I’m a longtime Python enthusiast and open knowledge advocate, I’ve been involved with Wikimedia for many years and was one of the cofounders of Wikimedia Israel.
I’m really excited about OTS as a model for teaching technology to people with little or no technological background.
Here in Jerusalem we are already planning two Python-for-beginners workshops to be delivered along the OTS model, in a very cool hub-like space we have here in town.
One of the workshops is part of a longer course that is meant to provide graduates of social science and the humanities with a kind of a glimpse into the tech world (mainly for career purposes) and the other is focusing on empowering some of the local digital humanities activists who come from a humanities background but lack the tech skill.
For now, the instructor team is supposed to be made of myself and some of my friends and co-workers. The learner groups are, as I wrote, quite well-defined for now and we aren’t trying to reach out to everyone yet, rather recruit from specific groups of people.
My question basically is what you recommend. Should we go through the OTS chapter formation and all the OTS branding (create an OTS Jerusalem Meetup group, Facebook or Twitter presence etc.) or maybe we should delay it till later, after we see how we can pull off these first classes on our own.
How do I best connect to the people behind OTS Tel Aviv? They seem to have been pretty successful with their Python workshops.
Anything else you would recommend to me? I read through the various handbooks.
glad that you found us. it sounds great what you’ve in your pipeline there and we feel honoured you want to do this under the umbrella of OpenTechSchool.
Usually we start by doing a few events first and establish the model with learners and coaches before going for setting up a chapter page on the website. but even for that, we normally already use an ots-meetup-group, I’ll set this up for you.
These workshops you are planning sound very interesting, is the material available online somewhere? We host our materials via github on learn.opentechschool.org so all coaches can easily improve it continuously. Would you like to share yours, too?
As these materials are hands-on for self-learnung they are very expressive and don’t have any presentations or lectures but rather just people around, who help whenever there are any questions - the coaches. In general 5 learners per coach had proven to be a good number for learners to take in. If you are trying new materials, we are sometimes lowering that number to also be able to collect feedback and fix bugs while we go. But as the workshops are open to the public and free, you should overbook them anyway as up 35% don’t show.
I’ll make you an introduction to the people in TLV via email.