Since we got through all the material I had on the first class, I had to prep another three hours of workshop materials. The class wanted to go on to rendering/display code -- what to do with your XML once you have it -- so I've retrieved and rewritten some of the material from our XML and CSS workshop for CASTA last year, and then added a second half which introduces the basics of XSLT. I don't know how far we'll get with it.

This has been immensely time-consuming, so I hope it's re-usable. It's taken nearly a week of my time to prep six hours of class time. For a workshop, you can't just assign them some readings then go in brandishing your accumulated wisdom and stoke up a stimulating chat; you have to give them fairly sophisticated materials, along with a presentation that makes them comprehensible. The effort of imagining what kind of materials might work for a combination of CS and English students was substantial, and even once I had a handle on the class, after doing the first session, it was still tough to find the right angle and create materials that (I hope) will work. It's especially hard to do this when you don't know what the real focus of the course is. Even after asking the students, I'm not sure about that.

In future, we need to be aware of the amount of prep time this kind of thing can generate. Giving a workshop is a very different thing from just leading or teaching a regular class.