The ALA Learning Round Table invites you to Disney Institute “Disney’s Approach to Quality Service” on Friday, June 22nd, 2012

You will examine the time-tested model for delivering world-class guest service and discover how attention to detail creates a consistent, successful environment for both employees and customers. Then take a field trip behind the scenes to see these principals in action. Intriguing and unforgettable, this unique field experience affords you a first-hand view of the invaluable business philosophies of Walt Disney himself. As you witness the day-to-day operation of his first Theme Park, you’ll gain insights into more than 80 years of business principles that can be easily adapted and implemented in your own organization… and inspire your library to new heights. After lunch on your own, regroup for an afternoon of networking and discussion on applying quality service practices in libraries.

$295 for Learning Round Table Members, $325 for non-members
Register by June 8th at alaannual.org

In the 15 years I’ve worked in libraries, I’ve been in many IT-related roles. A couple of them were even within an IT department. This has been a great vantage point from which to witness the challenging if not ghastly relationships librarians often have with IT.

I’ve been seeing a lot lately about technology training competencies for librarians. Yet something I rarely see mentioned in this context is relating well with IT departments.

As trainers, we have so much need for technology to support our training initiatives, and technology is often in the domain of IT. With this in mind, I thought I’d throw out an additional competency when it comes to technology training.

Competency: Plays Well with IT

Associated Skills and Knowledge:

1) Trainer befriends the Head of IT (substitute equivalent in your organization)

Ask the Head of IT to join you for lunch or coffee. More than once. This allows a human connection to grow between you. They’ll learn that you’re a competent professional, with your own set of skills and your own valid point of view within the organization. You will learn the same. Maybe you’ll end up on the radar when IT plans are being made that have the potential to impact you. You may be told about things going on in the organization that you wouldn’t otherwise know. Cultivate this relationship.

2) Trainer involves IT in planning

Let IT in on your training program plans. If your objectives and needs are understood, especially as they fit in to the larger direction of the organization, it’ll be much easier to get support for your initiatives. True or not, trainers (and many other librarians) have a reputation in IT for following the next shiny thing. It may not be so obvious to IT why everyone in the organization needs to learn social media, or why wikis and blogs are essential for your training program. Make sure your well-thought-out initiatives that involve technology are understood, and not seen as trivial.

3) Trainer folds IT into the product evaluation process

I once worked in a library where the public services management selected and went into a contract for a federated search product, without involving IT in the process. There were considerable implications for IT infrastructure and workload that weren’t planned for. Needless to say, this wasn’t awesome for the relationship between these departments.

Can your current IT infrastructure run the training software you’re evaluating? Host the files it puts out? Letting IT know about a product you want to purchase is a really good idea. Not only will you head off problems, you’ll be able to budget for additional hardware, software and IT staff time you may not have known you need.

4) Before the End Run, Trainer communicates

Sometimes, letting IT know what we’re planning and purchasing results in NO, or some level of control over our program so we’re not able to meet objectives. This is often due to lack of resources, but the bottom line for trainers can be that we’re held back from innovating and doing our jobs. This often leads us to take the proverbial End Run, leveraging the many possibilities for hosting material in the cloud, or using web services that are affordable and don’t involve our IT infrastructure.

If you decide on the End Run, let IT know in advance. They’re going to find out anyway. After the communication attempts you’ve already made, this is your last effort to understand any unanticipated impact.

There may be political or personal fallout from the End Run, and you’ll need to manage it. Sometimes, it’s only the End Run that allows IT to understand what you need. Sometimes, IT is even happy about the outcome.

5) After the End Run, Trainer befriends the Head of IT

See 1) above.

Do you have other ideas or experiences to share about working well with IT? Please feel free to offer them in the comments below.

Susan Lester’s 10th Honors World Literature/Composition students recently began a novel study of All Quiet on the Western Front.    Since students knew little about World War I, we gave students the opportunity to choose a World War I topic of interest to them ( a menu was provided but students could come up with their own topics, too) to research.  Susan and I decided to help students dwell in the connecting stage of inquiry by having students mindmap their research and then share those findings in a Fishbowl discussion group.  Using mindmaps that Howard Rheingold’s students created and published as our models, we gave students the choice for the tools and mediums they wanted to use to mindmap the key ideas and findings of their research on their topic.  Most preferred creating their mindmaps with concrete materials like paper and ink, but others like using Word or Bubbl.us.

After our Fishbowl meeting and having time to share our mindmaps last Tuesday, students shared their reflections on the effectiveness of mindmaps as a medium for sharing key ideas and information.

• Students were generally quite positive about the process and indicated it was helpful in better discerning important information and big ideas as well as organizing that information; this feedback was encouraging since these were challenges students identified in our research  project last semester.
• Other students shared they felt they were able to initiate and sustain a richer level of participation and engagement as members of their Fishbowls because the mindmap helped them easily remember key ideas they wanted to share and was a quick way to prompt talking points as opposed to looking a written reflection.
• Several students also indicated they felt creating the mindmap helped them better synthesize and remember the information they were finding in their research.
• Some students indicated they would enjoy having the option to create a mindmap rather than always writing a narrative reflection for Fishbowl discussions about their novel/book studies.
• One student shared that the mindmapping helped her feel as though her Fishbowl now had multiple experts on different topics and that the group was able to cover a broader amount of information with more depth; additionally, she thought the mindmap sharing created a different element of fun for the Fishbowl discussion.  She described mindmapping as helping students to create a “3D” perspective about a topic instead of just “brushing the surface with a boring 2D” perspective.

A few students indicated they encountered difficulty in the mindmapping process and in looking at some student mindmaps, we could see others might need some help in the organization of their mindmaps.   For our next mindmapping endeavor, I think I will scaffold their skills by doing a group think and do a group exercise in which we create a mindmap together to help those who are struggling and to grow the skills of those who feel comfortable with that  strategy.  I am also hopeful I can encourage other teachers to try this strategy in other courses and continue to grow my best practices for teaching students mindmapping.

If you are using mindmapping as a tool for building and sharing background knowledge, what strategies or approaches are you taking help students learn this skill and medium?  I encourage teachers, professors, and librarians to share your ideas here in the comments.

“If the future is not your destination, now might be a good time to disembark.”
(from Generosity by Richard Powers)

What do you think of when you hear the term “21^st century skills”? That question kicks off our Project Compass workshops, as we work with staff from public libraries around the country to augment the support they provide to a workforce struggling to recover in the current economic climate. We take a big picture look at what is different about job seeking in the 21^st century and what skills people need to succeed in the modern work world. This is inspired by the IMLS vision for the pivotal role played by libraries and museums in helping to build 21^st century skills.

Most people answer the question with technology skill responses: “it’s all about mobile devices;” “new office software;” “changes in library automation systems;” “embedded technologies;” etc. The reality is much more complex. Consider the skills shown at right, a list applicable to the workplace condensed from the IMLS publication.

What predominates is adaptability, flexibility, social and collaborative skills, and above all, the ability to learn and keep learning—knowing how to learn as shift continues to happen. While specific technical skills are certainly necessary, the key to thriving in this decade is more about attitude and the active embrace of lifelong learning.

The innovation problem

In the workshops, we hear the frequent lament that too many people coming to the library for help are stuck at a 20^th century skill level. This is true of both urban and rural communities. However, for rural libraries, the situation is compounded by the small size and isolation of their communities, especially when people stuck in antiquated attitudes are in positions of influence (board members, city managers, even library staff).

The reality is that everyone needs to embark on this journey to the future. It is no longer an option. We are in the thick of the 21^st century, a globally connected knowledge economy, and it does not indulge complacence.  It is heart-wrenching to hear about a small town factory worker who performed a narrow skill set on one machine for 30 years and now is thrust abruptly into the electronic information age. We don’t want to see anyone disembark from the future. But what can we do to boost those who are sinking to the bottom of the digital skills divide?

Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, would explain the problem as not enough density for incubating ideas, which lead to growth and progress. Small or isolated communities lack “liquid networks,” the fluid environments in which enough ideas bump into each other to spark great discoveries and innovations. Tracking the incidence of significant innovation through human history, Johnson concludes that the more diverse, populated and connected the environment, the more it works as an “engine of creativity.” As people migrated to cities, lived in close proximity and mingled their subcultures, the rate of innovation soared. The Internet and the Web have expanded this open information commons exponentially.

Incubating ideas is akin to nurturing the acquisition of crucial 21^st century skills. Increasing those 21^st century skill sets should not be a solo endeavor, as if one were studying for a math or a typing test. It is a networked effort in which community members stimulate each other to strive and achieve. The richer the idea/skill environment, the faster all members of the community will rise to the challenges.

Library as 21^st century skills incubator

If your library community needs a boost to become a more successful incubator for 21^st century skills, here are some ideas to try;

1. Get all library staff on board first. If all staff members understand why the 21^st century skill sets are so critical to patrons’ success, they will be more deliberate about embedding the skills in programs and classes and helping patrons improve on many fronts. Even a basic computer skills class can advance awareness of the online and digitized nature of our modern world and promote teamwork, accountability and flexibility.

2. Be the catalyst for creating networks in your community to approximate the “liquid networks” of cities. Bring people together at the library with the deliberate intention of mixing it up as much as possible to spark interactions between subcultures. Start an all-ages discussion group (teens to Boomers) to talk about the pros and cons of starting a small business.

3. Try to find the “edges” where the current state of things is not so satisfying. A major innovation blocker is a state of affairs in which things are so satisfying that nobody has any incentive to change. This is the “we’ve always done it this way” syndrome. Protracted high unemployment rates and economic difficulties offer an uncomfortable edge that may push people to face some 21^st century realities and open up to possibilities.

4. Focus on your community members who are most receptive to growth and change. I have lived in small villages where too many of the residents had “checked out” through alcoholism, drug addiction, or just lack of ambition. How disheartening for the community librarian who wants to have an impact. Working with the handful who are most likely to succeed starts a positive feedback loop which just may be contagious. Do what you can to expose your “champions” to outside resources and networks to add heat to a small town incubator.

Is your library succeeding in incubating new skills and awareness? Tell us what you’re doing right.

Many of us are familiar with the Learning 2.0 program started by Helene Blowers. This Web 2.0 training program has been riffed on by many libraries, and some are now using the model to deliver other kinds of training beyond Web 2.0 tools. As an example, South Dakota State Library staff recently tweaked the model to deliver database training in their state.

Last week I had the pleasure of talking to Missy Shock on her development of this model. Missy is the training director at Douglas County Libraries. She and her 3 trainers implemented Colorado’s version of Web 2.0 training with all the public service staff in her libraries. They had such success that they’re leveraging the model for other trainings. What follows are some excerpts from our conversation.

What benefit did your staff get from your Web 2.0 training?

Some of our staff were excited about the program and jumped in, while others took longer to come around. I think what got everyone hooked was the usefulness of the tools. We haven’t done formal evaluation yet, but we definitely see that they’ve institutionalized the use of these tools. And this is not just the early adopters. When people need to set up a meeting, they set up a doodle poll. When people need to work collaboratively, they’re using Google Docs. People are blogging their project reports. I didn’t see these tools being used before the training.

We’ve also noticed that the program allowed staff to develop a level of confidence for learning on their own. Staff needed learn the model and get used to it, but now that they’re familiar with it, we want to use it for more training as soon as possible.

What are your plans for developing the self-directed online learning approach?

This is a great approach for tech training, so most of our plans are related to technology. The first training being developed is with e-readers. We also have a “library as publisher” initiative coming and it’s likely we’ll use this approach for e-pub training. Other possibilities include current productivity tools, databases and ILS training.

Beyond technology, I can see it being used for library skills, for example, if we have a storytime initiative come down and training is needed. I can also see it used for staff orientation which is already online in a number of Captivate and other videos.

How are you creating these new trainings?

We liked the Learning 2.0 structure where large topics are broken down into modules with lessons, and we’ll use that. We’re using a blog format and decided on WordPress.com. With this approach we’re self-sufficient and not reliant on our IT department. This allows us to do quick development—get content from our SMEs, design the training using the model, then roll it right out. What’s great about this model is that you can start building modules and roll them out, while still creating more. We can be responsive to the needs of the organization, and even have multiple people developing multiple trainings at one time if that’s called for.

What do you do about those learners who are resistant to online training?

We take the approach of personal hand holding to deal with resistance. We’re available to support staff when needed. In our approach, supervisors and managers are playing more of a role in tracking and in guidance on the trainings. They receive a log sheet from us with information on how much time each module should take. Then if it takes that person longer, we know they need face-to-face help, which is available from the trainers or other helpful coworkers.

People talk about how this kind of training is a challenge for learners who like contact with other people. But this is something you can build in as part of your design. Offering a variety of activities is crucial for application within the workplace, so we’ll use multiple options and choices within the discovery exercises. Many of these can involve interpersonal contact. With the e-reader training, we might have an exercise where the learner needs to do an exercise with someone they know who owns an e-reader, or to go to Best Buy to get some hands on experience with devices. We’ll also have them buddy up with others on some of the exercises. Not only does this allow for contact but it also lets them see how to do something in a way they might not have done themselves.

Ultimately, for this to work, you have to have someone minding the store. It doesn’t even need to be a trainer—it can be a supervisor, a manager, or any of a library’s go-to people. There needs to be someone who will monitor and manage the process of the particular training. The program is about more than just the learners. You can’t just put it out there without someone being responsible for it.

What’s your ultimate goal with this approach?

As I mentioned, staff is more confident about learning more after using this model. There’s the saying, a rising tide lifts all boats. Because of the way staff is demonstrating their learning to managers, supervisors and each other, the competency level of everyone is raised.

As we bring more of these trainings to staff, they’re becoming more responsible for their own learning, will ask for time to do it and will manage it more on their own. I can see that this would ultimately evolve into a system where staff is developing their own personal learning plans in a way that can be integrated into their performance plans and evaluations.

If you’re using the Blowers model to support different kinds of training, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Let us all know what you’ve got in the works!

I spent 7 hours a day for two days in an overly air-conditioned, windowless room and I emerged energized and refreshed! Trends in Library Training and Learning, the online conference resulting from the power partnership of WebJunction and the Learning Round Table, was stimulating and boundary-stretching, capturing and holding the attention of 500-700+ viewers per session.  The lineup of presenters was top-notch. The visuals were often stunning. The chat window was often so active, it was dizzying. Some participants have said it was the best online conference they had ever attended—so absorbing in fact that multi-tasking was set aside for the duration.

WebJunction staff (Jennifer, Sharon S, Betha) live-blogged all of the sessions.

T is for Training devoted today’s podcast (titled I forgot my underwear) to an enlightening (and funny) debrief from the perspective of presenters, attendees and organizers.

Thanks to the wonders of webinar technology, you can still savor the selection of presentations through the archived recordings.

Day ONE:

• Born to Forget: How to Survive and Thrive the Age of Information Overload
  Jay Turner’s mind-expanding keynote
• Happiness Through Personal Learning
  Marianne Lenox
• Lights! Camera! Action! Using video for patron and staff instruction
  Angela Nolet and Amber Slaven
• Getting Admin Buy-In for Training
  Sarah Houghton

Day TWO:

• Instructional Literacy and the Library Educator
  Char Booth
• Tech Training Skills for 21st Century Library Staff
  Crystal Schimpf, Kieran Hixon, and Nancy Trimm
• Beyond 23 Things: Enhanced Self-Paced Training
  Julie Erickson and Jane Healy
• Cultivating the Library as a Site of Participatory Culture and Learning
  Buffy Hamilton

Not only can you immerse yourself in the conference experience, you can organize a viewing party to watch the archives together. The viewing party guide and the session discussion questions will enrich the event.

Attending a professional conference with colleagues has always struck me as a highly productive and mind-expanding experience—a learning experience that produces positive and long-lasting results far beyond anything I would have expected. And returning from the American Library Association (ALA) 2011 Annual Conference in New Orleans last week, then diving into Norman Doidge’s book The Brain That Changes Itself, may have finally helped me understand the physiology behind that feeling.

Doidge, in exploring the physiological plasticity of brains—the brain’s ability to rewire itself in response to new situations and challenges—documents how much we do to strengthen our brains when we “engage in tasks in which we must focus our attention as closely as we did when we were younger, trying to learn a new vocabulary or master new skills…That’s why learning a new language in old age is so good for improving the maintain the memory generally. Because it requires intense focus, studying a new language turns on the control system for plasticity and keeps it in good shape for laying down sharp memories of all kinds.”

Any of us who have traveled to places where our native tongue is not spoken can attest to the sense of revitalization that comes from immersion in those unfamiliar settings. It’s as if we are, once again, children, with that child’s sense of wonder and curiosity that so often leads to intellectual growth and creative endeavors. Which is exactly what happens for those of us lucky enough to even temporarily be in an unfamiliar setting like New Orleans, or Chicago, or Washington, DC, or any of the other conference sites in which I’ve been immersed over the past few years.

There is that palpable sense of excitement and stimulation that comes from having to be much more aware of everything around us—temporarily learning a new public transit system, quickly learning the layout of some of the immense conference centers we have to learn to navigate in extremely short periods of time, even something as simple as figuring out where we can find a comfortable place to dine and have conversations with our colleagues. It reawakens the sense of plasticity that comes from something as complex as learning a new language or something as simple as finding our way around in unfamiliar settings. And if we spend a little time afterward reflecting on what we have encountered and acquired—particularly by writing about it—we seem to increase the possibility of rewiring our brains in ways that produce changes no classroom or online learning experience can possibly hope to match.

It’s not as if there’s any one thing to which we can point to document this process. My own experiences in New Orleans were tremendously varied, stimulating, and rewarding. The chance encounter with a colleague over lunch that turned into a two-hour exchange of ideas about marketing and training in a way that left us both eager to build upon the thoughts that lovely conversation produced. The opportunity to help orient and work with conference volunteers and paid staff who were providing information to their 20,000 colleagues who were attending the conference. The spur of the moment opportunity to turn a routine book-signing into a memorable event for all involved. The inspiration provided by hearing colleagues discuss how they were matching technology with library users in innovative ways to produce notable results. The chance to explore something as dynamic as social learning centers through a joint presentation with a couple of cherished colleagues and a receptive and enthusiastic audience under the auspices of the ALA Learning Round Table. And the ongoing stimulation provided by reading, absorbing, and reacting to reports that came to my attention while I was onsite in New Orleans and continuing to reflect on the experience a week after returning home.

It doesn’t take a brain scan or a careful reading of Doidge’s book to provide an understanding of  the value of seeing and treating conferences and all that they produce as part of our essential ongoing learning process. As Doidge says toward the end of The Brain That Changes, the brain needs oxygen…and stimulation…and exercise. And full engagement in continual learning certainly goes a long way in filling those needs.

Registration is now open for Trends in Library Training and Learning: Developing Staff Skills for the 21st Century. WebJunction will be hosting this free online conference in partnership with the Learning Roundtable on August 10-11, 2011.

This event is packed with incredible presenters, including keynote speakers Jay Turner from Georgia Public Library Service, and Char Booth from the Claremont Colleges. The full schedule with session descriptions and presenter bios is now available.

Register now for this great event! You may also be interested in coordinating a viewing party at your library to engage staff, generate discussion and help to make this event locally relevant.

Follow the conversation about the conference on Twitter with the hashtag #learntrends!

Monday was National Library Unconference Day organized by JP Porcaro and 8BitLibrary and sponsored by the ALA Learning Round Table.

The virtual sessions were recorded and are available on the ALA Learning YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/ALALearning

Take a few moments to listen, enjoy, and be inspired. If you hosted or attended an unconference we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Intro by JP Porcaro

Meditations on Libraries, Library Work & Kindness by Michael Stephens

Library Spaces Part 1 by Jaime Hammond

Library Spaces Part 2 by Jaime Hammond

Make It Happen by JP Porcaro

What Can Libraries Expect in This Century by Eli Neiburger

ALA Learning Round Table and OCLC’s WebJunction
collaborate to offer free online conference

Trends in Library Training and Learning: Developing Staff Skills for the 21^st Century program is set for August 10–11

WebJunction, OCLC’s online learning community for library staff, and the ALA Learning Round Table, which promotes quality continuing education for all library personnel, will team up to offer a free, online learning and training conference August 10–11, 2011.

The conference, to include eight one-hour sessions over two days, will be hosted using the WebEx web conferencing tool, which will provide attendees with easy online access to all live sessions and the ability to interact with other attendees and presenters using text-based chat. Registration will open by June 1 when full conference details are available on WebJunction.org.

“Libraries are changing quickly and staff need more training than ever to navigate nimbly through change,” said Sharon Morris, ALA Learning Round Table President 2010–11. “This conference will help library trainers, managers and staff to find new ways to train, learn and keep up. The Learning Round Table members are excited to be working with WebJunction on this cutting-edge online conference.”

Jay Turner, a leader in developing creative e-learning solutions for libraries, will serve as keynote speaker for the conference. Mr. Turner serves on the Learning Round Table Board and is the training manager for the Gwinnett County Public Library until May 13. He will then become the new Director of Continuing Education for the Georgia Public Library Service. Mr. Turner was selected as an ALA Emerging Leader in 2008 and is also active in the Public Library Association.

Session presenters will provide practical solutions for libraries looking to implement both staff and patron training using innovative learning techniques that include formal and informal, and online and face-to-face methods. Topics will be particularly relevant to public libraries, but all library staff are welcome and encouraged to attend. Session details will be made available on WebJunction.org in the coming weeks.

With tight training and travel budgets, this free conference provides library staff an easy and affordable opportunity to learn from and network with both the WebJunction and Learning Round Table communities. Anyone unable to attend the live sessions will be able to view the recorded presentations that will be archived on WebJunction.org after the conference. Full session archives from WebJunction’s two 2010 online conferences are also available to view on WebJunction.org.

About the ALA Learning Round Table

The Learning Round Table of the American Library Association promotes quality continuing education for all library personnel. The Learning Round Table helps library staff network with other continuing education providers, serves as a source for continuing education assistance and advocates for quality library continuing education at both the local and national levels. More information, including training resources and membership opportunities, is available at www.alalearning.org.

About WebJunction

WebJunction is the online learning community for librarians and library staff. We provide information, insights, and online learning relevant to staff, their organizations, and the library field as a whole as part of our mission to foster collaboration and partnership within the library community. WebJunction is supported in part by OCLC, grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Services, partners in state library agencies and other library systems and organizations, and by the library community. Launched in 2003, WebJunction is based in Seattle, Washington and Dublin, Ohio. More information is available at www.webjunction.org.

About OCLC
Founded in 1967, OCLC is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing library costs. More than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries have used OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend, preserve and manage library materials. Researchers, students, faculty, scholars, professional librarians and other information seekers use OCLC services to obtain bibliographic, abstract and full-text information when and where they need it. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the world’s largest online database for discovery of library resources. Search WorldCat on the Web at www.worldcat.org. For more information, visit www.oclc.org.

A PDF version of the press release is available at: http://alalearning.org/about/press/