Wow what an amazing experience it was to share ideas about training versus learning with so many of you during the WebJunction webinar Cultivating a Culture of Learning in Libraries. Over the next few days I will be posting some key points from the presentation as well as answering questions from the session. Feel free to post additional questions in the comments.
Training vs. Learning
Our first activity was to come up with one word that describes the difference between training and learning. With so many people participating those chats were flying by! I’m posting a summary (duplicates have been eliminated).
So here is what you identified as the differences between training and learning:
- acquire
- action
- active
- activity vs. outcome
- applying
- best
- collaboration
- discovery
- do it yourself
- doing/done to/discovered
- emphasis
- engaged/engagement
- enjoyment
- experience/experiencing/experiential
- exploration/exploratory
- focus
- fun
- hands-on
- ideas
- inspiration
- integrated
- intention
- interaction/interactive/interactivity
- interest/interesting
- internalizing
- intuitive/intuitiveness
- involvement
- joint
- lifelong
- motivation
- need
- ongoing
- participating/participation/participatory
- passive vs. active
- personal
- perspective
- process
- self-experience
- self-motivated
- study
- synthesis
- time for reflection / discussion / integration
- training – boring ; learning – fun
- training is facilitated learning
- training is received; learning is acquired
- understanding
These answers are amazing and show that we really already know the difference between training and learning. So the real challenge is what does a culture of learning look like and how do we implement that change from training to learning within our libraries?
Stay tuned for the next post where I’ll answer that question. In the meantime I’d love to hear your ideas. What does or would a culture of learning look like in your library and what’s the first step you can make to move towards that goal?
- Lori Reed
Training Learning Specialist
Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County
I guess a culture of learning at the Public Library System where I work would mean classes with less handouts, manuals and hand-holding and more student driven work. My goal is to teach the staff and volunteers at the libraries we serve how to play and figure things out on their own. Now, how do I do that? It’s a huge change, but very necessary for Web2.0 apps.