I’m going to post feedback here as it arrives (I asked everyone to send by e-mail as many of them had to leave at the end of the seminar).
I taught a fairly in depth introduction to Max/MSP (a dataflow programming language/environment), enough for people to go off and build experimental interfaces and gather data and process it in various ways, as well as generate audio on the fly.
Overall I felt like it went quite well, although we were quite strapped for time and I had to condense a lot of material into an hour and a half, however I felt like it went down really well.
My biggest self-criticism is probably that every time I wanted to move on to a new concept a lot of people were still working together to figure out a previous thing or were just not paying attention and still focused on their group discussion. I’d introduce a new concept, explain a lot of it, and quite some time later I’d realize some people hadn’t paid attention to the very introduction of it. Not sure what to do in that case, guess there should be a way to focus everyone’s attention, but I don’t want to stop group discussion either.
Student Comments:
*\*feedback 1**
Negative: it would be good if you outline what you plan to do (both in general for the whole course
and for every small exercise in particular). I often wasn’t really sure where you were going
with putting boxes in the patch, although it became clear soon enough.
Positive: unlike many courses, the pace was well-adjusted to the group
(I often find these things mind-numbingly slow). You waited when something wasn’t
clear (and asked this frequently) but didn’t waste time in between for no reason.
*\*feedback 2**
Positive:
— You have very clear examples that closely follow the learning process of someone who is gradualy accumulating something new, while providing an interesting and useful example. You are also patient and concerned about whether people follow you (asking about it repeatedly) which makes people comfortable about telling you when they are behind or don’t understand something, which, in turn, maximizes everyone’s gain from the workshop.
Negative:
— Slowing down on the first step of each topic might give those that are patching up their saving/final steps of the previous topic some time to catch up on the prep for the next topic you are trying to convey; this would maybe prevent people from asking questions about things you explain clearly at the beginning of each topic (but people don’t pay attention because they are finalising their last steps from the last topic).
Both positive and negative:
— This particular workshop was very inspiring, which makes me feel that it might have been a bit too short for what this software can do. All in all, it inspired me to want to learn more, and wish the workshop was longer or that you could give a few follow-up sessions with more in-depth topics!
***
*\*feedback 3**
The course is really good and useful. And the content is suitable for beginner. I think the only thing you should improve is that the content is just little intensive. Because the time to digest the knowledge will be different if the people from different background. Best regards,
Will post more feedback as it arrives.