In an effort to increase the community’s digital literacy, Surrey Digital Academy has started working with Surrey Libraries to offer free tech-related workshops.
The workshops are run out of two of the city’s library branches – Semiahmoo and City Centre. Upcoming events include “Intro to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning” at Semiahmoo on Feb. 10, “Financial Analysis with Python” at City Centre on Feb. 13 and “Create a website from scratch: WordPress for Beginners” at City Centre on Feb. 20.
All workshops are at 6:30 p.m.
For more information, or to sign up, visit meetup.com/Learn-Talk-Tech-Surrey.
Harish Raisinghani, the founder and head instructor at Surrey Digital Academy, said the idea for the free workshops cam about after seeing how much tech has been in the news lately, adding that it’s “sort of leading a lot of people to be a little anxious with what’s happening with tech, it’s moving really quickly.”
But, he said, the problem was that most tech workshops in the Lower Mainland were more centered around Vancouver.
“The vast majority of them are located in Vancouver, sort of where a lot of the tech-related jobs are, but that’s changing,” he said. “You’re starting to see things like the health and technology district taking shape, you’re seeing a lot of the major university institutions setting up shop here, but at this point there still wasn’t anything sort of tech-related with respect to just workshops available for the general public.”
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So far, 15 workshops have been offered to a range of people, Raisinghani said.
“The idea is just to be able to empower the community to be able to engage with this new tech and be able to understand it in a way that makes them feel a little bit more comfortable, helps them improve their self confidence with working with these fast-paced and fast-moving technologies.”
Looking to the future, Raisinghani said there are plans to run more workshops after February and to look at offering them in other library branches, such as Guildford and Cloverdale.
lauren.collins@surreynowleader.com
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