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Featured Guest Post

Featured Guest Post, Online Learning, Staff Training, Web 2.0, Webinar
Start You Up! The Personal Learning Experience Learning Webinar
November 30th, 2007 | Permalink | 1 Comment

Imagine if you had a place to learn online that was so cool you’d visit it every day. It’s built especially to fit your learning style in all your favorite colors. Even the content is just for you – your chosen learning topic brought to you like front page news. Suddenly you are in charge of your own informal training and experiencing learning like never before. You are the star of your own Personal Learning Environment home page!

If you can ‘copy and paste’ you can easily build your own interactive PLE to help manage and revitalize your learning.

I’m excited to share what’s worked for me personally, but as a public library trainer I’m really thrilled to showcase a concept so simple that helps staff fulfill their individual learning goals on their own terms – in minutes at a time. I’m also looking forward to hearing your ideas on the Personal Learning Environment concept via the chat feature of the webinar and here in comments.

Please join me and the WebJunction Learning Team for Start You Up! The Personal Learning Experience for Library Staff and other Busy Professionals on December 5th, 11 AM – 12 PM PT / 2 – 3 PM ET.

Hope to see you then!

Marianne Lenox
Staff Training and Development Coordinator
Huntsville – Madison County Public Library
Featured Guest Post, Library Management, Spanish Outreach, Webinar
Guest Blogger: Loida Garcia-Febo
November 16th, 2007 | Permalink | 1 Comment

Many libraries are struggling to make their workforce reflect the diverse population of patrons they serve. Diversity Counts, a report from the ALA Office for Diversity and the Office for Research and Statistics revealed that our diverse workforce is in crisis. We need to be able to strategically plan to recruit more professionals from various ethnic backgrounds. The severe decline of librarians of color demonstrates that the profession must unite forces so that would-be users in libraries and information centers see their information needs and themselves reflected.

Currently, Diversity Counts is the only report of its nature. The findings revealed that credentialed public librarians by race/ethnicity (2000) include:

• 89% White
• 4% African American
• 3% Asian and Pacific Islander
• 3% Latino
•1% Two or more races
• 0% Native American including Alaskan

This Tuesday, November 20, WebJunction is presenting a webinar aimed to tackle the recruitment issue. Join us on for this special ninety-minute webinar to learn about recruiting and building a multicultural workforce. The purpose of the webinar is to present Diversity Counts, the situation in the nation for libraries in all settings (academics, public, school, special), address the needs, and provide practical and feasible solutions and examples of what is currently being done by librarians and what could be done.

Guest speakers include:
•Tracy Hall, former Director of ALA Office for Diversity who co-developed Diversity Counts
•Jerome Offord, Director of Diversity Initiatives for the Association of Research Libraries.
•Luis Chaparro, REFORMA Vice-President/President Elect
•Myself, Loida Garcia-Febo from Queens Library and a REFORMA Executive Board member

For more information visit Spanish Outreach – In Depth where you’ll find instructions for joining the webinar. We hope you will participate in this important discussion! Feel free to post your thoughts, ideas, and comments here before or after the webinar.

Loida Garcia-Febo
Featured Guest Post, Library Services, Online Collaboration, Rural and Small Libraries, Sustainability, Webinar
Next Rural Webinar: Library as Place
October 22nd, 2007 | Permalink | 3 Comments

What does the phrase “library as place” mean to you? How does it differ from “experience library” or “destination library”? What do these concepts have in common? At the next Rural Webinar, we’ll explore these concepts and share our strategies for making our library spaces inviting and useful to our “inhouse” visitors.

Please join Rural Webinar moderator, Brenda Hough and me, Cindi Hickey on Thursday in Live Space at WebJunction. Here are the meeting details:

Thursday, October 25, 2007
11:00 am PT/ 2:00 pm ET
For connection instructions, please visit:
http://webjunction.org/do/DisplayContent?id=13377

Bring your ideas and success stories! We’ll see you there.

P.S. Want a preview? Check out Library As Place, posted by Peter Bromberg at the Library Garden blog.

Posted by Cindi Hickey
Featured Guest Post, Tech, Webinar
Top 47 Training Tips from Today’s Learning Webinar
October 17th, 2007 | Permalink | Comment?
Wow, what a great group we had on the Accidental Technology Trainer webinar today! Thanks everyone for your great participation. I wished we had all day to keep sharing. At the end of the webinar I invited the participants to help me come up with a Top 10 list of training tips–generated from topics from the webinar and their own experiences. Well, they came up with 47 tips! If you missed the webinar, you can access the archived version (and the other past learning webinars) at: http://webjunction.org/do/Navigation?category=15543. On Friday, I’ll post the questions asked during the webinar, AND my answers. Do you have any additional tips to share or training questions you’d like answered? Just leave a comment on this post

Thanks! Stephanie Gerding, author of The Accidental Technology Trainer

Top 10 Training Tips from Today:
- Respect your participants
- Use activities
- Provide info in short bites
- Letting them DO more
- Train the Trainers
- Provide candy
- Reminder that the beginning and the end are the most important — make more beginnings and endings
- Give them an experience
- Patience is important
- Team teach when possible
- Keeping their attention, by making it fun
- Remember smokers…they may need to break more often…
- Don’t overdo the content
- Learning is not consumption but creation
- I like someone’s suggestion of partnering people of different skill levels
- Providing time for them to work independently
- Have structured and independent work on computer class
- Action plans
- Snowball fight exercise…great fun idea
- Let your participants do more — you just give backup at a certain point
- Begin and end strong and memorable
- Hands on is key
- Give them something to create so they leave with an example
- Mixing up the activities – lecture + activities
- Use humor to help keep the atmosphere relaxed.
- Variety, variety, variety!
- Polls
- Be flexible
- Make the classes smaller rather than larger.
- Laughter is a great motivator
- Find out participants expectations at the outset
- Get feedback!
- Immediately useful take-aways, professional or personal
- Let participants know they can request breaks
- Peer tutor
- Give time for independent learning and reflection
- Drawing
- Have them paraphrase what you have said.
- Positive Reinforcement
- Whoever is doing the talking is doing the learning.
- Allow time for practice
- Info they can take with them
- Allow plenty of time
- If available, guest speakers break the monotony
- Don’t try to cover too much material
- Certificates at the end for participants
- Tell them what you’ll teach, teach, tell them what you taught
Featured Guest Post, News, Staff Training, Tech, Webinar
Guest Blogger: Stephanie Gerding
October 15th, 2007 | Permalink | Comment?

I’m delighted to be the first guest blogger on BlogJunction! We hope you will join us this Wednesday for the next WJ Learning Webinar that will be based on my new book (being released on the same day!), The Accidental Technology Trainer: A Guide for Libraries. We’ll discuss how learning, participation, and retention can be increased in your library training programs!

No matter what type of library you work in or what kind of training you do, join our learning community to share tips and advice.

Compliments of the publisher, InfoToday, we will give away 5 copies of the book during the webinar. You just need to pre-register and then join the webinar to be included in the drawing. Over 100! people have registered, some who are new trainers and some with lots of experience, and I look forward to sharing and learning with everyone.

The Accidental Technology Trainer
October 17, 11 AM – 12 PM PT / 2 – 3 PM ET
Free via WebJunction’s Live Space
Register here (optional)

I’ll be back with more posts to keep the conversation going. Feel free to leave your comments and question here, before or after the session!

More soon,

Stephanie Gerding
Photo outside her home in sunny Phoenix where everything is in bloom

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Featured Guest Post

Featured Guest Post, Online Learning, Staff Training, Web 2.0, Webinar

Start You Up! The Personal Learning Experience Learning Webinar

Featured Guest Post, Library Management, Spanish Outreach, Webinar

Guest Blogger: Loida Garcia-Febo

Featured Guest Post, Library Services, Online Collaboration, Rural and Small Libraries, Sustainability, Webinar

Next Rural Webinar: Library as Place

Featured Guest Post, Tech, Webinar

Top 47 Training Tips from Today’s Learning Webinar

Featured Guest Post, News, Staff Training, Tech, Webinar

Guest Blogger: Stephanie Gerding