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
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
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
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:
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