In September 2002, I had the opportunity to teach a weekend workshop in Web writing in São Paulo, Brazil.
The event happened thanks to a Brazilian friend. Earlier that year she approached a small company in São Paulo to suggest that they invite me to give a workshop for Brazilian writers, editors and content developers. Projecto Tao accepted the suggestion and began preparations.
We all learned a lot in the process of organizing the event. Some problems were logistical – it was hard to find a venue in a city of 17 million with a shortage of conference space. Others had to do with the fact that I don't speak Portuguese, so we would need simultaneous translation. The key problem turned out to be publicity. While Brazil has a burgeoning Web industry, that industry (like North America's) is still largely unaware of the importance of good Web content. So print media weren't always interested in the workshop – least of all in the last weeks of a contentious presidential election campaign.
Still, a number of articles and news releases did appear in newspapers, magazines, and Webzines, and the workshop attracted around 70 participants. They came from varied backgrounds – journalism, business, academia. A few were in their teens, but most were between 25 and 45. One or two had flown as far as 3,000 kilometers to attend.
The venue was a hotel in downtown Sao Paulo. Given the city's sprawl and traffic, the organizers weren't surprised that some participants arrived late. Having already seen something of São Paulo traffic, I was grateful that they had arrived at all! The support staff, however, were all in place along with the equipment – laptop, projector, sound system, translator. I was startled to see all the Projecto Tao staff in orange shirts…with my name on them!
I was eager to have this workshop turn into a conversation, with lots of questions and comments from the participants. For that reason I had asked that chairs be arranged in semicircular rows, so everyone could see and hear everyone else. This arrangement wasn't quite followed; seating faced one of the short walls in the room, rather than one of the long ones, so only the first couple of rows curved a bit. If people couldn't always hear one another, they could certainly hear me: I had a shirt-pocket microphone that worked well.
Almost everyone also had a headset for the simultaneous translation, and seemed comfortable with it. So was I, on the second day – on the first, I was always tangling the headphones and wires. The translators, working in a booth at the back of the room, gradually got used to my style of delivery, but in the first morning I received a lot of "slow down!" signals.
The presentation used a set of PowerPoint slides in English, which projected quite well. Participants had a spiral-bound workbook that included the slides in both English and Portuguese, with space for notes.
This worked effectively, and I wished we had also included some samples of Webtext in Portuguese as well as some URLs. This would have enabled us to do some editing on paper; eventually we tried this on Sunday by printing out the front page of a candidate in the Brazilian presidential election, but it was an improvisation.
I began on Saturday by asking if anyone would say what they hoped to gain by the end of the day. Dead silence. It proved to be difficult on the first morning to elicit questions or comments. When they did speak up, I was wrestling with my translation headset and couldn’t always understand their points.
Still, we covered the material in the Saturday slides by noon and the group became more talkative in the afternoon when we looked at some Canadian, American, and Brazilian Websites. They were quick to apply thetheory of the morning to the practice of critiquing real Websites. They were especially struck by a goof on the Spanish-language page of the White House site: apart from the fact that the links on that page are still in English, one news story was repeated three times! We agreed that the nonverbal message on the page was that the White House was too distracted by Iraq to pay attention to Spanish-speaking visitors.
I sat down after the first session with the Projecto Tao people and we critiqued the day. In general it had gone well, but we needed to get the participants doing something. Hence the decision to print out copies of the candidate's front page. I was hesitant to get involved in Brazilian politics, but was assured that the participants in the workshops were unlikely to be supporters of this particular candidate.
On Sunday everyone was more relaxed. The topic now was not Webwriting in general, but writing for Web marketing and advocacy. I again used PowerPoint, but broke up the slides with visits to various Websites –including those written by some of the participants. In general I was struck by the good design and clarity of the language. I can’t speak Portuguese, and I read it poorly, but in many cases I could sight-translate right into English – which I took as a good sign.
The analysis of the candidate's site went well. We had printed off only 30 copies, so people had to share ideas and discuss how they might change the text. I always think a quiet classroom is the devil’s playground, and that students make a lot of noise when they're learning. So I was happy to hear an uproar during this part of the day. However, I'd given them too much text, and they'd paid more attention to the design of the page rather than its content. Still, everyone seemed pleased with the exercise.
Six hours may seem like a long time to fill, but on both days the time went very quickly. We wrapped up at 4:00 pm on Sunday with a "raffle" of five copies of my book Writing for the Web – an ending that everyone seemed to enjoy.
That night we reviewed the participants' evaluation forms, and were happy to see how positive they were. I had expected complaints about my ignorance of Brazilian culture and language, but instead got compliments. The complaints were mostly about the uncomfortable chairs – just like a weekend workshop at my own college. Some didn't like having to spend a whole weekend; they would have preferred Friday-Saturday, for example.
Nonetheless, in striking contrast to Sunday conferences in Canadian colleges, attendance did not drop off at all. Most thought two days was the right amount of time, and some thought it had been too short.
On Monday the 16th I had an opportunity to meet a very different group –about a hundred students in computer science and digital media at the Pontificia Universidade Catolica de São Paulo. Here I had nothing but a cordless mike and a broken whiteboard at one side of a big auditorium. While a faculty member volunteered to translate, he wasn’t needed; I had learned to speak slowly, and everyone seemed to understand well enough. On the whiteboard I put some Portuguese words and phrases, cribbed from the workshop book, which also helped.
This was a much less demanding effort – just an hour – but I was glad to see that the students were eager to ask questions, both during my talk and afterward. I think they enjoyed being scandalized by my low opinion of Flash ("I like chile peppers," I told them, "but not in my coffee"). It was fun to chat with them afterward about programs in Canada and where they might go for further studies after they graduate.
Projecto Tao and I hope to do more such workshops in the future. I certainly learned as much as I taught, and had a wonderful time. In three days I'd glimpsed a Web culture of considerable skill and sophistication, with great prospects for growth in a country where only 12% of households have computers. It's also a culture suffering from some isolation, partly through language and partly through its distance from North America and Europe. But I could see that a community of practice is growing rapidly among Brazilian Web developers, and it's beginning to form links around the world. As we share our experience with them, and they with us, we'll all be better off.
You can visit the workshop Website at
http://www.hainet.com.br/kilian/
Two reports on the conference, in Portuguese, are available at
http://www.atarde.com.br/materia.php3?mes=09&ano=2002&id_subcanal=14&id_materia=2641
and
http://www.confea.org.br/noticias/noticias.asp?IdNoticia=693
The Projecto Tao team--great colleagues and wonderful friends!
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