Last week, I posted my thoughts on Day 1 of An Even Apart (Seattle). I had fully planned on writing on both day 2 & the 3rd-day workshop, but after somehow losing a longish post to the ether, am skipping day 2. Suffice to say, the quality of the talks continued, as well as the laser-like focus on what can be accomplished with HTML5 and CSS3.
The A Day Apart Workshop was my primary reason for attending the conference. I wanted some hands-on learning & experimentation with these new tools that I had been unable to play with much. I have seen both Jeremy Keith & Dan Cederholm speak previously, so knew they would be good. And they were good. In fact, I would argue that the only thing that made this workshop worthwhile in the end was the quality of the presenters, who overcame everything to actually deliver quality.
This was the first A Day Apart put on by the AEA folks, so I expected it to not be perfect. But I did expect more. I’m certain that the next iteration will improve slightly on this one, and so on and so forth. But let me list my complaints, with some hopefully helpful critique:
- Size of workshop: There were simply too many attendees in one room. It meant, for the most part, that it was hard to carry on a Q&A thread, because you don’t want to take up everyone else’s time & B, radically changed the possibilities of how run the workshop. To fix, I’d recommend a)lessening the number of spaces available and b)split the audience into 2 groups. Group A would get presenter #1 in the AM, presenter #2 in the PM. Group B would get it in reverse. Yes, this would double the work-load for the speakers – but I think would vastly enhance the experience for the attendees.
- Format of workshop: The workshops were really just extended seminars – not so much a workshop. While Jeremy’s seminar & workshop topics were different, Dan was talking about CSS3 in both, so his workshop felt like an extension of his earlier seminar. Jeremy had us guess the definitions of elements from the HTML 5 spec, and actually work that out. The result? I remember those definitions more than virtually anything else. Because I got to actually interact with the material. So here’s my suggestion to fix this: Each workshop was divided into 3 parts (if I recall correctly). If, let’s say, 10 minutes was cut out each (maybe even 20 minutes) and replace with a related exercise for the audience to do, suddenly the interaction with the material would increase greatly, and, I suspect, both people’s comprehension & retention of the material. If, in addition to 10 minutes of homework, there was schedule in 10 minutes for post-homework Q&A, that provides a nice way to summarize each content block.
- Density of Material: The material-to-time ratio was way off, which meant we raced through the material. Either cover less or make the workshop longer. Both spent a long time on the history of the material – this was useful, but could likely have been done quicker, given the quality of the rest of the meat they were delivering.
- Related Assets/sample code: We were all given a book with all the slides printed and bound into it. This is a great reference. But an online wiki, perhaps specific to the course, that was setup by the creators, but, going forward, be looked at, edited, updated by the attendees would be awesome. If a laptop was required (given the audience, I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request) and we were provided links to download some source code, we could then, in the workshop, very quickly build a site each, to see the material in action ourselves – this would work great with the ’10 minutes of homework per section’ model – you just keep building on. This has been, more or less, the standard for programming workshops I’ve attended. For me, this is likely the biggest miss.
Despite everything I’ve written above, I do feel that I came out that workshop with a better understanding of the two tools I went into the workshop wanting to learn. As I said above, this is almost entirely due to the quality of the speakers, not the format of the workshop itself. If there was to be another A Day Apart at a future conference, on a topic of interest to me, I would certainly consider attending it again. But while it was OK, it could have been great.
Update (2010-4-12): I had initially remarked that both workshops felt like extensions of the seminar. Jeremy, thankfully, corrected me that his seminar and workshops were quite different. My apologies.