I completely agree with Bala's views.
I have done around 5 Wiki workshops and intentionally never used any
Powerpoint presentation or handout though resource material were available
in plenty. People get frozen with these resources and do not connect to the
speaker well. I have seen anecdotes, story telling with some humour, content
matching the locality / audience to work well. I use only very few
screenshots to illustrate and use the LCD projector only when I give a demo
of editing and take people for a Wikipedia site tour.
Basically, guys doing out reach need lot of passion for the movement and
should learn few basic lessons in public speaking.
On Gautham's questions:
//Would 'Indian' videos, so to speak, in multiple languages work better?
Maybe this is something we could work on?//
If we can have professionally done indic language videos ( or with subtitles
at least ) for showing how to edit and explaining various features in
Wikimedia project websites, then it can help.
//Also, how important does everyone see having say, ten or so, laptops
and data cards to use is?//
More computers with internet access is always a plus. But it need not be a
handicap. Many of our earlier workshops just had one laptop with net access
which the speaker used to project. We had even used pre-recorded screencasts
/ screenshots when there were no online access.
When we have few computers we can have sessions and put few users per system
to practice together.
Ravi