Federal Way Public Library
Feb. 4th, 2015
5: 00 PM - 7:00 PM
Overview:
The Federal Way branch library was a nice and busy building. Edna gave a very informative overview of library programs at the Federal Way branch. I thought it would be distracting to have an interpreter, but I think it went very well.
The women from Federal Way who attended were an interesting group. The three women in front who seemed like they were used to a formal educational environment - they had notebooks for notes, asked many questions, etc. A different woman seemed very interested in activities for her children, so I imagine that was a motivating factor for her participation.
I had planned some group discussion activities with the idea that the women from Casa and the women from Federal Way could get to talking with each other, but they were reticent to form groups with each other. (I even asked twice....) One woman from Casa was quite distracted by her teething baby, so I understand she wasn't able to fully concentrate on discussion! Another woman from Casa had a laptop with crashing Windows (blue screen; auto restart; blue screen; auto restart) so she was worried and distracted as well. Since my Windows crashed recently, I sympathize! I wanted to spend more time with her to help her troubleshoot, but the group was...well, not big, but big enough...that I couldn't get sucked into open-ended computer troubleshooting land. Another participant wanted to use her laptop, but couldn't find a good place to plug it in. Since we only used the technology a very short time, I just suggested she use a tablet. I'll bring my power cable next time.
I was surprised that the discussion about finding info only brought up Google. I had thought participants would bring up finding jobs, or information about American institutions/agencies. The discussion evolved in a fairly interesting direction, though. Participants had good insights into the problem of credibility -- one women said, "our kids believe everything they read on the internet. What can we say?" So we discussed evaluating credibility: figuring out the author and their intent, whether they're presenting their opinion, or facts they've researched.
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