Maurice Coleman
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Posts by Maurice Coleman
T is for Training 40 will be created tomorrow
Feb 25th
Tomorrow marks the 40th episode taping of the Library Training Podcast, T is for Training which is sponsored by the ALA Learning blog.
Detailed notes about the podcast are visible here: Trainers Assemble! (Up next on tomorrow’s T is for Training)
You can listen to past episodes of the podcast by clicking on the widget on the top right side of this page.
Thanks for listening!
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Loading ...5 Tips for Trainers to Prevent TechFail
Feb 4th
Rewind to Monday, February 1, 2010. It’s 11:45 am at the Harford Public Administration offices.
It’s a typical Monday morning: catching up on email, social media, mailboxes moving slowly toward zero. I prepare to jot down some notes for this post on the ALA Learning Blog. I open my trusty laptop and start banging away at some ideas about marketing your trainings and marketing yourself.
I take a break and find some video blogging resources on the web and >>>WHAMMO<<< surreptitious website redirection to an unknown Web site, leads to an extremely large popup ad that says:
YOU HAVE BEEN INFECTED…DOWNLOAD OUR PRODUCT NOW.
The background on the screen becomes an ugly green/yellow color and says:
YOU ARE INFECTED SAVE YOURSELF!
Well it said something like that making me think a zombie had entered the interwebs. I clicked the X to close the program, which of course installed the bleeping thing. I tried the faithful CTRL + ALT + DEL keys and discovered I lost Task Manager.
To sum it up, it’s a Monday morning and I lost my computer.
Yeah. Good times. The upshot is that my laptop has now been nuked. Wiped out. Toast.
But I am such a twenty-year plus veteran tech head, of course I saved my data on our network. Right? Well, no not quite everything. So that stuff is toast. I lost two projects in various stages of brilliance.
Did I mention that my brand new HTC Hero (an Android based smartphone), with 50+ apps and set up to my specs also decided to take a holiday to bricktown? Yeah, great day Monday was, so as we stand today (Thursday) the Hero had to get fully wiped–as did the laptop. But, I got an upgrade to Windows 7 so I have that working for me! Yeah me.
So, what does this have to do with training you ask?
There are so many aspects to creating and delivering training and presentations that inform and transform that sometimes we forget some essential training tech tricks that save our sanity. I like to think my bad day of tech inspired this list so that you may not have a day like my “Techfail” Monday.
Training Tech Tip One: If you need it, back it up.
Backing up your important data should be as automatic as the sun rising. You will always be thankful for backed up copies of your presentations, research, writing and photographs when your computer goes belly up–which it will when you least want it to do so. Make sure you do this on a regular basis. If you are a mobile trainer, you may want to back your stuff up in the cloud (as in applications and/or data that live on the web) and on a handy portable hard drive.
Now ask yourself: Do you have your vital training materials backed up? If so, could you reach them if you needed them while you are out of the office?
Training Tech Tip Two: Don’t cry over spilled anything.
Think of this as the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy tip. Don’t panic. Stuff happens. Everyone has had something unexpected happen while training. The room you booked for training is being used for a storeroom or extra office space. You will show up and no one remembers that you were coming that day, and no one is available for training, and can you come back next Thursday. Thanks. Goodbye.
Perhaps you will double confirm and show up at the wrong time, floor, building, street, town or state because someone left the trainer out of the loop. Perhaps the room is uncontrollably too hot/cold/moldy/drafty/sunny for you (and your participants) to be comfortable during four–days of training. Perhaps you are doing an all-day training on “Using the Internet for Beginners” and there is NO internet access whatsoever because of a fire early that morning. Roll with it and adapt. Remix on the fly.
Now ask yourself: Have you had a bad start to a training day followed by the one of your best trainings ever? Were you able to transform your tragedy into a learning opportunity for not only your learners but for yourself?
Training Tech Tip Three: Be prepared for technology to fail.
Being prepared for technology failure will save your bacon and make you look like the training deity that you are. Make sure that you could get across most if not all of your learning objectives without anything that uses electricity or batteries. Just you and your tools (voice, handouts, facilitation skills, adaptability, experience, flipcharts) and some time should be all you need to do your presentation in a pinch.
A very easy way is prepare for tech fail is to think about doing computer training without a computer. What would you say? How would you demonstrate certain skills or point things out? Would you want to have screen shots to hand out as back up plan? Detailed instructions on basic tasks participants could do back at their computers without you standing over them?
Now ask yourself: How would you deal with a technology failure while training? Would you be able to get across your training objectives without technology?
Training Tech Tip Four: If you think you need it, bring it.
Over the years, I’ve created my own technology kit for off site trainings.
The BGIMD Basic Training Technology Survival Kit©:
Computer stuff:
- One 50 Foot Network Cord
- One 25 foot Rotating Head Extension Cord
- One/Two Surge protectors
- 24 port hub
- Projector
- Laptop
- USB 8 in one kit
- USB hub
I also may throw in a small webcam and speakers if needed.
Boy Scout Stuff:
- Extra Batteries for Remote Keyboard/Mouse/Presentation Remote
- Flash Drive with Materials (if I am working outside of my home library system)
- Healthy Snack Food (a low blood sugar trainer is a mean trainer)
- Markers, pens and sometimes writing pads
- An extra shirt or two to adapt to the crowd
Ask yourself: Do you have your own “training kit”? What’s in it? What do you always seem to need but forget to carry to a training site?
Training Tech Tip Five: Back that cloud up!
The cloud (as in applications and/or data that live on the web) is a great tool to organize and back up your information. You can use tools in the cloud to create training curricula; share materials and resources; bookmarks and links; all accessible from any computer with an internet connection. You may be able to eliminate all of your handouts or point trainees to a site with all of your class information in one handy place.
Just remember to have a copy of whatever you put in the cloud somewhere in real life. If you use a wikispace to create your content and that wikispace gets attacked your data could be wiped out. A more likely scenario is that your favorite cloud resource is purchased/goes bankrupt and you no longer have access to the data you created. Would that throw a wrench into your plans? Sure it would.
Now ask yourself: Do you have up-to-date copies of all of your cloud materials? Are you ready if your cloud service goes offline?
I hope these five tips and the follow up questions help you become better trainers and help you avoid a technology disaster. Have you survived techfail in training? Share your stories and tips in the comments!
Maurice Coleman (ALA Learning Bio) is a Trainer for the Harford County (MD) Public Library, Speaker, Consultant and Organizer/Producer of T is for Training, the Library Training Podcast. He blogs when the mood hits at
The Chronicles of the (almost) Bald Technology Trainer and tweets a few times a day.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Maurice Coleman’s Getting to Know All About Me Post
Jan 11th
I am Maurice Coleman, one of the writers here at the ALA Learning blog and I have been tasked to both reintroduce myself to celebrate the (awesome!) redesign of the blog (thanks Lori!) Another challenge point is that I have to follow Peter Bromberg, again. (I followed him at Pres4Lib. Not easy since he is a great live speaker.)
So, how to do this you may ask?
The following questions were “crowd-sourced” during a few posts on the T is for Training (the library training podcast’s) Google group. A number of members of that group, which is pollinated by several ALA Learning writers, came up with this set of “getting to know you” questions. They are to be answered in one sentence. Let’s see how long that lasts. So Let’s Get This Party Started. Remember: Nothing Beats a Failure but a Try according to the Godfather, James Brown. The annotated version of this post will be up on my blog later this week.
1) Your One Sentence Bio
I am a tech/sports/tv/history geek that loves to educate, excite and stir up the status quo (when needed) in my position as the Technical Trainer for my public library system and as host of the T is for Training podcast who happens not to be a librarian. (Whew, that was hard to keep that to one sentence.)
2) Do you blog? If yes, how did you come up with your blog name?
Yep, but not a frequently as I once did. The name I came up with was The Chronicles of the (almost) Bald Technology Trainer As for the name: well it is a continuing story about a guy with not too much hair who shows people how do stuff with stuff. The Chronicles of the (almost) Bald Technology Trainer sounds better. This is how I started blogging. (Yeah, that “one sentence” thing lasted long.)
3) What is your professional background?
I have been training for over fifteen years starting with community development and neighborhood organizing training, then technology training in NY, then a variety of training my library system, focusing on technology and organizational development and culture immersion here in Maryland.
4) What training do you do? staff? patrons? types of classes?
My organized trainings are for staff, while I do “just in time” training for the public as needed. I teach both face to face and virtual classes, on computer skills, management skills, Microsoft Office products, social networking tools and organizational culture.
5) What training do you think is most important to libraries right now?
Teaching staff and public that our mission of connecting people to information does not change even though the vessel of delivery or what we deliver changes.
6) Where do you get your training?
Trial and Error, lots of experience and a Train the Trainer class back in 1994. Learning to accept failure as a learning experience was essential to developing what training and speaking skills I have today.
7) How do you keep up?
By depending on the kindness of my friends inside the computer via Twitter, Friendfeed, (both locked because of previous spam stupidity) some RSS feeds and list-servs, and outside the computer at meetings and conferences.
#8) What do you think are the biggest challenges libraries are facing right now?
Show the non library using public why libraries are a vital community resource on par with schools and public safety.
9) What are biggest challenges for trainers?
Balancing life and work.
10) What exciting things are you doing training wise?
At MPOW we are creating a Civility Through Customer Service training using blended synchronous, asynchronous, and face to face modules. The T is for Training podcast is in the middle of our intersession featuring interviews and a 27 question trainer questionnaire that may sound familiar to you, gentle reader.
11) What do you wish were you doing?
Living a life of leisure on a live aboard in the Caribbean snorkeling, diving and eating too much seafood.
12) What would you do with a badger?
Take it to Wisconsin.
13) What’s your favorite food?
How can you have ONE?!?
14) If you were stranded on an island, what one thing would you want to have with you?
By myself? A sturdy sailboat. With my wife? A sturdy sailboat.
15) Do you know what happens when a grasshopper kicks all the seeds
out of a pickle?
Yes, it claps with one hand.
16) Post it notes or the back of your hand?
Palm of hand.
17) Windows or Mac?
Windows with a mancrush on Linux.
18) Talk about one training moment you’d like to forget?
Like Mariano Rivera, I have a short memory of failure.
19) What’s your take on handshakes?
Solid, with a big hate of “wishy-washy” handshakes.
20) Global warming: yes or no?
If you call it Overall Global Climate Adjustment due to man made chemicals in the air, then yes.
21) How did you get into this line of work?
At a FPOW I started as a trainer helper (really an apprentice) then started to deliver then develop trainings.
22) What is the best part of your job?
Helping people “get it” and feel empowered.
23) Why should someone else follow in your shoes?
I get paid to teach and learn new stuff.
24) Sushi or hamburger?
Hamburger Sushi. Done and done.
25) LSW or ALA?
Actually, I like them both for different reasons.
26) What one person in the world do you want to have lunch with and why?
I would like to have lunch with my father.
27) What cell phone do you have and why?
A very dumb but rugged one for the moment. I want a smart phone but every service and phone had serious pluses and minuses. Presently trying to work out what I want to do.
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Promote Yourself: Get The Word Out About Staff Development!
Sep 22nd
Promotion. Marketing. Recognition.
You need to think about these actions all of the time.
Promotion. Marketing. Recognition.
These actions help you reach your audience.
Promotion. Marketing. Recognition.
These actions will help you make decision makers aware of the inherent value of training.
Promotion. Marketing. Recognition.
These actions are integral to your library’s success.
Quality staff development and training are essential to the success of any library organization. A library that does not have a staff willing to learn and a management supportive of that learning will fade into irrelevance. However, when the many libraries face hard budget choices, staff development is one area that libraries consider expendable or easy to downsize. These heartfelt decisions to eliminate a “luxury” can come back to haunt libraries in the long run with unsatisfied (and mandated) training needs of the remaining staff. To those left standing after difficult cuts are dealing with doing much more more with ever shrinking staff and resources. In these situations the expertise of a staff development professional is vital to helping staff use their resources with the utmost efficiency.
Making staff development visible by promoting training, marketing your services and providing real recognition to the value of training will go a long way to acknowledging the value of staff development/training and help ensure a training’s place in an library’s essential operations support plan.
How do you promote yourself?
The short answer: Talk about yourself, the work you do, and the things you know to people inside and outside of your library.
How do I do it?
Your staff from the top of your staff structure to the bottom of your staff structure should have some knowledge of the training and staff development opportunities you coordinate or provide for the organization. If they do not know anything about what you and your staff can do, they cannot start to recognize the value of what you do for the library.
Get out from behind your desk and teach/lead learning opportunities. These can take the form of may different types of learning/training situations including: formal face to face and virtual classes, prerecorded screencasts, “just-in-time” training, informal one-on-one projects, and open house Q and A sessions. I cannot stress enough how much also need to “be out on the floor” to be an effective trainer. Your visibility both inside and outside of a learning opportunity broadens the respect of your peers and will help you establish yourself as a vital and visible part of the library.
Do not limit yourself to promoting yourself and your library to your internal peers. Seek out engagements outside of your library to talk about what you do, how you do what you do and to ask and offer assistance to other staff development/training professionals.
Network with other library staff development folks either at the local/county/city level, regional level, statewide or national level. If there is no active group, start one. Maryland’s Staff Development group has been invaluable in developing new partnerships, new statewide learning opportunities and sharing each system’s staff development strengths and resources.
Seek out local/regional speaking and training opportunities do broaden your reach and knowledge. Find a great conference and go participate. Put yourself out there and meet your peers and learn from them. These conferences can be local unconference gatherings, local and statewide conferences and national conferences. If nothing meets your needs, create a local/state unconference which gives everyone a chance to be both presenter and attender and can be held for minimal financial outlay.
How do I market my workshops?
The short answer: Communicate what you have to offer both formally and informally to your supervisors/constituents. Develop word of mouth by delivering great and timely content. Seek feedback and incorporate as needed to serve your constituents.
How do I do it?
The task of letting your staff know about what you offer and how that benefits them is the hardest thing to do when marketing your workshops. However your library communicates (email, text, social networking, paper memo) should have a way to let your coworkers know what services you provide as a staff development professional. To connect staff development opportunities, you should get to know what workshops your staff want to attend and what they need to attend. You can use focus groups, surveys or regular meetings to get feedback from your staff on what they would like to know and use those opportunities to let staff know what staff development opportunities are already offered at your library.
You can also market yourself by delivering great, timely and fun workshops. Use those workshop attendees as a captive audience to bounce ideas and provide live feedback and a sense of your staff and how they view your workshops. You can bring in outside folks to share what they know to your library. Your connection to a different voice shows that you work is informed by the latest trends in librarianship and technology.
Perhaps the easiest way of marketing you and your staff development opportunities is to get out among the staff that you serve. Ask if they need help at their desks/work areas. Encourage an open door policy for staff tap your knowledge and skills. Your assistance builds trust and markets your skills via positive word of mouth.
Creating new staff development opportunities from staff suggestions accomplishes two things. First, you are responding to the direct needs of your staff which builds trust and good word of mouth. In addition, developing new staff development opportunities keeps you as a trainer refreshed and helps prevent workshop repetition and burnout.
How do I create recognition for my work?
The short answer: Ask for recognition to create recognition. Evaluate short and long term and change when needed. Seek outside engagements to boost recognition. Generate measurements and metrics to boost recognition of the value of your staff development opportunities.
How do I do it?
Don’t be shy about asking someone who appreciates the content in the workshop you offered or the assistance you provided to write a note to your supervisor. It can be difficult for a supervisor to keep track of all of the different learning sessions you provide both inside and outside of formal training. Direct feedback from the people you serve is a powerful card to hold in an evaluation cycle.
As a training and staff development professional, you should look at your workshops with immediate evaluations (using plus/delta aka keep and toss, and smile sheets) and over the long term (focus groups, anecdotes and surveys) to gauge and measure the change created by your work. Use these surveys to create data about your classes and to serve as a basis for reports if needed.
Another great metric is to measure the actual dollar value saved by your organization by providing training. Ask yourself some questions to begin capturing this data: How much staff time was saved because of proper training? How much staff time and travel money was saved by bringing training to your staff? How much money was saved by you sharing what you learned at a conference with your staff providing them the information from a conference without every staff member paying to attend? This is just getting “return on investment” data which is a powerful advocacy tool when discussing staff development’s value to a library.
Why should you become your best cheerleader?
You are the best person to advocate for the role of staff development in your library. Don’t expect or assume anyone else will advocate for you.
Just because you provide some nebulous value to an organization, that value is diminished without some serious promotion of what you do, marketing of your staff development encounters and recognition for the role they play withing any library.
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Mohandas Gandhi
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...T is for Training — A New Podcast about — Training!
Sep 23rd
by Maurice Coleman, Technical Trainer at Harford County (MD) Public Library and blogger at The Chronicles of the (almost) Bald Technology Trainer
I am pleased to announce to the all in the ALA CE Buzz/CLENE community a new podcast called T is for Training. UPDATE: Here is the link to the Episode 2: How I Stumbled Into Training mp3.
The podcast was started because I did not find a podcast that spoke to me or my colleagues about training issues with a library slant. In fact, it found almost nothing out in the podcasting world there that talked about training at all.
So, with the encouragement of some library cohorts, I started the podcast T is for Training.
Episode 2 is coming up on Friday September 26th at 2 pm Eastern and we would love to have you listen live or subscribe to our feed. For those into social networking, we have a delicious tag (tisfortraining,) a FriendFeed page, a Facebook Page and a LinkedIn Group. Network with your fellow trainers at any of these sites.
Here is what we talked about on the first episode:
Dealing with Information Overload (Article by Sarah Houghton-Jan) ;
What is a/your personal learning environment? (Article) and Dealing with your staff personal training needs;
What tools do you use to transfer your small burst/Just in Time Trainings?
What kinds of skills do we need to teach in library school to encourage quality training?
The second episode’s talking points like this:
Undercover Training: How do you handle those “outside of your system” training opportunities;
Do you want to go to ALA? Or CIL or LITA?
Qualify and Certify: Trainer Certifications, Qualifications and Organizations.
We also will begin each show with introductions and close the show, as time permits, with From the Back Room a space to find support and ask for help. The posts after each episode will be annotated with links to resources discussed in the podcast. I want this podcast to be dedicated but not obsessed with training in libraries.
So please join us live, on our feed or on the blog! See you there!
Special thanks to Peter Bromberg, at South Jersey Regional Library Cooperative (SJRLC), for extending the invitation to talk with all of you about T is for Training.
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