Learning and Evaluation/Reporting and Storytelling/Toolkit/Learning Questions

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Storytelling toolkit


Questions for finding out stories

How do you start telling others what your work is about, what you do at your organization? These questions are meant to help you pin down all the stories, and highlight the ones you want to put forward. These questions were taken from a guide used by Wikimedia Foundation storytelling team.

  • What types of things do you find yourself explaining or justifying over and over (internally or externally) about the work that you do?
  • What are the objectives of your department?
  • What kinds of photos or images would help your team?
  • What kinds of projects are you working on that could use a 'poster child' or explanatory video?
  • What will you be working on, on an ongoing basis for the foreseeable future?
  • What do you want the world to know about what you do?
  • What is interesting or exciting or something that people can relate to about what you do?
  • How can others participate in what you do?
  • What are the mission-oriented goals of your project/efforts?


Learning Questions

Learning from your programs requires the right questions! We divided these in three stages: ideas, action and outcomes. Review your program under the light of this guide and bring out what you learned.

Ideas to change the world
  • What is the aim of your program? What goals did you set for it?
Example

e.g., to increase teacher’s skills in computer literacy.

  • How did you expect to change the context you were working on?
Example

e.g., Teachers will understand how to edit using wiki mark up, thinking of content in a category system. Teacher will eventually develop lesson plans on wiki.

Action
  • What activities did you develop? How many people took part?
Example

e.g., we did 5 workshops over the course of two months. 30 teachers from all over the country took part.

  • What were the outputs?
The world changed - a lot, some, not at all - and why

To what extent did you reach the goals you set for your program?

Example

e.g., we originally thought we could reach out to a group of 90 teachers, but only 30 were interested in the workshop.

→ To which extent is this positive?
→ What would change in your actions to reach your goal?
→ What would you do differently?
  • What parts of your original assumptions did you find might be incorrect?
  • Why is this important in your context?
Example

e.g., there is a knowledge gap between teachers and students in my country, and the National Office for Education does not have the capacity (both in terms of state of the art technology, manpower and academic year) to have the capacity development that is needed at the moment. This is why several organizations raise to the occasion to fill in the gaps. Our workshops come to fulfill this demand.

  • How does this program relate to a topline issue in your local cultural / education agenda?
  • What is the relationship with knowledge in areas that are just now coming online?
  • How does your community engage with open culture and free knowledge? How is your program facilitating that?

Pick the questions that are relevant to the story you want to tell. Use them as a checklist when writing a report. Some questions are good for opening a topic, some for developing, and some help you find a conclusion. Create your own path!

Have your own guiding questions? Help us expand this section by submitting them here!
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