I’m a little late to the party, but I thought I’d mention something that hasn’t gotten brought up yet.
I have some experience at leading/organizing groups like this. Something to consider when dealing with sequential learning is how to deal with people who are absent. Ideally, of course, you’ll have a core group of people who want to do nothing more than attend every session diligently, take notes, and study the material as soon as they wake up, and before they retire at night. This, however, isn’t going to happen. Life intrudes; people will miss some sessions.
Creating a plan to keep people updated and current when they miss things, or how to remind them of what they’ve already learned (something LW could improve upon, in my opinion) will allow everyone to stay together. Consider creating a summary to give them to take home. Likely, you’ll be doing a summary any way at the end of your talk (if you aren’t planning this, please do), and that ought to be sufficient. Also, you may want to leave room at the end and beginning of your sessions for questions about the concepts.
Also, make an effort to apply whatever concept you’re working on to people’s daily lives. One of the reason people find the extra material more useful than a lot of the core sequences as that they’re more immediately applicable to what we deal with, while it takes more creativity to figure out why some of the more basic or obscure steps matter right now. You may consider challenging people to look for examples of the current concept in their daily life, papers, or current events and bring it to share next time.
I hope something in here was useful. What you’re doing sounds really awesome—let us know how it goes!
I’m a little late to the party, but I thought I’d mention something that hasn’t gotten brought up yet.
I have some experience at leading/organizing groups like this. Something to consider when dealing with sequential learning is how to deal with people who are absent. Ideally, of course, you’ll have a core group of people who want to do nothing more than attend every session diligently, take notes, and study the material as soon as they wake up, and before they retire at night. This, however, isn’t going to happen. Life intrudes; people will miss some sessions.
Creating a plan to keep people updated and current when they miss things, or how to remind them of what they’ve already learned (something LW could improve upon, in my opinion) will allow everyone to stay together. Consider creating a summary to give them to take home. Likely, you’ll be doing a summary any way at the end of your talk (if you aren’t planning this, please do), and that ought to be sufficient. Also, you may want to leave room at the end and beginning of your sessions for questions about the concepts.
Also, make an effort to apply whatever concept you’re working on to people’s daily lives. One of the reason people find the extra material more useful than a lot of the core sequences as that they’re more immediately applicable to what we deal with, while it takes more creativity to figure out why some of the more basic or obscure steps matter right now. You may consider challenging people to look for examples of the current concept in their daily life, papers, or current events and bring it to share next time.
I hope something in here was useful. What you’re doing sounds really awesome—let us know how it goes!