Nov 28   Gwama  Day 3 of training for RWC workshop starting Monday


Today was the last day of the training phase for the Gwama workshop. The focus today was on practical exercises to reinforce all that had been taught. We added something to the training portion of this workshop that we’ve never done before, but which I think was very helpful, so we’re likely to do it again in the future. Instead of simply focusing on exercises that had them collecting words from a single semantic domain, we had them do a couple of complete folders. I realized that, in the past, we have never in the training phase had the participants do exactly what they would be doing during the word-collection phase of the workshop. We had never given them the experience of doing an entire folder prior to the actual word collection. But today we did, and I think it was very helpful. Some issues became apparent that were not evident until we had them work on a whole folder, and we were able to discuss those today instead of in the context of the entire group that will be here on Monday.

In the afternoon, we had to move from the large room where we’d been doing the training to a much smaller room. The move was motivated by a meeting of government officials who needed the larger room; that meeting is scheduled to continue through Tuesday. There was barely enough room to squeeze all of us in the smaller room for the last three hours of the day, so I think we’ll have to find another solution for next week (when more Gwama participants will join us) until the larger room becomes available again.

Small meeting room:

Kevin Warfel