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E-Learning Preparedness

May 14, 2009 By

I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to participate in an online chat about e-learning best practices with our own Paul Signorelli.  As I answered questions for Paul, I had the opportunity to reflect on my experiences in introducing blended learning at Gwinnett County Public Library, an organization, that until a couple years ago, relied almost solely on classroom-based ILT for training.  In my ferver to get e-learning off the ground, I took a few lumps along way that could have been avoided had I taken more care to address early on a few fundamental questions in implementation regarding physical assets, supervisory needs, and administrative concerns.  I volunteered to Paul that I would be happy to compile and share a general e-learning preparation checklist for libraries considering e-learning, or for those that are relatively new to it.  Here goes (or visit the Google group T is for Training for a printer-friendly version):

E-Learning Preparedness Checklist

Physical

  • Does each work unit have an adequate number of PCs to be used primarily for e-learning?
  • Are the PCs in an area away from potential distractions?
  • Does each training PC have the necessary equipment and configuration for e-learning?
    • Consider equipment such as:
    • Headset microphones for webinars
    • Webcam for video conferencing
    • Browsers correctly configured (i.e., Java, Flash Player, Active X controls, popup blockers, software applets, etc)
  • Is there a Help Desk/Tech Support system in place?
  • Are there bandwidth bottlenecks during peak times of PC use in the branches?

Supervisory

  • Do employees have scheduled off-desk time to participate in e-learning?
  • Is training viewed as an essential job function and supported as such?
  • Are policies/guidelines in place to restrict hourly employees from accessing e-learning off the clock?
  • Will concepts taught in e-learning be modeled and reinforced in the workplace?

Training Administrator

  • Will e-learning offerings conflict with branch/department scheduling?
  • How will new e-learning opportunities be advertised?
  • Which, if any, e-learning classes count toward CEUs for your professional staff?
  • Have you communicated your vision for e-learning so that staff know what to expect?
  • Do you have the buy-in of key stakeholders, such as the Director, the IT department, line managers, etc?
  • What evaluative criteria will be used to determine the success of e-learning initiatives?

Jay Turner

Jay Turner, Training Manager at Gwinnett County Public Library in Georgia, is responsible for all aspects of learning and development for a staff of 300+ employees. He considers himself a lifelong student, and delights in sharing his passion for learning with anyone willing to listen (much to their chagrin!) He is a library lifer, who began working in libraries as a teen and has worn almost every conceivable public services hat since. Jay’s diversity of experience helps him develop and deliver solutions that are creative, practical, and effective. He is a self-proclaimed information and tech junkie, who gets his fix by playing in his “digital sandbox” with new tools and neat ideas to make learning more accessible, more flexible, and more fun across any medium. He can be reached at jayturner[at]comcast.net.

Filed Under: E-Learning Tagged With: , ,

Is 3D Training the Way of the Future?

April 13, 2009 By

For several years now – at least since the advent of Second Life – learning professionals have been intrigued by the prospects of constructing immersive 3d worlds (metaverses) for training. It’s easy to understand why: one of the first things I learned in communication theory in undergrad is that aesthetics are powerful. Even the most astute and discerning among us form initial impressions from outer appearances. Ooh! Shiny, shiny! Let’s go buy the new tech-toy

I’ll hand it to those wily coyotes at Linden Lab – even this roadrunner was attempting to fast track a Second Life implementation at my library. Instead of diving off the cliff with nary a look, I decided to hold a magnifying glass up to the app first. Well, the bloom fell off that rose pretty damn quickly. I won’t air a laundary list of complaints here, although Wapedia does a decent job summing them up for me.

I’m not here to skewer Second Life, or any of the myriad pretenders to the throne, such as There, IMVU, or Kaneva. I firmly believe that immersive 3d worlds are a viable learning medium, especially when good rhetorical practices are utilized. For example, I love the art gallery critique that Michael Connors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison set up a couple years ago. Beyond teaching in a traditional sense, 3d environments add more interactivity to e-learning experiences, and we know that fully engaged students walk away better equipped to do their jobs.

If 3d training is indeed the way of the future, as experts have been extolling for the past few years, why aren’t more organizations taking the leap? In my opinion, there are two fundamental flaws to most 3d metaverses: the clients needed to run the applications and the metaverse structure itself. A typical metaverse requires that a client be downloaded and installed on the user’s computer. For instance, Second Life requires a 21MB client download and then a PC that is decently equipped for gaming And let’s not forget that these 3d spaces are bandwidth hogs. As students of Web 2.0, we have come to expect instant access, simplicity, and portability with online content – things that are conspicuously missing from online 3d worlds.

Aside from the technical issues associated with fat clients, the sprawling, unregulated structure of a metaverse is not congruent with fostering an environment for learning. I acknowledge that you can restrict access to your piece of a metaverse, but the idiocy of a virtual world gone mad is still out there. Seriously, who wants their 3d library orientation on ABC Island interrupted by some perv bunny rabbit avatar wanting to cyber??? In my estimation, the ideal 3d training environment needs to be self-enclosed and completely removed from a larger world.

There are flickers of hope piercing the matrix. Big brother Google made strides in tackling the fat client/wide-open world conundrum a little less than a year ago with its ephemeral Lively experiment. Lively operated as a thin-client, strictly through a web browser. There was no software to download to participate in this 3d world. Simply sign in, customize an avatar, and hop into a room if you weren’t inclined to spend five minutes making your own. If you constructed your own room, you could close it off and make it available by invitation only. Finally, you also had the option of embedding your room into your webpage. While Lively is offline (and sorely missed!), Vivaty is a thin service that allows users to create 3d chat rooms that can be embedded in other webpages. Finally, VastPark has an open source toolset that empowers moderately savvy users to author self-contained 3d environments that can be accessed exclusively through a web browser.The products that have come from Google, Vivaty, VastPark, and their ilk demonstrate that significant changes have occurred since Second Life launched six years ago. Maybe in another three, 3d learning environments will be reality in many organizations.

Jay Turner

Jay Turner, Training Manager at Gwinnett County Public Library in Georgia, is responsible for all aspects of learning and development for a staff of 300+ employees. He considers himself a lifelong student, and delights in sharing his passion for learning with anyone willing to listen (much to their chagrin!) He is a library lifer, who began working in libraries as a teen and has worn almost every conceivable public services hat since. Jay’s diversity of experience helps him develop and deliver solutions that are creative, practical, and effective. He is a self-proclaimed information and tech junkie, who gets his fix by playing in his “digital sandbox” with new tools and neat ideas to make learning more accessible, more flexible, and more fun across any medium. He can be reached at jayturner[at]comcast.net.

Filed Under: E-Learning Tagged With: , , , ,

Expanding the Lion Hunt

January 27, 2009 By

Where the heck have you been? I mean, it’s been like, what, six months since I saw you!

I’ve heard this a bit lately, but somehow I’ve managed to not seriously reflect on the importance of these statements. Like many of you, fellow learning lieutenants, I’ve been shepherding several sizable projects — rewriting policy, developing new guidelines, implementing programs, teaching new technologies. As Billy Pilgrim would say, so it goes.

A reality that I now recognize is that as learning professionals our work is highly visible, but we, as individuals, often work in solitude. Trainers in libraries, or whatever we are called that week, are sometimes departments of one. Sometimes we are departments of nothing. Sometimes we work in offices completely removed from people. Sometimes we work out of the back of computer labs with no windows. I am puzzled by these arrangements considering that most of us in the land of learning are gregarious people with a touch (and need) to interact with others.

The dearth of stimulation atrophies the mind and siphons the soul. Idle in these doldrums for, say, six months and your creativity and drive are running on empty. We all occasionally suffer through these professional maladies. Consider shaking up routine by driving to work a different way each day. You’d be surprised, I might add, the number of route permutations you can construct for an eight-mile drive.

Also consider adding a midday lion hunt into your routine. A lion hunt is simply taking five or ten minutes each day to speak with a few persons with whom you normally do not interact. It can be as simple as asking, “What are you working on?” or “What do you think about…?” You will learn things about people that you ordinarily wouldn’t know. You might even learn something about yourself.

But even taking new routes to the same destination, or talking new topics with the same people might not remedy all your challenges. The key is expanding the lion hunt, so that you are getting intellectual and social stimulation from others like you – lifelong learners. Be sure to lion hunt in your professional jungle. Talk to other learning professionals to see what projects they are working on or what they think about x. Five to ten minutes with fellow professionals might help you see the forest instead of the trees.

So I challenge each of you to expand your lion hunt, and as Pat Wagoner suggests, allow yourself to be useful to others.

Jay Turner

Jay Turner, Training Manager at Gwinnett County Public Library in Georgia, is responsible for all aspects of learning and development for a staff of 300+ employees. He considers himself a lifelong student, and delights in sharing his passion for learning with anyone willing to listen (much to their chagrin!) He is a library lifer, who began working in libraries as a teen and has worn almost every conceivable public services hat since. Jay’s diversity of experience helps him develop and deliver solutions that are creative, practical, and effective. He is a self-proclaimed information and tech junkie, who gets his fix by playing in his “digital sandbox” with new tools and neat ideas to make learning more accessible, more flexible, and more fun across any medium. He can be reached at jayturner[at]comcast.net.

Filed Under: The Training Life Tagged With: , ,

Content is King in Your LMS

June 6, 2008 By

In my last post (many, many moons ago!), I discussed some key factors to consider while evaluating learning management systems.  If you have already made the jump and purchased an LMS or are on the verge of purchasing, you have more factors to consider when setting up your system.  Let me share a few more nuggets of insight from the trenches:

 

v     Content is king: If you shopped smartly, then your LMS should already include a library of courseware from a reputable content vendor, such as Skillsoft.  These our-of-the-box e-learning solutions are great for building and enhancing basic job competencies, such as customer service, management and leadership, and software skills.  However, the crux for public libraries is finding content specifically for us – content that enhances focused, job-specific competencies, like readers’ advisory, providing services to teens, or advocating for funding.

 

When you are building up your library of content in your LMS, do not overlook the wealth of free resources, such as archived webinars or self-paced courses, provided by powerhouses such as the SirsiDynix Institute or Webjunction.  Also remember that many database vendors have free training presentations or webinars archived as well.  Finally, compile a list of all the knowledge objects you currently have available in-house that you can add to your system.

 

v     Accessing the knowledge: So now you have mountains of content, but how will your users access it?  Your LMS will definitely have a search the catalog feature, but you should be extremely thoughtful of how you assign categories during the initial setup.  Many of your staff members will want to browse the categories to see what’s available.  Think about how your staff currently searches for training resources.  If you already have a library of training materials that is organized by category or subject, consider using those as starting point for assigning categories.

 

v     Permissions: Inevitably, how you assign permissions in your LMS is tied to your organization’s culture.  Is authority in your library highly centralized?  Do you have much local autonomy?  Be cognizant of your culture before you begin assigning permissions.  For example, will you set up your system so that any staff member can create a log in on their own, or will the LMS administrator assign logins, or a combination of both?  Can any staff member, regardless of position or relevance of training content to their current position, register for any course in the LMS?     

 

Hopefully, you will find these tips useful in the not-so-easy task of implementing your LMS.

Jay Turner

Jay Turner, Training Manager at Gwinnett County Public Library in Georgia, is responsible for all aspects of learning and development for a staff of 300+ employees. He considers himself a lifelong student, and delights in sharing his passion for learning with anyone willing to listen (much to their chagrin!) He is a library lifer, who began working in libraries as a teen and has worn almost every conceivable public services hat since. Jay’s diversity of experience helps him develop and deliver solutions that are creative, practical, and effective. He is a self-proclaimed information and tech junkie, who gets his fix by playing in his “digital sandbox” with new tools and neat ideas to make learning more accessible, more flexible, and more fun across any medium. He can be reached at jayturner[at]comcast.net.

Filed Under: LearnRT News Tagged With: ,

Evaluating Learning Management Systems

April 25, 2008 By

Learning management systems (LMS) have been around forever, and it appears, at least in my anecdotal observations, that public library land is jumping on the bandwagon.  

An LMS empowers an organization to manage, track, and quantify all learning activities. 

 

No system is perfect, but there are several things to consider before purchasing an LMS.  We recently acquired an LMS here at Gwinnett County Public Library after evaluating several vendors.  I began this process very green, but have learned several valuable lessons along the way.  Here is some wisdom I’d like to share:

 

v     What exactly do we need from our LMS?

Sure, as the training manager, I have many ideas for what I want the system to be able to perform, but this purchase isn’t just about me.  Does HR have specific needs?  What role will the IT department play in the implementation?  What strategic benefits do the Executive Director and other department heads hope to reap from this large purchase?  Know your core needs before contacting any vendors.  You’ll be quickly embarrassed if you don’t.

 

v     What features must the LMS have?  What’s optional?

After you know your business needs, you can begin thinking about core features of the LMS and any extra bells and whistles.  What kind of reports do you need?  Does your LMS come bundled with courseware?  How scalable is the system?  Is the LMS SCORM and/or AICC compliant?  Only you know your budget.  It goes without saying that you cover the core features first.  Do not go gadget crazy and purchase features you don’t need (ie, learning management system vs. talent management system).  There are some thirsty sharks out in the ocean of sales reps.

 

v     Who is this company, anyway?

Be sure that you are buying from an established company.  Can your vendor provide references of clients who have benefitted tangible returns after implementing the vendor’s LMS? 

 

v     Should I buy or rent?

Buying your LMS software may sound appealing, and if you have the IT resources in your organization, maybe this works for you.  If you purchase your LMS, it’s yours.  The implementation, upkeep, and upgrades also become your sole responsibility.  However, if you rent, the vendor implements, upkeeps, and upgrades using this software as a service model.  The LMS is hosted on the vendor’s servers, and you don’t have much to worry about… except the yearly fee for service.

 

v     Will the LMS work with other systems our organization uses?

This is a huge consideration, especially if your library already has a human resources management system.  Is it important that your LMS be able to communicate with your HRMS?  Can the LMS talk to the HR system?  If so, how much will it cost to customize the LMS?  Customization is expensive!

 

 Hopefully these tips will save you some grief.  If only I knew then what I know now.

 

~Jay

Jay Turner

Jay Turner, Training Manager at Gwinnett County Public Library in Georgia, is responsible for all aspects of learning and development for a staff of 300+ employees. He considers himself a lifelong student, and delights in sharing his passion for learning with anyone willing to listen (much to their chagrin!) He is a library lifer, who began working in libraries as a teen and has worn almost every conceivable public services hat since. Jay’s diversity of experience helps him develop and deliver solutions that are creative, practical, and effective. He is a self-proclaimed information and tech junkie, who gets his fix by playing in his “digital sandbox” with new tools and neat ideas to make learning more accessible, more flexible, and more fun across any medium. He can be reached at jayturner[at]comcast.net.

Filed Under: E-Learning Tagged With: ,

Bring Sharepoint to Life With Blogs

February 4, 2008 By

Sharepoint 2007 has five templates for building sites on your organization’s intranet: team site, blank site, document workspace, wiki site, and a blog.  Each template has obvious uses.  A team site is useful for organizing, authoring, and sharing content.  A blank site is completely empty and highly customizable.  Document workspaces are used for teams that need to co-author a document, and the site supports various project management functions native in MOSS, such as task assignments and issues tracking.  A wiki site is for brainstorming and sharing ideas.  Finally, the blog site is utilized for sharing observations and allowing for others to comment.

While each template presents advantages for workflow, I want to take a few minutes and share how the blog site in Sharepoint can be harnessed for more creative purposes.  When I think about corporate blogs, I think of them as online journals in which the blog’s author is typically ranting to the ether.  We all know that corporate blogs often suffer from low use, even though they are implemented to open up dialog.  Many employees could care less about someone’s musings from a conference.  We duly note their indifference when we look at site usage statistics, or more obviously by the lack of comments under each post:)

So, how can we encourage better participation with blogs on Sharepoint?

1.  Aesthetic appeal: The Site Designer permission group in MOSS allows you to change the look and feel of your site.  Change the Theme of your site to something befitting your content.

2.  Get dynamic: Web parts are your friend.  Use the Content Editor Webpart to add images, tables, and embeddable content like video.  Remember that most videos on Youtube, or popular podcast sites like PodBean contain embeddable source code. 

3.  Redux: Remove from the template any webparts your users won’t need and DO NOT add unneccesary webparts because they look cool. 

4.  Stop playing “Mother May I”: Sharepoint is intended to share content and ideas.  Don’t construct your blog permission sets in such a way that discourages participation.  Ideally, the blog’s administrators should at least have Design permissions, and everyone else should have Contributor permissions.  The Contributor permission set will allow all staff members to start new posts (with publication pending approval from the site’s admin) and also freely comment on existing posts.  Making your blog Read-Only isn’t cool!

5.  Experiment: Your internal blog can be so much more than an online journal.  Build a blog as an organizational FAQ and allow staff members to post new questions.  Build a blog as a virtual book discussion.  Build a blog for sharing best practices with your organization’s new technology.  Your users will appreciate your creativity.

Below are images of two Sharepoint blogs I’ve constructed based on these simple, yet effective design principles.

attila.jpg

office.jpg

~Jay

Jay Turner

Jay Turner, Training Manager at Gwinnett County Public Library in Georgia, is responsible for all aspects of learning and development for a staff of 300+ employees. He considers himself a lifelong student, and delights in sharing his passion for learning with anyone willing to listen (much to their chagrin!) He is a library lifer, who began working in libraries as a teen and has worn almost every conceivable public services hat since. Jay’s diversity of experience helps him develop and deliver solutions that are creative, practical, and effective. He is a self-proclaimed information and tech junkie, who gets his fix by playing in his “digital sandbox” with new tools and neat ideas to make learning more accessible, more flexible, and more fun across any medium. He can be reached at jayturner[at]comcast.net.

Filed Under: LearnRT News Tagged With:

Learning Communities in Sharepoint 2007

January 4, 2008 By

Sharepoint is a hit-and-miss tool in my experience.  It’s clunky and counterintuitive in its good places and just plain rubbish in the bad ones (check out its poor excuse of a Wiki feature).  I have a litany of gripes with the product, but it has features that perform surprisingly well for supporting learners once they leave the classroom.  I plan to publish a series of posts over the coming weeks about leveraging Sharepoint for supporting employees’ performance. 

Let’s look at a Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS) feature that can help solve a common training situation – helping new employees not feel “lost” in the organization after orientation is over.  Many of us have to throw employees to the wolves after a few days of training.  It’s a scary place for a neophyte, learning company culture while trying to digest a hundred policies and a thousand procedures.  The My Site feature of Sharepoint can help offset the angst.  

My Site allows an individual to create a personal site for managing and storing documents, links, and contacts.  It is also a place where others in the organization can learn about your interests and skills. 

Consider requiring that all new employees set up a My Site and add the other new employees as colleagues in the Colleague Tracker.  This is a bit of social networking in the office.  Newbies can support each other by sharing common experiences and tips and tricks they pick up over time.   

Your new employees can also create a blog housed inside of their site.  The blog can be used as a professional development journal for sharing goals, accomplishments, and frustrations. Finally, My Site includes an RSS Viewer.  In Sharepoint it is possible to receive an RSS feed on a list or library that has been modified if you have signed up for an Alert.  Encourage your new employees to sign up for RSS feed alerts on important documents, like the policies and procedures manuals.   

Jay Turner

Jay Turner, Training Manager at Gwinnett County Public Library in Georgia, is responsible for all aspects of learning and development for a staff of 300+ employees. He considers himself a lifelong student, and delights in sharing his passion for learning with anyone willing to listen (much to their chagrin!) He is a library lifer, who began working in libraries as a teen and has worn almost every conceivable public services hat since. Jay’s diversity of experience helps him develop and deliver solutions that are creative, practical, and effective. He is a self-proclaimed information and tech junkie, who gets his fix by playing in his “digital sandbox” with new tools and neat ideas to make learning more accessible, more flexible, and more fun across any medium. He can be reached at jayturner[at]comcast.net.

Filed Under: LearnRT News Tagged With:

Talking Avatars

December 5, 2007 By

Everyone is on the podcast bandwagon and it’s easy to see why.  These small knowledge objects are accessible, portable, and even entertaining.  Their uses are varied, and organizations are finding neat ways to leverage podcasting. I’ve recently built some e-learning modules for Gwinnett County Public Library (our first foray into e-learning, by the way) and I’m hosting them on MOSS 2007.  While I was constructing our Virtual Classroom, I discovered how to directly embed video and podcast players into the site.  Now it was time to bring the Virtual Classroom to life. 

Enter TVnima.  Ever heard of it?  TVnima.com allows users to upload a podcast into an online TV studio and then have the user construct a news broadcast, complete with a semi-customizable avatar lip-synching your podcast.  I fell in love with this tool instantly.  It’s flexible, easy to use, and your learners will enjoy having a face to go with the audio.  You can even put your avatar into a Power Point.  Check out the news broadcast I made just for this post.   Sorry for having to link to Youtube, but I couldn’t figure out how to embed the player into this blog!   

Here’s a quick guide for making your own broadcast with completely free tools: 

n      Record a short podcast with a free mp3 encoder, such as Audacity, and export the mp3.

n      Enter TVnima.com and start a new project using their documentation.

n      Coordinate your avatar’s appearance, gestures, and camera angles.

n      Record your finished broadcast using a free screen capture tool like CamStudio, which is enabled for full-motion recording.

n      Save the file as an AVI and upload to Youtube.

n      Retrieve the HTML code from Youtube for the embeddable version of your broadcast.  If you want to embed video directly into Sharepoint without using Youtube’s player, I can share the code later.

n      Past the code into the HTML of your webpage and enjoy. 

I currently have a TVnima avatar embedded into my Sharepoint site at work advertising the upcoming training opportunities at the library.  Has anyone else out there used TVnima for training purposes?  If so, for what?  

Jay Turner

Jay Turner, Training Manager at Gwinnett County Public Library in Georgia, is responsible for all aspects of learning and development for a staff of 300+ employees. He considers himself a lifelong student, and delights in sharing his passion for learning with anyone willing to listen (much to their chagrin!) He is a library lifer, who began working in libraries as a teen and has worn almost every conceivable public services hat since. Jay’s diversity of experience helps him develop and deliver solutions that are creative, practical, and effective. He is a self-proclaimed information and tech junkie, who gets his fix by playing in his “digital sandbox” with new tools and neat ideas to make learning more accessible, more flexible, and more fun across any medium. He can be reached at jayturner[at]comcast.net.

Filed Under: Cool Tools, Free Stuff Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Alternate Reality Games and Learning

November 8, 2007 By

Familiar with alternate reality games? Basically, players interactively participate in an in-depth story that is revealed as a series of puzzles in the real world. ARGs are usually open-ended as the players create the content and influence the development of the story arc. One person or a small group serve as the puppet masters who steer the game that other players happen into through the rabbit hole – the game’s conceit. Read a whitepaper on ARGs here and even check out one of the best “serious gaming” ARGs, World Without Oil, here.

Alternate reality games, in my opinion, are the natural evolution of simulations, which have proven invaluable in learning environments. We know that simulations provide learners safe contexts in which to practice real-world skills. Now imagine the level of immersion we could provide our learners if they were involved in a larger story, while simultaneously learning and developing those new skills.

Recently, I experimented with alternate reality gaming here at the library using one of our bi-monthly Quality Book Discussions as fodder. Here is the situation:

Thirty staff members signed up to discuss the book, “Branded Customer Service: The New Competitive Edge.” The staff members were expecting the same let’s-gather-together-in-a-circle-and-discuss-the-book format, but what do you really take away from that kind of discussion? Nothing. Instead, I, acting as the puppet master, sent all 30 participants an encrypted email message from the character I would portray in the game, Dr. X. Over the next few days, the staff members deciphered the code, which ultimately sent them to a hidden discussion board inside our intranet, Sharepoint. During the course of a week, participants (now dubbed “field agents”) gave themselves silly pseudonyms and contributed to discussion questions I rolled out every other day.

When the actual face-to-face discussion occurred a week later, Dr. X met with the field agents and instead of me leading an unguided discussion about “Branded Customer Service,” I had the participants complete a series of creative exercises to stimulate further discussion and to maximize transfer.

I had two-fold learning objectives for this ARG: to have staff members demonstrate on-brand customer service behaviors at several touch points in our branches and to have staff members utilize the web parts of Sharepoint 2007, which we just implemented about two months ago. While I have not formally assessed the learning goals, the early signs seem promising for this pilot project.

Jay Turner

Jay Turner, Training Manager at Gwinnett County Public Library in Georgia, is responsible for all aspects of learning and development for a staff of 300+ employees. He considers himself a lifelong student, and delights in sharing his passion for learning with anyone willing to listen (much to their chagrin!) He is a library lifer, who began working in libraries as a teen and has worn almost every conceivable public services hat since. Jay’s diversity of experience helps him develop and deliver solutions that are creative, practical, and effective. He is a self-proclaimed information and tech junkie, who gets his fix by playing in his “digital sandbox” with new tools and neat ideas to make learning more accessible, more flexible, and more fun across any medium. He can be reached at jayturner[at]comcast.net.

Filed Under: E-Learning Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

BAR. BELIEVE. ACT.

October 11, 2007 By

Wow – what a whirlwind month it has been since I last posted!  Training new employees, coordinating registration and travel to external conferences, meeting with management teams, serving on several committees, and putting out small fires in my wake have occupied the time of this manager of a department of one.  In the midst of all this insanity, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend Bob Pike’s Training and Performance Solutions Conference in Minneapolis.  Even though my work followed me from Georgia to the Land of a 10,000 Lakes (I guess you can never break free from the Internet – the electronic leash), I came ready to learn.  And when it was all over, I returned to my office feeling enriched and inspired. 

One of the projects that I’m working on is a series of Train-the-Trainer classes for our Librarian Is, who’ll serve as the resident trainers for each of our branches.  While I was in Minnesota, I attended Pike’s Train-the-Trainer 101 to see if there was any good content I could add to what I’ve already been building.  Janice Horne of the Pike Group was kind enough to share some seeds of knowledge that I’d like to plant here in the ether for our up-and-coming trainers:   

Raise the BAR with an Opener

v     B breaks preoccupation

v     A allows for networking

v     R relevant to the content 

BELIEVE in Yourself

v     B breathe into your nose, out of your mouth.

v     E energizing statements keep the class engaged.  Smile and gesticulate.

v     L love: come from a place of compassion toward your audience.

v     I interactivity puts the onus to learn on the class.

v     E eye contact with room is a must.  Find friendly faces in the room.

v     V visualize that your trainees will enjoy the class.

v     E eager to serve. 

Commit to ACT with a Closer

v     A action planning

v     C celebrates a job well done

v     T ties things together

Jay Turner

Jay Turner, Training Manager at Gwinnett County Public Library in Georgia, is responsible for all aspects of learning and development for a staff of 300+ employees. He considers himself a lifelong student, and delights in sharing his passion for learning with anyone willing to listen (much to their chagrin!) He is a library lifer, who began working in libraries as a teen and has worn almost every conceivable public services hat since. Jay’s diversity of experience helps him develop and deliver solutions that are creative, practical, and effective. He is a self-proclaimed information and tech junkie, who gets his fix by playing in his “digital sandbox” with new tools and neat ideas to make learning more accessible, more flexible, and more fun across any medium. He can be reached at jayturner[at]comcast.net.

Filed Under: Presentation Tips Tagged With:
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