Posts tagged ALA Learning
8 Easy Ways to Get Connected With ALA Learning
Feb 1st
I hope you enjoyed getting to know the ALA Learning authors these past few weeks. Tomorrow we return to our regularly scheduled posts bringing you the best training and learning news, information, best practices, and thoughtful discussion.
Today I’d like to share some additional ways for you to get connected with ALA Learning, the official blog of the Learning Round Table of the American Library Association.
- Comment and join the discussion on our posts.
- Become a fan on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ALALearning
- Join our Linked In Group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=2700921&trk=anet_ug_hm
- Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ALALearning
- Subscribe to our posts or news by RSS or email: http://alalearning.org/subscription-options/
- Join the Learning Round Table Email List: http://alalearning.org/about-the-learning-round-table/email-discussion-lists/
- Become a Learning Round Table Member–Only $20 on top of your ALA Membership: http://alalearning.org/join/
- Plan to join us for one of our events at PLA, ALA Annual, or ALA Midwinter.
As always feel free to comment and contribute to the discussion. If you have a topic to suggest for a post drop me (or any of the authors) a line at webmaster@alalearning.org.
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Loading ...Paul Signorelli’s “Getting To Know Me” Post
Jan 19th
1. Your One Sentence Bio
I was born; have been deeply immersed in writing, training-teaching-learning, and working with libraries and nonprofit organizations for many years; am honored to sometimes be mistaken for ALA Learning colleague Peter Bromberg when the two of us are lucky enough to be on Maurice Coleman’s T is for Training podcasts at the same; and plan to die someday—which, I believe, covers all bases.
2. Do you blog? If yes, how did you come up with your blog name?
You’ll find me blogging here at ALA Learning and at Building Creative Bridges. I came up with the name because “Librarian In Black,” “Library Trainer,” and “(almost) Bald Trainer” were already taken by writers better than I’ll ever be, and Building Creative Bridges seemed like a good way to describe what I hoped to accomplish through the blog and everything else I’m doing.
3. What is your professional background?
As far as I can tell, I’ve worked for newspapers, magazines, a couple of schools in Japan, the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the San Francisco Public Library system, and with a variety of other groups and organizations, but if you’ve heard differently, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
4. What training do you do? staff? patrons? types of classes?
My position as Director, Volunteer Services & Staff Training for the San Francisco Public Library system had me providing orientations, software introductions and updates, and other learning opportunities for staff and volunteers; current training-teaching-learning efforts include writing e-learning courses for Infopeople and LE@D (Lifelong Education @ Desktop)–http://www.leadonline.info/–and conducting workshops at professional conferences.
5. What training do you think is most important to libraries right now?
We need to be combining sessions on practical matters (software upgrades, customer service, leadership and collaboration skills, conflict resolution, health and safety issues) with inspirational/visionary/long-term matters (how to continue serving library members and guests on site and online, maintaining libraries as on-site and online community centers, becoming collaborators with members of the communities we serve rather than one-way providers of information and services).
6. Where do you get your training?
For training-learning, I try everything I can think of, including conversations with colleagues; on-site and online workshops and courses; blogs/RSS feeds; books; journals, magazines, and newspapers; webinars; conferences; speakers at ASTD (American Society for Training & Development) and ALA (American Library Association) meetings and conferences—and I’m sure that’s only about half the list.
7. How do you keep up?
Keep up?
8. What do you think are the biggest challenges libraries are facing
right now?
One of the many large challenges is to recognize and respond to their increasingly huge role in being learning centers for their local and online communities while not abandoning any of the important and life-changing roles their members and guests still expect them to fulfill.
9. What are biggest challenges for trainers?
All too often, we have training-teaching-learning as part of our job rather than as the entire focus of our job, which leads to lots of half-finished projects, lots of stress for everyone, and less than optimum learning opportunities; focusing on our own continuing education and our primary roles as workplace learning and performance providers might be the best lesson-by-example that we can provide to colleagues whose workplace focus is equally divided to their own detriment and the detriment of those they serve.
10. What exciting things are you doing training wise?
Trying to be creative face-to-face and online in the way I respond to learners’ needs: delivering a synchronous online learning opportunity through live Google Chat, for example, was a fun distance-learning experiment with a University of Nevada, Las Vegas colleague and his class in October 2009.
11. What do you wish you were doing?
Writing; oh, wait, I am writing.
12. What would you do with a badger?
Teach it to use Google Chat so it could more effectively participate in synchronous online learning opportunities.
13. What’s your favorite food?
Pizza. Purchased somewhere in NY, NJ or the Philly area. If you’re not buying pizza in one of these geographic areas it’s not really pizza. Sorry, it’s not. (OK, an exception for Chicago deep-dish. As long as you qualify it.)
14. If you were stranded on an island, what one thing would you want
to have with you?
A confirmed flight back to the mainland.
15. Do you know what happens when a grasshopper kicks all the seeds
out of a pickle?
I live in San Francisco; can someone tell me what a grasshopper is?
16. Post it notes or the back of your hand?
No, thanks.
17. Windows or Mac?
OK, but definitely not on the first date.
18. Talk about one training moment you’d like to forget?
Can’t remember; must be an occupational hazzard since at least one other ALA Learning colleague has responded similarly.
19. What’s your take on handshakes?
A handshake is certainly a pleasant way to avoid open warfare in a learning environment.
20. Global warming: yes or no?
Best response I’ve seen is Jill Sobule’s “happy song about global warming”; who am I to argue?
21. How did you get into this line of work?
My supervisor at the time told me I had to take over the organization’s staff training program if I was going to keep my job; I found that to be tremendously motivating.
22. What is the best part of your job?
Being part of what ASTD refers to as the effort to “create a world that works better.”
23. Why should someone else follow in your shoes?
This question reminds me of a story from Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidism, which I will now paraphrase to the best of my recollection. The gist of it: Samuel, a very devout man who is struggling to be good in the eyes of the Lord, approaches the Rabbi and asks, “Rabbi, should I try to be more like Moses or more like Abraham?” The Rabbi replies, “Rather than trying to be more like Moses, or more like Abraham, the Lord would be pleased if you tried to be more like Samuel.” And that’s all I have to say about that.
24. Sushi or hamburger?
Depends on who is asking.
N.B.: Special thanks to Peter Bromberg for allowing me to insert, verbatim, his answers to questions #13 and #23 here. I figured if I couldn’t match his responses for cleverness, I might as well just outright steal them and see if I could further confuse colleagues about which of us is speaking (please see response to question #1, above).
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Working With and For Each Other
Dec 14th
ALA Learning Round Table friend and blogger Maurice Coleman was right on target, as usual, with the first of two online discussions about what we’ve gained through workplace learning and performance offerings this year. (The second of the two discussions, under the auspices of Coleman’s ongoing T Is For Training biweekly sessions for those interested and/or involved in library training programs, is scheduled for Friday, December 18, 2009 at 2 p.m. EST/11 a.m. PST and will remain archived online for those who cannot attend.)
Coleman, like many who contribute to the ALA Learning Round Table and make it a first-rate resource for trainer-teacher-learners, offers an antidote to the isolation trainers sometimes experience. Through T Is For Training sessions, he provides a chance for trainers to talk with, listen to, and become familiar with colleagues from library training programs all over the country; share best practices and discuss why some practices are far from the best; contribute to a growing repository of training materials maintained on Delicious by T IS for Training participants; and have some fun while engaged in all the previously listed endeavors—all while becoming familiar, through practice, with how online communities develop and interact effectively.
The payoff is significant. Struggling with a training problem? So are others, and they can offer suggestions as well as useful resources so you don’t have to solve the problem yourself. Wishing you were feeling a bit more creative in resolving workplace learning and performance issues screaming for your attention? T Is For Training participants have been there, too, and can, with the sense of humor they deeply cherish, rekindle the creative sparks you thought had vanished. Looking for colleagues willing and able to commiserate, collaborate, and show you how they have already done what you are trying to do? They’re available, willing, and able because they understand that in giving, they also are receiving in ways they often can’t anticipate.
Even more significant is the reminder that one great resource often leads to another. The list of regular participants—“The Usual Suspects” on the left-hand side of the T Is For Training page— serves as a reminder that there is a tremendous amount of overlap between the T Is For Training group and those of us who are also involved in the ALA Learning Round Table. If you want to see what others are writing, you’ll find articles from those usual suspects on individual blogs as well as on a variety of engaging group blogs.
The more we explore, the more we discover—including the revelation that colleagues who at one time appeared beyond our reach are actually quite accessible. Participate in T If For Training or become engaged in the ALA Learning Round Table, and you’ll discover that first-rate samples of organizational learning plans are just an e-mail or phone call away from Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Learning & Development Coordinator Lori Reed. Or that an E-Learning Preparedness Checklist is available from Gwinnett County Public Library Training Manager Jay Turner. Or that Huntsville-Madison County Public Library Staff Training and Development Coordinator Marianne Lenox has produced the equivalent of a semester-long course on learning theory and resources in a single article here on the Learning Round Table blog. Or that WebJunction Learning & Curriculum Developer Betha Gutsche has edited the highly detailed Competency Index for the Library Field.
We have, as the recent T Is For Training episode reminded us, learned a lot in 2009. And one of the most important lessons is that by participating in online discussions, or responding to a blog posting, or engaging in a Google Chat or Google Talk or Skype interaction, or simply making the time to pick up the phone and call a colleague for assistance, we are working with and for each other on behalf of all we serve.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Training, Planning, and Collaborating to Build the Future
Oct 11th
Trainer-teacher-learners are by nature forward-thinking and collaborative. There is no reason, after all, to invest time, money, energy, and other precious resources into helping others learn if we don’t believe there will be a payoff for everyone involved.
It’s no surprise, therefore, to see that local, regional, and national groups of trainers are providing replicable examples of how to produce magnificent results with a modicum of effort even during the challenging times we’re facing. Members of the American Library Association (ALA) Learning Round Table, for example produced two sell-out training workshops at the 2009 ALA Conference in Chicago this summer while other groups were struggling to attract minimal audiences; we also once again presented a first-rate “training showcase” open free of charge to our colleagues throughout ALA.
Training and other professional groups around the world, undaunted by the difficulty of attracting participants, are producing “future of library” conferences and panel discussions to inspire like-minded colleagues. ALA itself, this summer, had a standing-room-only panel discussion on the topic. The University of Arizona has sponsored conferences for several years. The Colorado Association of Libraries, Queensland (Australia) Department of Education and Training, and Southeast Florida Library Information Network have all recently been involved in future of library conference planning, and a “Future of Libraries within the Framework of Sustainable Development” was held on the island of Guadeloupe in June 2009.
An earlier article for this blog detailed the successes achieved by trainers in the Mt. Diablo Chapter of the American Society for Training & Development in attracting and retaining new members; at the heart of the success were the collaborative efforts of a few of us who improved the Chapter’s speaker series so it provided effective training for the trainers it is meant to serve.
Similar successes have come from another informal group of trainers meeting in the San Francisco Bay Area: the Pacific Library Partnership Staff Development Committee (formerly the Library Staff Development Committee of the Greater Bay Area). Seeing how this group operates suggests that we are far from living in a protracted dark age for training in spite of training-budget cutbacks.
The 10 to 12 core members of the group, in planning our fifth annual future of libraries conference this year, recognized early in our planning process that attracting attendees would be a challenge, so we made some key decisions. We would continue to rely on the individual skills of our planning group to use available resources—attracting an enthusiastic speaker whom we knew we could afford, enticing local presenters who were willing to volunteer their time to be part of what we were developing, relying on a combination of a first-rate publicist on our committee and additional well coordinated marketing efforts undertaken by other members of the committees to do much more than we have done before in reaching prospective paid attendees—without letting any part of the process become overwhelming for any individual member of the planning group.
A key to our continuing successes—and this year’s event was another profitable endeavor even though attendance was, as anticipated, considerably lower than it has been in better times: approximately 100 people compared to the sell-out audiences of 220 we have had in previous years—is that we employ a combination of well defined roles and a willingness to step in wherever needed as our time allows.
As is the case with every successful group I work with, I see an amazing ability for my colleagues in this training group to accomplish a lot in very little time (one face-to-face meeting every other month), combine skills to attain a well establish goal (producing conferences and other training events with real value to the people who attend them), and donate a very limited number of hours of work (five to 10) between each meeting so the projects stay on track. If we see that we need to increase our marketing and other promotional endeavors, we coordinate our efforts to combine personal contact, email messages, and the use of listservs to reach our audience. If we discover that we’re not attracting the presenters whom we need, we continue sharing resources by phone, email, or face to face until we have a winning package.
The result is that we continually produce events we’re proud of offering—events which inspire our audiences with useful and easily adapted ideas they can apply when they return to work. And we have fun—which, I believe, is the real future of libraries, training groups, and everyone we touch through all the work we do. For by showing others how easy it can be to achieve significant and long-last goals, we are offering the best we have to offer as trainer-teacher-learners.
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