even if you never read the notes, they help. Handwriting allows rapuid sketchy diagrams and interpolations and suchlike.
Of course, if people want an e-version, we can supply that too.
As facilitation, I have my own copy of the manual. I sit it on the desk under a document camera. I like document cameras because they capture what is really going on, not a carefully edited and redacted version. When I ask the participants to to an exercise, I open the book under the camera and do it myself. They can see me do it. Skwetch the graph, make a mistake, try again. And so they have a better idea of what an answer might look like. If they have a query I can sketch up a little solution or suggestion.
A page from one of our manuals, viewed by the document camera
And they see my hand going back and forth, pausing in thought, and so on. The Zoom experience becomes more human and organic and flexible.
I find it helps interactivity. People bored with a section can read the advanced material in the appendixes, or doodle, I suppose.
DSPACE 