I got out of work and dropped by the library today to help them with their preparations. Next week they're holding a forum for one of their volunteer groups that is specifically geared towards technology. Something of which is right up my alley - so much so, that I decided to spread the word about the XOs via a presentation.
One of the planed key points that I wish to emphasize is the ever growing importance of the open-source community. The XOs are a great testament to its power and I feel that it would be a wise way of keeping in check with the theme of the forum - showing the kids there how much opportunities they have in the world of technology.
As I was running through a very bare draft of the powerpont document I was creating to help aid me during ten minutes of attempting to woo the audience - whom are in the same age demographic as I am - to the manager of the volunteer office that I worked with, the conversation found itself upon ways to expand on the topics I was going to speak about, outside of the just the presentation. The idea that came up was possibly holding round table discussions about current issues in the field of computers and such. I would personally enjoy leading this. For one it would be great content to podcast, which is something I would like to get into and second it would be good practice in leading any type of group in an activity, since I'm about to lead language oriented talks. Right now all of this is just thought, but one I'm planning to chase after so check back for more details later.
With that said lets segway into the language groups. It was decided today to move forward with the Japanese group rather than the French. While I would have prefered to focus on French since my school courses in start next week, there is already a pack in the library that deals with it. Also I may be able to draw in more people with Japanese - I think it has more of an alure to most people my age than French. Anime would play a large part in explaining why - most teenagers have come into contact with more Japanese than they have French.
As for the format, while I'm planning to see what I get and go from there I'm definitely going to teach hiragana and katakana, two of the three writing scripts used in the language. I don't care to make much of anything set in stone just yet - merely the basics.
The folks at the library want to see how fast we can have things set up - the goal is to hold the first meeting sometime in October, mainly to give myself enough time to gear up for this. Heres to everything going well. I'm interested in seeing just what I can pull off.*
*Hopefully it will be more successful than may ill-fated blog carnival....
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