Today was the fifth and final of my MC 101 sessions for the Summer and I’d say the programming went out with a bang. New Kensington had the largest turn out of all the campuses I have been to with 17 people in attendance. Of those, about 65% were faculty, many of whom had not worked with the Media Commons in the past.
Though a full house, 031 ITC proved to be a great room for the event, making possible a fair amount of conversation during lunch with its U-shaped configuration. The flat panel TV with HDMI port that was brought in ahead of time worked out really well for the experimental afternoon session, too.
About that: Deborah arranged for a voluntary afternoon workshop on using our Mobile Media Pilot technology to create short videos. I used the iPad 2 as a teaching tool connected to a display for the first time today, which was a great way to show mobile iMovie – and come to the realization that there are enough differences in interface that also showing the iPod touch on a document stand might be a good augmentative strategy for later training. The participants really enjoyed getting out into the field with the iPod touch and produced good results in just a short time (around 45 minutes total).
Update: Evaluation
Participants at New Kensington were asked to rate the Overview session that started out the day. Responses were entirely positive, with 5 choosing Excellent and 1 choosing Good.
They were then asked to rank the entire day as Relevant and Interesting to them professionally. 4 Strongly Agree that MC 101 had relevance to their work and 5 Strongly Agree that the materials covered interest them.
Finally, participants were asked to rank the particulars of the day. Organization and Pacing scored highest marks with 5 and 4 Excellent responses, respectively. Communications and Refreshments received a 3/3 Excellent/Good split of responses, with the latter’s lower numbers probably resulting from a morning coffee mix up. The venue received 2 Okay marks, perhaps due to the full house we had which made 031 ITC a bit tight.
All respondents would attend this event again or recommend it to a colleague. The anecdotal responses also praised the way the event made MC resources approachable, as exemplified by this comment:
Absolutely an excellent workshop! The facilitator/presenter Nick was conversational and presented technical information in a very easy to comprehend way. The links and information were all very useful, and a lot of good questions from the attendees. Very impressive.