Infoblog

Staff and administrators in many libraries are starting to think about training which reaches all employees—not just librarians—and includes pre- and post-workshop activities with peer trainers. While others continue to think, Infopeople Training Consultant Cheryl Gould and key players at Contra Costa County Library here in the San Francisco Bay Area have been shaping this growing trend.

When County Librarian Anne Cain supported Library Human Resources Manager Janet Hildebrand and Cheryl’s proposal to have every one of the nearly 300 staff members working in the system’s 25 facilities register for standard one-day computer competencies workshops last year, she relied on a successful Library tradition: using peer trainers as an integral component of training sessions, Janet said recently in a conversation we had. Janet and Cheryl worked with Library staff. They combined Infopeople’s Increase Your Computer Competency: Practical Tips and Tricks workshop with the Helping the Public with Public Access Computers workshop. The result was a new session which would help the library director achieve the vision she, Janet, and Cheryl had for the Library’s staff.

The results went far beyond the initial goal of helping staff learn more about the technology they were using, according to Janet. By pulling in representatives of each unit within the Library system as the workshops were being developed, peer trainers were prepared; the course content was designed in a way which would meet needs of staff at every level of experience; and the peer trainers coalesced as a group through post-workshop follow-up sessions led by Cheryl.

“It was wonderful to see how much everyone got out of the class,” Janet said. “They were able to turn to their neighbors and give help. We were building, right there in those workshops, the basis for learning together and helping each other learn. We were developing a common language and an openness about discussing what we didn’t know. No one could miss that this was a wonderful thing that was happening.”

In summarizing the successes provided through this process, Janet noted that the “computer competency learning environment has become established and staff is talking to each other, reminding each other, suggesting to each other, looking over each other’s shoulders, asking for help.” Staff has also established and is using a computer-competency wiki. And, best of all, many of the same people who made the computer competency workshop project a success are working together again as a new training initiative is about to be rolled out to staff throughout the Library system.

“It was a fantastic project,” Cheryl agreed. “That was a wonderful, win-win project for the Library.”

Posted by paul signorelli at 5:25 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

“I wish I’d thought of that” has to be the creative trainer’s lament. So, reading a New York Times article about a new trend referred to as “right-brain meetings,” you have to really fight the urge to utter the lament and wonder how you missed this one—unless you’re Infopeople Training Consultant Cheryl Gould.

Cheryl has for years been doing what Elaine Glusac writes about in the April 30, 2008 Times article: using “accessories ranging from Slinkys to the video game Guitar Hero to help drum up better brainstorming”—and, by extension, learning.

Glusac reports that the “new method owes some debt to the books “A Whole New Mind,” by Daniel H. Pink, and “The Rise of the Creative Class,” by Richard Florida.” Admitting that I’ve read and admired much of what Pink and Florida have written, I also think we should give credit where credit is due: Cheryl and other Infopeople colleagues have been effectively injecting this sort of creative fun and inspiration into work, learning, and training for quite a while.

Those of us who attended some of the “Master Trainer” sessions she led in 2002 remember that the simple act of tossing rubber balls and other toys around at the beginning of those workshops helped us enjoy and learn the lesson that ice-breakers help to stimulate learning. And you can be sure that we engaged in viral learning by carrying that idea back into our own training sessions so other trainers and learners would help to spread the word.

Attendees at the California Library Association conference in Long Beach last year remember Cheryl and others enthusiastically engaging everyone they could reach by demonstrating and encouraging others to try Guitar Hero and a variety of other games. The result is that skeptics who might have seen no place for gaming in libraries walked away with a visceral understanding of how it might be effective in drawing teens and others into their facilities. They came; they learned; they had fun.

It’s no accident that Cheryl’s Infopeople workshops sell out fairly quickly. Those who know her recognize that whatever she teaches is going to be useful, applicable to their work in libraries, inspirational, and entertaining. When she teaches us about Flip cameras and helps us learn to operate them, in her Customer Service in a Self-Check World workshop, we know we’re going to be using them on behalf of the libraries and customers we serve as soon as we can bring these tools into our own workplace.

As we review Glusac’s reporting, we are left with at least a couple of reactions: the feeling that we are already on familiar ground because of what we’ve seen from Cheryl and her colleagues, and curiosity about what new trends Cheryl is already helping to establish months or years before reporters and other writers bring them to an even larger audience.

Next: Creating Trends in the Contra Costa County Library

Posted by paul signorelli at 5:13 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

Trainers and staff interested in creating a comprehensive technology training program within libraries will find a tremendously useful introduction to the topic in Sarah Houghton-Jan’s “Technlogy Training For Library Staff: Creativity Works!" posting available through her Librarian in Black blog.

Her “A Path to Learning: Technology Training for Library Staff” PowerPoint presentation from a pre-conference session held at “Computers in Libraries 2008” and her accompanying blog piece about that workshop give viewers a 56-slide summary of the essentials, including planning and brainstorming (starting with Slide 9); ways of increasing staff competencies (Slide 22); how to assess staff competencies in the area of technological knowledge (beginning with Slide 23); guidelines for creating an effective training program (beginning with Slide 31); and a concise review of the various ways staff learns—through scheduled learning (Slide 34), unscheduled learning (Slide 35), e-learning options including Infopeople webcasts and webinars (Slide 36), and ongoing learning (Slide 38).

There are training tips for those with little experience in setting up a training program (Slides 45 and 46) and suggestions for ways to celebrate learning successes (Slides 52-54) as a way to increase the stickiness of the lessons being offered and assimilated. A list of resources for those who want to learn more about creating effective technology training sessions for library staff completes the package (Slide 55).

Sarah moves right into her subject by providing trainers and other staff members with the justification they may be asked to create when they propose this level of training: effective staff technology training programs “save money, strengthen staff skills and confidence, improve customer service, show institutional commitment to lifelong learning, increase efficiency and productivity, increase staff retention (and) motivate staff to keep learning,” she notes on her third slide. Placing training in this context, as we have seen in previous Infoblog postings, can lead to the dynamic and effective training programs found at libraries including Newport Beach Public Library and Contra Costa County Library.

If this doesn’t provide you with enough guidance, you’ll find even more through Infopeople archived materials such as those prepared by Infopeople instructor Michelle Boule for her "Using Web 2.0 Tools for Staff Training" workshop.

And for more of what Sarah is doing, don’t miss her “Effective ‘Virtual Visits’ Statistics for the Annual Library Public Library Survey” webinar on Thursday, April 27, 2008 from noon – 1 p.m. The presentation will be archived on the Infopeople website shortly after the broadcast is completed.

Posted by paul signorelli at 3:38 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

Forget about viral marketing, the contemporary version of word-of-mouth promotion combined with Web 2.0 social networking tools.

Let’s popularize a relatively new, rarely encountered phrase—“viral learning”—and acknowledge San Francisco Public Library Access Services Manager Marti Goddard for unintentionally providing an example of how easily we can use this to the benefit of those working in libraries.

The story begins with a lunch Marti and I had little more than a week ago. We were talking about Infoblog articles on the topic of “Training, Story, and PowerPoint”; Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points; and how to make training and learning sticky. I had read both editions of Atkinson’s book, was using the ideas with Infopeople webcast and webinar presenters, and was about to do my first bullet-less PowerPoint presentation. Marti had not read a word of Atkinson’s book, but was intrigued by what she was hearing.

When we met again yesterday for lunch, she proudly told me she had tried a bullet-less PowerPoint presentation this week and was delighted to receive enthusiastic, unsolicited comments about her slides from those who were present—which leads us to the idea of viral learning and how easy it is for anyone working in a library to put it to use. As Marti demonstrated, it is not difficult to informally exchange word-of-mouth (or, for that matter, online) descriptions of lessons we have learned so that they are immediately adapted, applied, and shared at the moment of need with others who might repeat the process in a quickly expanding group of learner-trainer-teachers.

This really is no different than the experience I had less than a year ago as a result of taking Michele Mizejewski’s “Web 2.0: A Hands-On Introduction for Library Staff” Infopeople workshop. I knew very little, at that point, about wikis, blogs, or RSS feeds. It wasn’t long before I was using Netvibes and iGoogle to read RSS feeds; writing more than 30 articles on training and Web. 2.0 for Infoblog and CE Buzz; experimenting with a rudimentary form of wikis with colleagues in Canada by using Google Docs; and, most importantly, engaging in viral learning by describing my successes (and failures) to others who might pass this learning-training on to others in our libraries and beyond.

Let the viral learning spread!

Posted by paul signorelli at 4:01 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

Having looked at how PowerPoint presentations with and without bullet points work in Part 1 of this series, and how Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points gives new life to an old tool in Part 2, let’s turn now to Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick and Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind to see how we can use these ideas to our advantage.

The Heath Brothers, in their book on “Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die,” use engagingly simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, and emotional stories to make the point that ideas stick when they are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, and Emotional and include Stories (SUCCESs, as they remind us with a word designed to make the message even stickier). They do this in a way that makes any of us who are familiar with Beyond Bullet Points immediately recognize that these are concepts to be woven into our classroom, learning lab, and workshop offerings.

When they discuss the importance of helping people learn through simulation—imagining how they might react if they were part of the story they are hearing—and through inspiration, we easily make the leap to seeing how our own stories and those of our students can lead to simulation and additional inspiration. When we read the Heath brothers’ story about a Subway sandwich advertising executive who wanted to run a campaign promoting the taste of the company’s food rather than the much stickier story of how an obese young man lost more than 200 pounds on a diet of little more than Subway sandwiches, we have to look at ourselves and wonder what lessons we are burying under reams of facts and figures and bullet points.

“The goal here is to learn how to spot the stories that have potential,” the Heaths write (p. 230), and we are again struck by how full of SUCCESs this advice might make our work.

Pink’s A Whole New Mind is equally effective as a tool for trainer-teacher-learners. His SUCCESs stories—like the one about how he went from drawing stick figures to producing a reasonably accurate self-portrait in a one-week period under the guidance of a fantastic instructor—make us sit up and ask, “Why can’t I teach and learn like that?”

The encouraging answer is that we can. By adapting the lessons offered by Atkinson, Pink, the Heath brothers, and many other creative trainer-teacher-learners, we recognize that old tools can bring new, powerful, and encouraging results which keep us all alert, inspired, and engaged.

Posted by paul signorelli at 11:59 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Tell me a story” has to be one of the most basic archetypal command-requests of our civilization. It is, therefore, completely natural that storytelling would be part of every endeavor we undertake, including training-teaching-learning. So let me tell you a story.

Attending a presentation by Leadership Challenge co-author Jim Kouzes several months ago, I was looking forward to hearing stories about the qualities great leaders shared in common. I was as much fascinated by Kouzes’ use of a visual facilitator as I was by his engaging examples, so I took the opportunity to talk with visual facilitator John Ward after the presentation ended.

“Read Beyond Bullet Points,” Ward counseled me at one point in our brief conversation, and I did. Twice.

The first edition of Cliff Atkinson’s book takes readers through a “Lights! Camera! Action!” system which starts all PowerPoint presentations with development of a great filmic narrative tool—a script—beginning with just a few major points each speaker/trainer wants to convey to an audience, then moving into a planning/storyboard phase with existing PowerPoint tools including the slide sorter function. Using the slide sorter assures that we see numerous slides in sequence at a glance so we won’t lose sight of the big picture while preparing individual slides.

Atkinson helps make it easy. He provides a story template in the book, through a CD-ROM which comes with the revised edition, and through his online Beyond Bullet Points website. The final phase of the process includes guidelines on how to offer a winning combination of narrative and visuals so that audiences remember what they are being offered.

As we read, learn from, and use the largely revised second edition of the book, we find Atkinson’s ideas coming even more clearly into focus. What he offers is the basic “Introduction to PowerPoint” course which so many of us sought and missed when we first began using the program as a training-teaching-learning tool, and he gives us an entirely new way of looking at an overly familiar and sometimes stale tool. He does it in a straightforward, helpful, guiding fashion, and is continuing to build a community of like-minded presenters through his website, blog, printed and online material, and—since we are in a Web 2.0 world—even a LinkedIn user group.

This appears to be a story with a happy ending; it leads to encouraging innovative presentations which learners will remember. What more could a trainer-teacher-learner want?

Next: Sticky Training and A Whole New Mind

Posted by paul signorelli at 11:09 AM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

Through an Infoblog posting late last week, we explored ways that effective learning could be integrated into a learner’s workplace. Seattle-based NetSpeed Learning Solutions continued the journey this morning through a “Web 2.0, Learning 2.0 and the Emergence of Peer-Driven Learning” webcast, adding yet another voice to the growing group of trainer-teacher-learners who are moving toward blended learning models which produce measurable results.

What we are seeing here is a combination of onsite workshops, online follow-ups, and employees and supervisors trained to work collaboratively in establishing cohesive and effective learning environments with formal and informal components. This continual-learning model is becoming increasingly familiar to those of us who are looking beyond library training programs to see what our colleagues in the commercial and nonprofit sectors are doing. Examples include leadership training sessions with pre- and post-workshop activities including those offered by Fort Hill Company (Wilmington, Delaware) and a move toward making learners rather than classrooms and instructors the center of the learning process.

NetSpeed Founder Cynthia Clay moved right into these topics during her webcast by summarizing changes in how training is presented. “Learning 1.0,” she suggested, was based on a “one-to-one apprentice model” or a “one-to-many” system whereby trainers trained and learners learned. “Learning 1.5” moved us into a world where training reaches students in multiple locations through webcasts, webinars, and other online courses. “Learning 2.0,” she said, involves abundant learner-to-learner connections and goes hand-in-hand with the Web 2.0 world of social connections established online.

Procedures established through NetSpeed’s leadership and customer-service projects are being incorporated into the company’s latest offerings. They include classroom instruction combined with “electronic reinforcement”: online resources including electronic magazines with case studies, role-model interviews, learner-to-learner blogs—libraries saw this through Helene Blowers 23 Things/Learning 2.0 project at the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenberg County, where learners tracked their progress through in-house blogs—and “other features crafted to reinforce the face-to-face training.” Web-based tools which help participants to create and use their own workplace action plans are the natural next step in the process. The final component includes tracking and measurement to document the impact the training has in the workplace.

“About a year and a half ago, I got really interested in Web 2.0 and how it affects training,” Clay said in a brief conversation we had after the webcast ended. “I think more and more people have embraced the idea that you need blended learning; more and more organizations accept that.”

And more and more trainers, along with library administrators, appear to be looking for ways to use these ideas and tools to the benefit of employees, organizations, and the customers they serve.

Posted by paul signorelli at 7:38 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes we need to go to London to be reminded of what is here at home.

A virtual trip to the London-based Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) via the organization’s website this week revealed a new online report offering more support to trainer-teacher-learners who believe that effective learning must be integrated into a learner’s workplace.

There’s nothing revolutionary here, but the report does offer a first-rate summary of what an effective learning program should include. At the heart of “How People Learn Systems,” written for CIPD by Stephen Gourlay and Carol Baily from Kingston University, is the idea that learning includes a social component and is more effective if it involves colleague-to-colleague assistance in the workplace rather than being treated “primarily as something that happened away from where the learning was to be applied.”

It’s all about context, which “(a)dult learning theory typically overlooks,” Gourlay and Baily contend. Since “professionals…are more likely to learn from their peers (as co-workers or as mentors), effective training programs include workshops away from the worksite, but must also include connections to onsite co-workers/mentors who are trained and formally designated to provide learning assistance when and where the learners need it.

This is not extremely common in libraries, but it is not a ground-breaking concept, either. The Newport Beach Public Library in Southern California, for example, has a “Geek Squad” of employees who are well versed in the Library’s technological tools; staff is encouraged to seek help with tech questions by calling Geek Squad members whenever the need arises. The Contra Costa County Library system in the San Francisco Bay Area also provides a great example of how training continues beyond a one-time workshop: after Infopeople trainer Cheryl Gould reached every member of the Library’s staff with a basic one-day computer-proficiency workshop, she also worked with Contra Costa County Library staff to train a group of Library employees who would serve the Geek Squad function long after Cheryl’s initial workshops ended.

Infopeople itself is continuing to experiment with ways of assuring that lessons learned will carry over into libraries after workshop participants complete their coursework. Recent online courses have included opportunities for students to have telephone conferences with instructors—which helps to build a lasting relationship between instructors and students, and perhaps even among the students themselves. Infopeople Director Holly Hinman takes this a step further: before her online grant-writing workshops begin, she conducts a brief survey to better understand the needs of each student. She uses that information to guide participants through the lessons and sometimes works with them on grants which they are preparing for their own library systems. The fact that some students remain in contact with Holly for a year or two after a workshop ends provides a here-at-home variation on what Gourlay and Baily propose, and reminds us that it sometimes is not all that hard to give our trainings life.

Posted by paul signorelli at 11:25 AM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

Trainers and other presenters are rediscovering that revolutions sometimes involve little more than returning to the basics. Current discussions about the revolution in how PowerPoint is integrated into presentations, for example, take us back to the importance of good storytelling and visual narrative. It’s all about engagement at every possible level, where nothing is more engaging than a good story.

PowerPoint certainly is receiving its share of criticism from those who suffer through poorly prepared slideshows where the person in the front of the room does nothing beyond reading words and bullet-point items from slides to a somnolent audience—which seems about as fair as hating everything in the universe of chocolate based on a single experience of eating a candy bar ten years past its expiration date.

With its ubiquitous use of bullet points, PowerPoint has been an effective tool for many of us who need help in organizing material. It is now growing to include a narrative/story-based style through Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points (a heavily revised second edition is available) and support from visual facilitators like John Ward. Trainer-bloggers including Michele Martin in The Bamboo Project Blog and Garr Reynolds in Presentation Zen are among those who have already written lengthy pieces on how trainers-teachers-learners can benefit from a more effective use of PowerPoint, and Infopeople webinar and webcast presenters including Kelli Ham and Mary Minow are enthusiastically embracing hybrid versions of all that is being proposed.

There’s no real magic here, nor is any of this particularly complex. The largest step is the one taken backwards—far enough to see the larger picture of what makes a presentation cohesive and compelling rather than comprised of little more than single slides which jump from topic to topic without any consistent flow.

None of this needs imply that bullet points are dead. Edmond Otis’s slides for his recent and well received Infopeople webcast, “Setting Boundaries with Library Patrons,” might drive Beyond Bullet Points aficionados absolutely crazy, but one of his many enthusiastic viewers actually took the time to compliment him for effectively weaving the slides into his overall presentation. Edmond didn’t need to spend the extra time it would have taken to replace the bullets with strong visuals; the bullets—and Edmond—hit the target dead center and left a lively online audience inspired by a lesson they very much had wanted. No stale pieces of chocolate here!

What all of us as trainers-teachers-learners need remember is that we do not have to race from one technique or current trend to another in an all-or-nothing fashion. Outlines continue to work because they give all of us a helpful structure, and bullet points can be an effective tool. The visual beauty and stickiness of Beyond Bullet Points and “Presentation Zen” do not mean that we need to abandon those helpful bullet points, as Kelli’s presentation shows.
Next: Cliff Atkinson and the Path Beyond Bullet Points

Posted by paul signorelli at 4:03 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

I frequently find out about new and exciting training tools both from Infopeople and the Continuing Library Education Network & Exchange Round Table (CLENE) of the American Library Association. In June 2007, I read a wonderful blog entry, A Quick Intro to ScreenCasting by Steve Garwood in CE Buzz, CLENE's blog. Steve describes how he used Camtasia software to record a PowerPoint presentation he did on ScreenCasting as he spoke.

Since I recruit instructors for Infopeople I contacted Steve and voilà, his Infopeople onground course became a reality, Tutorials 2.0: Teaching the Public and Training Staff with Online Screencasts; sessions start this month.

Even if you aren't ready to take a course, do check out the course description and sample shown in his blog entry to see a really cool tool your library could use to do tutorials for the public or for staff training.

Posted by gail mcgovern at 7:38 PM in Cool Tools | Infopeople News | Training | Permalink

The Urban Libraries Council has, with the release of a report in January 2008, provided trainers and other members of library staff with yet another option to consider as we think about the expanding roles libraries might play. And this one is completely in line with libraries’ roles as centers of learning and places which help strengthen the communities served by libraries.

“The biggest barrier for new arrivals is language,” Rich Ashton and Danielle Patrick Milam write in Welcome, Stranger: Public Libraries Build the Global Village (p. 5). To help immigrants overcome this barrier, more urban libraries throughout the United States are forming partnerships with community-based organizations to provide English-language instruction. They are also offering programs on health; parenting and early childhood education; and computer training in languages other than English for immigrants and anyone else interested in taking them.

The reward for staff offering this level of teaching-training is obvious, the authors note: “Seattle Public Library’s Multi-cultural Librarian, Valerie Wonder, draws on her previous experience with Peace Corps resettlement programs and works with focus groups to create a menu of programs that have great relevance to immigrants and refugees, how to navigate the legal system, obtain small loans, and manage credit” (p. 10).

Libraries are also responding to this challenge by hiring a more diverse workforce and spending more time preparing staff to work effectively with immigrants: more than half of the 35 libraries responding to the survey “train staff in multi-cultural customer service,” and nearly a third of the respondents “test staff for language competency,” Ashton and Milam write (p. 10).

Other notable teaching-training achievements include the Queens Library’s seven Adult Learning Centers and 26 community library instruction programs serving 3,000 people annually. The model was adopted by Arlington Heights Public Library in a suburb of Chicago and “is augmented with conversation groups and one-on-one volunteer tutoring.” The Arlington Heights library also offers advanced English-language instruction in partnership with the local community college (p. 12).

Anyone interested in additional examples of what Ashton and Milam call the “robust variety of ways public libraries are supporting English instruction” can either view or order the report from the ULC’s webpage offering descriptions of and links to the organization’s various publications. (ULC does offer ample warning on that site that the size of the 118mb document means the download will take several minutes.)

Posted by paul signorelli at 2:48 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

Readers of the London-based Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s online factsheet “Aligning learning to the needs of the organization,” written by Valerie Anderson, will miss plenty of training gems if they don’t follow some of the links to earlier papers on related themes.

One, for example, leads to an April 2007 report, “Learning and the line: the role of line managers in training, learning and development.” It offers intriguing ideas for front-line managers who are thrust into the role of trainer without any formal preparation for that role.

“Learning and the line,” written for the Chartered Institute by Susan Hutchinson from Bristol Business School at the University of the West of England and John Purcell from the Warwick Business School, documents what they call “the critical role of line managers as facilitators and providers of learning” and moves right to the point: “(e)nsuring that line managers have the skills for and are committed to support learning and development is essential” (p. 3).

This, of course, is something which rarely receives attention within libraries. It’s enough of a challenge for most of us to organize or participate in train-the-trainer offerings when we are formally responsible for staff training programs. The front-line manager and supervisor who is running a facility or department is rarely acknowledged as a trainer, and probably sees little reason to participate in train-the-trainer workshops which would benefit staff and the institutions and customers they serve.

The problem is obvious and documented by Hutchinson and Purcell: far too few employees receive much needed one-on-one coaching or training from supervisors because many supervisors and managers are not comfortable placing themselves in the role of trainer (p. 4). Furthermore, managers and supervisors who are uncomfortable in a training role provide little more than “short-term learning related to a current job…at the expense of longer-term career development” (p. 5).

Within organizations where training is effective, the writers note, several things are in place (p. 8): new staff shadows or works alongside more experienced staff to gain the skills they need; “good performers go the cutting-edge work that provided the best route for learning new things by doing”; line managers provide coaching and guidance; informal training activities, often over lunch, are part of the mix; and staff are encouraged to attend conferences and formal training sessions.

“Line managers always have conflicting priorities and role overload,” Hutchinson and Purcell acknowledge (p. 14). The best organizations, they add, supply managers and supervisors with the skills they need to provide “short-term job-relevant learning and development” and “longer-term career development.”

Perhaps one major shift we all have to make is to broaden the formal definition of trainer-educator so that it extends far beyond the walls of administrative and staff-training offices.
***
Do you have your own examples of front-line managers trained as trainers? Please share them with our colleagues by posting a comment here.

Posted by paul signorelli at 3:49 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s no surprise to trainers that aligning strategic plans with training plans makes sense; the real news is that the London-based Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has released a detailed factsheet which, through a series of links imbedded in the text, serves as an easy-to-read primer useful to trainers, learners, and anyone else interested in effectively linking strategic planning with training.

Among the key elements in “Aligning learning to the needs of the organization,” written by Valerie Anderson (Principal Lecturer in Human Resource Management at the University of Portsmouth Business School) and released in January 2008, is the reminder that “(l)earning, training and development professionals…need to work in partnership with senior managers, line managers and learners” to provide learning opportunities which are aligned with business needs as well as with individual learners’ career development needs. It’s a simple concept with little room for argument—so simple, in fact, that it often is forgotten as we all concentrate on resolving the short-term crisis du jour. Long-range planning, unfortunately, remains a sporadic-at-best process for many and results in strategic plans which sit, unused, on shelves or intranet sites—until they are retrieved as templates for the next strategic plan.

There’s a roadmap here. Anderson, in a section entitled “Implication for learning and development professionals,” offers a list of skills needed by training and learning professionals interested in long-term impacts: “developing a strategic understanding of the organization”; “clarifying the operational priorities that are important to line mangers in different parts of the organization”; “working effectively as part of a management team”; and “assessing the extent to which ‘year-on-year’ learning and training processes maintain a close fit with organizational strategic priorities”—items usually left to managers, supervisors, and other administrators rather than to the trainer-learners who implement formal staff training programs.

The beauty of Anderson’s CIPD report is that it offers ammunition for trainers and administrators supportive of all-inclusive, consistent, long-term training programs to meet their organization’s interrelated business and staff career-development needs. The essential corollary is that training is planned and implemented at all levels within an organization, not just by training directors or a small group of administrators—a tall order for contemporary libraries and nonprofits, where it is all too common for everyone to have multiple responsibilities and too little time to do more than respond to each in all but the most cursory way.

“Alignment,” Anderson concludes, “is a process rather than a singular outcome,” and the training which leads to alignment has to come from line managers as well as from those with overall responsibility for managing staff training.

Next: Preparing Line Managers to be Effective Trainers

Posted by paul signorelli at 6:35 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

Once again, trainers willing to spend a little time with online resources run the risk of being completely entranced—this time through Garr Reynolds’ blog on issues related to professional presentation design, Presentation Zen.

Reynolds, according to an online bio, is currently Associate Professor of Management at Kansai Gaidai University in Japan; served as Manager of Worldside User Group Relations at Apple, Inc, in Cupertino here in California’s Silicon Valley; and worked as a corporate trainer for Sumitomo Electric Industries in Osaka during the 1990s. What he offers on his Presentation Zen and Garr Reynolds sites is a godsend for trainers and all others interested in improving their presentation skills.

The blog postings at Presentation Zen work both as articles to be read and as a source of visual inspiration —striking imagery with a minimal amount of text—which live up to Reynold’s philosophy as expressed in an online interview: “restraint, simplicity, and a natural approach to presentations.”

For those who want nothing more than a good resource list, he has a list of recommended books running down the right side of the blog site. If the three I have already read—Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind; Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points; and Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die—reflect the quality of the others, we all have a lot of reading to do.

Trainers in search of basic reminders have not been forgotten. The Garr Reynolds website includes a page of well crafted “Organization & Preparation Tips.” His “Top Ten Delivery Tips” includes a pointer on how to blank out a presentation screen long enough to move an audience’s attention from PowerPoint slides to presenters who want to deviate from what they had prepared (press the “B” key on the keyboard; pressing the same key a second time should bring the presentation back). His “Top Ten Slide Tips” offers ideas including how to use the PowerPoint Slide Sorter function so trainers can simultaneously view a sequence of slides in their presentations to be sure there are no jarring juxtapositions. (This is one of the “View” options in PowerPoint.)

If it remains true that a picture is worth a thousand words, the samples on Reynolds’ site and Presentation Zen should provide the equivalent of a visual tsunami.

(Thanks to Peter Bromberg, who drew attention to Presentation Zen in his recent Library Garden posting.)

Posted by paul signorelli at 2:46 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s all about involvement—from trainers, learners, and managers and supervisors—as a group of East Bay Area trainers heard loudly and clearly last night from consultant/trainer/writer Rebecca Morgan.

Addressing members of the Mt. Diablo Chapter of the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) during the group’s monthly meeting in Danville, Morgan suggested several reasons why trainings sometimes fail to produce positive effects and offered at least one halfway tongue-in-cheek suggestion for improvement: having trainers evaluate participants at the same level that participants evaluate trainers.

If trainers are judged on their ability to be interesting and engaging, she quipped, perhaps students should be judged on the interest and level of engagement they display. The result, she added, would probably show that high (or low) marks for trainers in these areas would probably be paralleled by high (or low) marks for learners.

The best experience for everyone, she reminded her audience, comes from up-front planning and extended collaboration between trainers, learners, and supervisors and managers—a theme previously explored in an Infoblog posting on "Leadership in Training." Problems often begin when trainings are set up without a specific business purpose, Morgan said. The situation becomes worse when the wrong people are forced to attend a training and the session offers the wrong intervention—a customer-service session for 30 people when only one of the 30 needs the help and the other 29 are forced to attend just so the employee in need of training is not “singled out.”

If those attending trainings are not properly prepared in advance—by a manager or supervisor, for example—attendees and the organizations for which they work are less likely to benefit from the time invested in providing the training session.

“You’d get as much out of sending them to the movies,” she suggested.

More effective training is likely to occur when everyone collaborates to make sure the session as well as pre- and post-training efforts are relevant, include the follow-up necessary to allow learners to absorb and implement the material to the advantage of all involved, and include a level of accountability.

Morgan counsels supervisors and managers to sit with employees for as little as 10 minutes before the employee receives approval to attend a training session. The purpose is to ask what the employee expects to gain from attending the training; how the employee plans to apply the training to the workplace; and how the manager or supervisor can support the employee through the training process. Post-workshop activities to guarantee results could include a learner’s brief report to colleagues during a department meeting. Simple. Effective. Engaging. And wonderfullly collaborative.

Posted by paul signorelli at 4:14 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

Prepare to be overwhelmed in a completely positive and helpful way by a trainer-learner’s Valentine's Day gift.

As Char Booth (Ohio University Libraries) notes in her infomational blog this week, Jane Hart at the online Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies has posted a work-in-progress: a Spring 2008 Top 100 Tools for Learning list; the 101st tool, of course, is the list itself. If you haven’t yet bookmarked it by adding it to your del.icio.us account (del.icio.us being the top-rated tool on the list today), the only question to be asked is, “What are you waiting for?” And if you want to influence it, you can, before April 1, 2008, submit your own contribution to the rankings.

The real value of the site for those struggling to keep up with first-rate training-learning tools—many of them are Web 2.0 applications—is that it is organized in an easy-to-read and easy-to-use format. The list provides the name of the tool; its rankings in 2007 and 2008; the number of votes it has received so far to place it on the list; and links which usually provide two- or three-line descriptions of each tool, users’ comments about the tools, and, at the bottom of those pages, online resources including reading lists and resources such as online tutorials.

What we have here is a crash course, in small and digestible units, on tools including del.icio.us, Firefox, Google Search, Google Reader, Skype, PowerPoint, WordPress, Wikipedia, Slideshare, Google Docs, and 90 other tools. (Audacity, Gmail, Twitter, flickr, Ning, and YouTube are right behind the top ten items on the current list.)

At the most simple level, trainers will find the list to be a great starting point if they are trying to design workshops for staff interested in Web 2.0 tools; simply moving through the list provides a content outline for a Web 2.0 update session. The list itself can be used as a handout for that sort of session, and it can also be distributed to staff via email, on a library intranet training page, or as an additional bookmark on a reference desk computer work station so that staff can look up and provide brief descriptions of any of these tools which a library user wants to explore.

And if you somehow work your way through the entire list and still want more, you can always create a link from your Netvibes page (Netvibes being #38 on the Top 100 list today) to Hart’s E-Learning Pick of the Day blog.

The list and the Centre’s site are training-learning at its best: accessible when you need them, easy to use, easy to print if you want ready-made cheat sheets, and free. So, what are you waiting for?

Posted by paul signorelli at 11:17 AM in Training | Permalink | Comments (4)

Creativity and adaptability, as I was reminded over lunch yesterday, are often keys to effective classroom experiences for learners of all ages. Sitting with Dona Malan, who is a retired kindergarten teacher and a long-time volunteer leading tours of the Main Library for the San Francisco Public Library system, I was enchanted by her recollections of how she managed to make world events understandable and sticky to her very young audience.

Waking up one morning in Fall 1989 to news of the fall of the Berlin Wall, she didn’t need much time to shape that world-changing event into something a group of five-year-olds in Mishawaka, Indiana, could grasp at a visceral level. When her students walked into the classroom that day, they were greeted by a waist-high wall made from every building block Dona could find in the room. Half of the students were directed, through a breach in the wall, to the side of the room where all the toys had been collected; the other half of the group was forced to sit on the side of the room where no toys remained. No one was allowed to cross from one side to the other without Dona’s permission, and no one was allowed to pass toys over to those who had none.

“I was Checkpoint Charlie,” she recalled with obvious glee, and those who tried unsuccessfully to move through the learning-sized barrier in the classroom that day quickly learned, through their own frustration, the lesson she was trying to convey by constructing the wall and discussing it with them.

It didn’t take long for the principal of the school, who routinely walked by Dona’s classroom, to discover what she was doing. He quickly left the room, made a phone call, and, when Dona reconstructed the wall for her afternoon students, had provided two additional visitors: a reporter and a photographer from the local newspaper.

What strikes me about this generation-old story is that Dona, as an educator, was successful as much because of her creativity as for the support she had. That level of support for any teacher-trainer is critically important.

I don’t expect to be building or pulling down any replicas of the Berlin Wall when I’m next conducting a staff training session—that’s already been done; time to move on—but I do expect to continue following and sharing the examples Dona and so many others set by caring enough to make classrooms exciting places to be. And although Dona retired in 1995, it remains clear to me that she’s still teaching anyone smart enough to listen to her.

Posted by paul signorelli at 12:16 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

A recently released report on the future of libraries keeps trainers and other library staff on the topic of thinking outside—or ignoring—boxes, provides more impetus for us to spend time reading and responding to what is being written about libraries, and proposes collaborations we might not otherwise pursue.

The American Library Association’s Association of College & Research Libraries 2007 Environmental Scan, released in January 2008, helps us see that a report about the future of academic libraries can be as meaningful to those of us immersed in public libraries as it is to our colleagues in academia. The heart of the 29-page report is a list of ten assumptions; among the “emergent issues” is the prediction that the future will bring “broader collaboration between academic, public, special, and school librarians on topics of common concern, e.g., public engagement, media literacy” (p. 7).

More significantly for libraries and those involved in staff training programs, the report predicts that library print materials “will be moved from prime library space and relocated to off-site locations; space currently housing collections will be repurposed to support collaborative learning, new modes of research support and interactive learning areas” (page 7). One look around large urban libraries with increasing amounts of space dedicated to Internet access work stations should be enough to make all of us realize that library users are bringing a little of that projected future into the present by suggesting that they want print and electronic resources at their fingertips. It doesn’t take much to see that staff training in libraries, therefore, needs to recognize and deal with staff’s increasing need to be trained as trainer-instructors comfortable with these resources.

Among the hidden gems in the report is the list of selected sources at the back of the paper. With more than eight pages of citations available to us, we could spend the rest of the month—perhaps the rest of the year—just reviewing the various reports and articles which served as the backbone to the report. In the process, we would find additional support for the idea that “instruction has become a standard responsibility for academic library’s public services, and that interpersonal, written, and oral communication skills were critical for all librarian positions” (p. 10). Having read that line, those of us with public library experience can ask ourselves why this would only be important to academic libraries.

If library trainers are going to assume more of the leadership role we so clearly need to play, we can begin by making our colleagues more aware of reports like ACRL’s 2007 Environmental Scan and providing training sessions which respond to the needs of staff who are working within the future described by the report’s authors. We might also recognize—and help others see—that the future often has an amazing way of creeping into our present without being immediately noticed.

Posted by paul signorelli at 4:32 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

Having explored, in a recent Infoblog posting, the need for trainers to devour reports such as Information Behavior of the Researcher of the Future, let’s see what the report actually has to offer those of us involved in staff training and development.

While general summaries of the report highlights are available through the British Library and Library Journal postings, a complete reading of the 35-page document reminds us that “Enormous changes are taking place in the information landscape that are transforming teaching and learning…” (p. 8). There is the prospect that the future library user will only ever want to use libraries remotely (p. 35)—as many already do—so it behooves us to continue helping library staff and the customers whom they serve become more familiar and proficient with the use of tools such as Skype so we can meet their evolving needs in creative ways.

The implication, stated simply, is that all of us have to be equally adept at providing online and face-to-face service as libraries work to meet the needs of onsite and online (invisible) customers.

“Few digital library offerings make any real attempt to connect with the larger digital consumer world,” the report contends (p. 33) while noting how important Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon have become to those who are current or prospective library customers. Trainers, responding to this digital challenge, can help by suggesting that it is not all about Facebook, MySpace, and other tools which have not yet proven effective for libraries in search of clients. Free online tools such as LinkedIn.com are offering business colleagues opportunities to communicate and share resources, and we should be familiarizing ourselves and our colleagues with the ways in which these resources might make us more effective at what we do.

Since leadership remains a much discussed topic, the report’s assertion that the “library profession desperately needs leadership to develop a new vision for the 21st century and reverse its declining profile and influence” offers one final area of attention for trainers. Building from Infopeople’s series of leadership workshops and upcoming leadership institute as well as from others who maintain that leadership training is a lifelong endeavor rather than a goal to be achieved through a one-day workshop, trainers can support and design programs which promote leadership skills at all levels of an organization in an ongoing and consistent fashion.

Posted by paul signorelli at 3:10 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

Carole Leita’s Infoblog post earlier this week draws attention to a myth-breaking report from University College London (UCL), the British Library, and the Joint Information Systems Committee: Information Behavior of the Researcher of the Future. Her post also makes me think about the current behavior of those of us who are or have been involved in staff training and development programs.

We spend our time racing from task to task, engaged in delivering training sessions just in time to meet our colleagues’ needs or plugging gaps we inadvertently ignored. We rarely take the time to read the kind of report Carole helped to publicize. Which, of course, means that we remain less effective than we should be at shaping the way training programs are designed and implemented.

There is no single culprit for this particular failing. We respond, within the time we have, to requests and mandates from our colleagues, our supervisors and administrators, and the other clients we serve. (The fact that some of us raise our eyebrows in surprise at the idea that we have “clients” shows how far behind we are as potential leaders in the world of libraries and training.) We need to be more diligent in making time to read reports such as the UCL paper, OCLC’s wonderful membership reports, the Pew/Internet report on How people use the internet, libraries, and government agencies when they need help, and the Public Agenda report, Long Overdue: A Fresh Look at Public and Leadership Attitudes About LIBRARIES in the 21st Century.

Feeling overwhelmed again? The challenge of making time to read on the job is daunting—but not insurmountable. We need to convince our clients that reading, thinking about, reacting to, discussing, and incorporating into our lives the rich and well thought out reports which rarely hit our radar screens are actions with ample rewards for everyone. We also need to teach ourselves and our colleagues how to effectively sift through the RSS feeds, blogs, and other online resources which help us find these reports; we should be learning and helping others learn how to use aggregators such as Netvibes, Pageflakes, and Google Reader to organize and manage the overwhelming flow of information which threatens to bury us each day.

It starts with our own commitment to fighting for, insisting on, the idea that using a little time each day at work to see what others are writing, saying, and doing in our field of expertise is well worth establishing as a priority.

Next: What the UCL Report Suggests for Trainers

Posted by paul signorelli at 4:40 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (1)

Steve Coats, co-author of There Is No Box: Discovering the Internal Character Needed to Achieve Groundbreaking Growth, offered trainers great food for thought during his Sonoma Learning Systems’ webinar (“There Is No Box”) this morning: they—we—live, work, and serve in the same figurative place inhabited by leaders.

Summarizing one of the main themes of his book, Coats was describing what he and his co-author, Tom Heuer, found among leaders they studied: they don’t worry about thinking outside the box because they don’t even acknowledge the existence of the box as a limiting factor in their lives. Leaders frequently move from the comfort zone into the learning zone and somehow manage to avoid propelling themselves further, into what Coats and Heuer call “the panic zone.”

“The true leaders reside in the Learning Zone. It is the place where exploration, innovation, improvement, risk-taking and growth are normal,” Coats and Heuer contend in their book (pp. 35-36). “People who value learning are not afraid of moving out into the unknown. They know that some uncomfortable time spent in the Learning Zone is the price to be paid in order to ultimately arrive at a better destination.”

And there it is, for trainers everywhere: working in that familiar learning zone where creative and effective leaders tend to gather reminds us that trainers have an often overlooked leadership role to play within any organization, including the libraries with which so many of us are familiar. We thrive on that “uncomfortable time” in that learning zone; it helps us learn from and function as leaders for those who learn from us.

It is, we heard from Coats, all about a willingness to take risks, explore and share our passions, and lead ourselves and those whom we train into the most rewarding and productive place: the growth zone. If we are willing to climb out onto the limb of change, and encourage others to follow us there, then we, they, and the organizations and clients we all assist, ultimately are the winners.

Posted by paul signorelli at 3:54 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

Trying to not miss all the great training tips to be found at the American Library Association Midwinter Conference here in Philadelphia is a little less challenging thanks to the large variety of exchanges, including reports in the daily conference newspaper, Cognotes.

“Injecting Fun into Library Orientations Using Interactive Methods,” published on page 13 of the January 13, 2008 edition, provides a great example through its summary of an Association of College and Research Library-sponsored workshop by two Cardiff University librarians. The article also leads readers to the University website to show how one of the presenters—Nigel Morgan—and a partner work.

Those following the link find a PowerPoint presentation designed to orient students to what the University library offers—and returns us to the theme of “learning and laughing,” covered briefly in a recent Infoblog posting. Whereas a typical library orientation often includes a recitation of services and rules and regulations, Morgan and his partner break the pattern by using a mixture of text, photographs, and word balloons for comic effect. The result is an entertaining, memorable, and, therefore, effective experience for the audience.

To tell students where the photocopy machines are located, one of the slides features a student who is holding a picture of a sombrero-toting reptile and saying, “My mum has e-mailed me a photo of Miguel, my pet iguana. Where can I print him out?” Those completing the orientation probably will have no problem recalling the information—but may have to stifle their giggles every time they think of that iguana while they are standing near a library photocopier.

Rather than simply providing a list of study-room locations, the librarians have another student sharing something not easily forgotten: “My tutorial group has to prepare a presentation on ‘the winter vomiting virus.’ Is there anywhere we can work together?” And instead of providing a list of library do’s and don’ts, they ask, “What really irritates the library staff?” and then provide the answer.

Which only leaves one question: how did they get that hat on that iguana?
***
Do you have your own examples of effective use of humor in library training programs? Share them with our colleagues by posting a comment here.

Posted by paul signorelli at 8:59 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

Good news is spreading for library support staff—an often overlooked group when it comes to library staff training programs. A three-year project to develop consistent cross-training for library employees who do not have a Master of Library and Information Science degree is well underway, American Library Association-Allied Professional Association (ALA-APA) Director Jenifer Grady assured ALA New Member Round Table members attending the ALA Midwinter Conference here in Philadelphia this morning.

Those who eventually enter the program, which will culminate with formal certification for graduates, will be trained on topics including access services, reference and information services, technology, personal skills, and technical skills. The program, designed to provide educators with guidance for training curriculums, will also include electives in youth services, reader’s advisory, public programming, marketing and public relations, and management and supervision.

Funding for the project, which began in 2007, comes from the Institute of Museum and Library Services through ALA and the Western Council of State Libraries. ALA-APA and an advisory committee are the project directors. Efforts are currently underway to develop core competencies for support staff; the proposed competencies may be available for public review as early as Spring 2008.

Those interested in learning more about the developing program can find details through a fact sheet posted on the ALA-APA website.
***
Do you have examples of innovative training programs for library support staff? Please share them with colleagues by posting a comment here.

Posted by paul signorelli at 7:51 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

The January 2008 ASTD (American Society for Training & Development) e-newsletter Links offers a great tip for library staff and library users in search of simple, free, online introductions to a variety of software packages including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access.

GCFLearnFree.org, owned by Goodwill Community Foundation, Inc., provides online tutorials, classes, articles, video modules, and interactive lessons, at no cost, to anyone interested in learning. Topics are easy to find in the lower right-hand corner of the home page. A site map offers a more complete overview of what GCFLearnFree.org offers. And the registration process is among the most painless and facile I’ve encountered online (requiring little more than a user name, password, and email address)—these are clearly people who understand how to attract and comfort even the most computer-phobic learners.

The lessons themselves are in byte-sized, easily digestible segments. The Word 2007 tutorial, for example, begins with a three-screen lesson introducing users to the Word environment, includes an easy-to-complete exercise, and returns users to the main screen so they are not left wondering what to do next. Those wishing to move to the next level of instruction find a four-page section on text basics. The icons in the upper right-hand corner of each page make it easy for users to print the lessons, and a link to a video on the second of the four pages provides students with a short introduction done in a conversational style which gives the impression that the instructor is right there to support and encourage even the most reticent of learners.

There is even a “Link To Us” page for libraries and other organizations interested in helping their users find GCFLearnFree.org.

“For the past eight years, adult learners have been able to turn to GCFLearnFree.org for free, online computer, math, and life skills training,” Kelly Markham notes in her ASTD Links article. “Courses are provided in English and Spanish and are available to learners around the world. To date, GCF has served more than 300,000 people from more than 230 countries.”

Kudos to Goodwill Community Foundation, Inc., and kudos to ASTD for helping draw more attention to this wonderful introduction to online learning.
***
Other free trainings you have encountered? Please share them with our colleagues by posting a comment here on Infoblog.

Posted by paul signorelli at 11:09 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

Carole Leita’s “It Made Me Laugh” (posted on Infoblog a few days ago) made me laugh. And think. And want to acknowledge the role laughter and humor play in first-rate training and learning.

The starting point for Carole’s piece is a wonderfully humorous video promoting services at the Berkeley Public Library. It’s an effective reminder that humor goes a long way in making something memorable. A video simply announcing the Library’s upcoming amnesty on fines for overdue materials might have helped to spread the word, but viewing the Berkeley approach to the program makes us remember the event and want to spread the word.

Daniel Pink, in A Whole New Mind, makes a similar point when he writes about play and laughter and Madan Kataria’s laughing clubs. Pink, in his chapter on “Play,” could have put his readers to sleep by lecturing them on the joy of laughter in the workplace, but he keeps his audience awake and engaged by providing an example of how work and play are intertwined in ways that work to everyone’s benefit. In the process, he leaves us with a memorable lesson, and makes us laugh (or at least smile).

One of the most consistently effective and highly rated trainers I’ve ever seen in action is right here in San Francisco. Shawn Holle, a safety analyst with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, consistently takes topics which he himself describes as “about as exciting as watching mud dry” and makes them engaging through his use of outrageous and self-deprecating humor. You won’t find many people laughing or talking about training sessions they have attended on Illness & Injury Prevention Plans or Workers’ Compensation or Bloodborne Pathogens, but Shawn consistently makes his workshops memorable precisely because he keeps them entertaining, edgy, and unpredictable. The result is that those attending his workshops remember what he says, talk about the sessions with their colleagues (thereby spreading the reach of those workshops), and include comments like “From now on, I want Shawn to teach every workshop I attend” on their workshop evaluation sheets. Which, when you think about it, has to make you laugh.
***
Readers interested in sharing their own experiences with laughter and effective training/learning can join the conversation by responding with a comment here on Infoblog.

Posted by paul signorelli at 10:14 AM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

It shouldn’t take much to produce a great online educational experience for those who want to learn. Some presenters make it look like the easiest thing in the world to accomplish: their students for online courses and multi-session workshops find a few simple and clearly marked links to course materials so that all the learners have to do is follow the steps in sequence to find what they are meant to see.

It is not, however, always this good; having completed a variety of online courses recently, I have to say that when online leaning misses, it really misses. And, as always, I learned again what none of us wants to do when we serve as instructors in front of a class (virtual or otherwise): confuse learners to the point of almost irreversible frustration.

Much of what works online is what has always worked onsite. Instructors who are well organized and clear—to their students, not just to themselves—are essential. They have to know how—and remember—to present information in an engaging and thought-provoking fashion. Their assistance, support, and feedback must be delivered in a timely manner. And they have to connect their presentations to quizzes, exercises, and assignments which reinforce what is being taught so students are conscious of what they have learned. Much of what doesn’t work only becomes worse in online offerings because the opportunity for interactions between instructors and students is often less immediate.

A poorly designed online course map—that critically important initial online page which leads to all an instructor intends to offer—can make or break a learner’s spirit. It sends students on time-consuming searches for lessons and documents which should have been at their fingertips. The ensuing frustration clearly hinders learning just when the student should most be drawn into what the course could offer.

So, kudos to the instructors whose initial links from course maps are simple, direct, and well differentiated: “announcements,” “course information,” “course material,” “roster,” and “communication.” And, for those who provide two or three times as many options (poorly defined and overlapping in what they contain), let’s all hope that they will spend a little time looking at their more organized and effective colleagues’ offerings so that they and their students will have the sort of positive teaching-training-learning experience that everyone expects. And deserves.

Posted by paul signorelli at 4:24 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (1)

Employees’ learning skills, according to Pat McLagan (Change Is Everybody’s Business), are “woefully inadequate” for the task of effectively using all that is available to them in their role as learners.

McLagen and Marc Rosenberg (Beyond E-Learning: Approaches and Technologies to Enhance Organizational Knowledge, Learning and Performance), during their ASTD (American Society for Training and Development) webcast on “Future Trends in Training and Development” this week, agreed that learners are benefitting from a learning revolution which is putting learners rather than instructors and classrooms at the center of the learning process. What needs to happen next, McLagen suggested, is that trainers-instructors need to focus on the “inner world of the learner.” This includes helping learners effectively use the myriad learning resources available to them in what McLagan calls “this rich learning environment.” The issues are familiar to those working in libraries: inadequate search techniques often leave learners and other information seekers overwhelmed with a flood of irrelevant information because they don’t know where or how to look for what they really need.

A deeper trend “toward ‘professional’ self-managed learning” will guide learners toward drawing insight from information; evaluating the quality of information; using analytical, systemic, and creative thinking processes; consciously managing their own learning; and helping others learn, McLagan predicted.

Trainers—what McLagan called “learning professionals”—will also have their roles to play: helping to “link organizational needs and learner priorities”; creating designs and experiences that accelerate the learning capabilities needed by organizations; helping employers become “full players in the learning network”; and serving as guides and facilitators of the learning process.

The result, both presenters concluded, take advantage of Web 2.0 social interactions to create a “dynamic collaboration” with “more interactive, personal experiences” for everyone involved in training-teaching-learning.
***
(Readers interested in sharing their own experiences in the learning revolution can join the conversation by responding with a comment here on Infoblog. Best training-learning practices may be explored in future postings.)

Posted by paul signorelli at 4:33 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

The learning revolution has arrived, and learners are the victors, according to Marc Rosenberg (Beyond E-Learning: Approaches and Technologies to Enhance Organizational Knowledge, Learning and Performance) and Pat McLagan (Change Is Everybody’s Business).

Both consultants, during their ASTD (American Society for Training and Development) webcast on “Future Trends in Training and Development” this week, suggested that learners rather than classrooms and instructors are becoming the center of workplace learning, and this can only work to the benefit of everyone involved in staff development.

The old paradigm, Rosenberg said, had the instructor as the center of all knowledge; assumed that everyone learned the same way; and had the classroom as the place where all knowledge was disseminated by an instructor. The new paradigm, he continued, acknowledges the employee-learner as a knowledge seeker with numerous online and offline resources available. This knowledge seeker directs the learning process by accessing “knowledge repositories” as needed, not just when onsite workshops are offered. These knowledge repositories will (and in many cases already do) include online lessons, webcasts, listservs, and myriad other resources—not much different from what Infopeople already offers through archived lesson plans, archived webcasts, and other resources.

What is happening through the revolution is that training is no longer solely a special event or an interruption in which employees leave their workplace, attend a training, return to the workplace, and repeat the cycle as if there were no visceral connection between the two. Accessing knowledge repositories means that work and learning are intertwined, and training is imbedded directly into the workplace.

The resulting trends include learning which is evolving beyond training, learning becoming more effectively integrated into the workplace (but not completely eliminating the classroom as a place of learning); and learning becoming less “course-centric” and more “knowledge-centric.”

Next: The Learning Revolution and the Inner World of the Learner

(An invitation suggested by a colleague: readers interested in sharing their own experiences in the learning revolution and with workplace knowledge repositories can join the conversation by responding with a comment here on Infoblog. Best training-learning practices may be explored in future postings.)

Posted by paul signorelli at 8:45 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

Watching leaders engaged in leadership training can leave us with wonderful lessons. Seeing how they present their material can make us better trainers.

Jim Kouzes (co-author of the recently released fourth edition of The Leadership Challenge), Roy Pollock (co-author of Fort Hill Company’s The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning), and Michael Papay III (vice-president of Fort Hill) were the key presenters this week at Sonoma Learning Systems’ Redefining Leadership Development Best Practices Forum in Walnut Creek. Kouzes, in an engaging summary of The Leadership Challenge, told audience members that his research consistently shows family members, teachers, and coaches to be our most important leader role models; that the one quality differentiating leaders from other credible people is being “forward-looking”; and that leadership develops over many years, not in one-day or one-week-long workshops--an obvious point which is often forgotten when students return from training sessions and have no time to digest and think about how to use what they have learned.

Pollock, echoing the theme that “becoming a leader is a life’s work,” insisted that workshops are only part of the learning process. The preparation a student completes before attending leadership training sessions, and the effort a student makes in a supportive workplace to use what was learned, combine to make leadership workshops effective. Papay, to drive the point home, described Fort Hill’s practice augmenting leadership training sessions with brief weekly email follow-ups to trainees and their supervisors for up to three months. The emails and the interactions they inspire increase the likelihood that lessons will be absorbed and applied so leaders-in-training continue developing the skills needed to benefit the organizations they serve.

While conveying the lessons they were attempting to teach this week, all three presenters used simple and effective techniques. They remained engaged with all members of their audience by moving throughout the room rather than remaining tethered to their laptops or a lectern at the front of the room. Their PowerPoint slides added to rather than repeated what they said. The presence of a visual facilitator enhanced the learning experience. And they used one-page handouts containing key questions they would answer: “who are the most important leader role models in our lives?”; “what differentiates highly-effective leadership training programs from less effective ones?”; and several others. By recording the answers which came out of speaker-audience interactions, participants were more likely to remember what they heard, and they were actively involved in creating the printed reminders which they might later use.

Posted by paul signorelli at 10:35 AM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Ward calls himself a “visual thinker.” He draws visual representations of meetings, and therein lies an idea for any trainer lucky enough to have graphics and sketching skills—or a friend or colleague willing to provide them in a training workshop.

Ward’s techniques were on display this week during Sonoma Learning Systems’ Redefining Leadership Development Best-Practices Forum in Walnut Creek; presenters included training gurus Jim Kouzes (co-author of the recently released fourth edition of The Leadership Challenge) and Roy Pollock (co-author of The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning). Ward’s tools were a set of felt pens in various colors; large blank sheets of white paper posted on a wall; good penmanship, design, and cartooning skills; great listening skills; and an ability to engage in improvisation.

As each presenter spoke, Ward created a visually attractive and cohesive mural comprised of multi-colored words, symbols, and simple line drawings to summarize what the audience was hearing; by the time he and the presenters were finished, the audience could see—and more importantly, walk away with the memory of—a striking visual representation designed to make the lesson stick. For Pollock’s part of the presentation (“The Road Map for Optimizing the Impact of Leadership Training”), Ward sketched a bridge and arced key words and phrases above and below the bridge at the top of his mural-in-progress. The phrase “bridging the gap” formed the arc above the bridge; the words “optimizing the impact of leadership training” flowed in an arc directly below the bridge; and the words “learning” and “doing” were anchored on either side of the bridge to illustrate how they were linked by the speaker’s presentation.

The result: a simple, charming, and memorable representation of a first-rate presentation which might not have been as easily remembered without Ward’s illustration.

“It’s about being sensory,” Ward noted after the presentation. By hearing the speakers, seeing the illustrations, reading the key terms on the presenters' PowerPoint slides and seeing the graphic and colorful reproduction on the mural, participants see interesting lessons become memorable ones—which increases the possibility that the lessons will have a lasting impact when attendees return to their workplace to apply what they have learned.

Posted by paul signorelli at 5:05 PM in Training | Permalink | Comments (0)