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Learning 2010: The Continuing Power of Collaboration

December 31, 2010 By

Looking back at what we learned this year produces some interesting conclusions—not the least of which is that it wasn’t so much a year of trying to create something entirely new, but, rather, a time to step back long enough to survey what surrounded us and learn more effectively how to use the collaborative resources we’ve been given: wikis. Shared document tools including Google Docs and Dropbox that are helping us incorporate cloud computing into our training-teaching-learning efforts. Web-conferencing tools ranging from WebEx, Dimdim, and TalkShoe to Google Talk and Skype for the delivery of just-in-time learning. And LinkedIn discussion groups and Twitter as a way of seeking and exchanging information that contributed to more effective learning for everyone involved rather than as a way to simply tell others where we were sitting and drinking coffee or waiting for a bus to arrive.

What remains at the heart of this learning process is the power of collaboration face to face as well as online, and what made 2010 so fruitful for so many of us was the way we managed to work together in a variety of often overlapping settings to the benefit of learners and our learning colleagues. If you haven’t yet hopped on the train, let’s take a ride together to see how these tools and how collaboration have been serving us and may well end up serving us even more effectively in the months and years to come.

The ALA Learning Round Table provides a natural starting point. In addition to providing an ongoing collaborative forum for face-to-face exchanges at American Library Association conferences to promote and support effective learning opportunities for members and prospective members, it has been developing a wiki where trainers can post as well as seek resources developed by their colleagues. The Round Table’s monthly online meetings further advance its mission of helping trainer-teacher-learners collaborate to produce resources and results that we would otherwise not enjoy. And ALA Learning—the blog where this piece is being posted—not only provides us impetus to collaborate through sharing articles but also contributes to the larger goal of drawing together trainers who are working within or working side by side with libraries rather than leaving all those one-person training offices and libraries without formal training programs in a frustrated state of isolation.

Another productive community of learners where collaboration is the order of the day is Maurice Coleman’s biweekly online T is for Training discussions. Interested regulars—the “usual suspects”—and guests frequently interact during these online hour-long free-ranging conversations via Talkshoe on a variety of topics of interest and importance to those involved in workplace learning and performance, and those discussions helped open doors this year to routes of exploration such as the possibility of helping promote the development of libraries as social learning centers. They also led to additional collaborations including the webinar Maurice and I designed and delivered in October 2010 to more than 400 participants for WebJunction—another great collaborative forum for trainer-teacher-learners in libraries. All of these tools and resources are easy to access and/or use, and they are well worth considering for workplace learning and performance programs.

The American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) remains yet another gathering place at the local, regional, and national levels face to face as well as online for many of us. Opportunities for productive collaborations abound at many levels: through membership on Chapter boards and collaboration at national conferences, through learning opportunities provided via webinars, through postings on LinkedIn discussion groups, and through groups including the National Advisors for Chapters which meet face to face and use a variety of online tools and posted online documents to do business throughout the year.

My own familiarity and comfort with collaboration via wikis took a quantum leap this fall when I was accepted onto the New Media Consortium’s 2011 Horizon Report Advisory Board; all 40 of us from countries all over the world did all our work asynchronously, online, via the wiki which leads to completion of the report; among the pleasant surprises, given the small number of people involved in this worldwide project, was the discovery that ALA Learning colleague Lauren Pressley was part of the group.

If anyone remains unsold on the powerful benefits provided by collaboration and the use of the social networking tools we’ve been exploring, Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner’s new release, The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media, may prove to be the tipping point. As James Surowiecki notes in The Wisdom of Crowds, those who engage in collaborations are often the most prolific and successful at what they do (pp. 162-163). And that, of course, remains a lesson well worth absorbing anytime—not solely in the year just ending.
N.B.: Those interested in exploring the theme of collaboration through a variety of tools and other resources will find plenty of options in “Community and Collaboration in an Onsite-Online World: An Annotated Bibliography.”

Paul Signorelli

Paul Signorelli is a writer, trainer, presenter, and consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He works with clients to successfully facilitate the introduction of new technology into organizations; prepares and presents webinars and other online and onsite learning opportunities for a variety of clients; is actively involved in ALA and ASTD; continues to prepare articles for "American Libraries," the eLearning Guild's "Learning Solutions Magazine," and other publications; and co-wrote "Workplace Learning & Leadership" with Lori Reed for ALA editions. Paul can be reached at paul@paulsignorelli.com.

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Creating “Literary Salons” for Trainer-Teacher-Learners

July 16, 2008 By

An interesting thing is happening in the San Francisco East Bay area: a local chapter of the American Society for Training & Development is becoming the trainer-teacher-learner’s version of a literary salon, and its community of members has increased by nearly 33 percent (from 62 to 82 members) in less than six months.

 

Here’s how it’s evolving: Three of us who work on programming for the ASTD Mt. Diablo Chapter’s monthly two-hour dinner meetings at the Crow Canyon Country Club in Danville decided to build off of the Chapter’s tradition of bringing in the best available speakers on the interrelated topics of training, leadership, and human resources; we encouraged presenters to use engaging, cutting-edge presentation styles while playing off of the camaraderie which existed within the small group of 10 or 15 repeat attendees.

 

Chapter member Steven Cerri, presenting on the topic “Why Most Training Isn’t Sticky and What to Do About It” at the Chapter’s April meeting, didn’t just cover the topic effectively; he frequently called attention to the techniques he was using and, as a result, kept the event lively, personal, and sticky for the audience he was addressing. And that’s when the magic began: the regulars had never been shy about engaging speakers and each other throughout the monthly formal presentations, but they upped the ante—and made the experience memorable—by being part of the discussion rather than sitting back, listening passively, and politely asking questions while Steven stood before them. And when the hour-long formal program was over, people didn’t quickly empty the room. The discussion continued informally for at least another half hour.

 

Daren Blonski, VP of Leadership Development for Sonoma Learning Systems, inspired an equally engaging exchange the following month on the theme of what trainers need to know to function effectively in multigenerational workplaces. We worked together, as he prepared his PowerPoint slides, to incorporate a Cliff Atkinson Beyond Bullet Points style to his presentation—creating a visual narrative flow from slide to slide without using much text. The level of engagement between Daren and the other participants—it would be inaccurate and unfair to refer to them as an “audience” in this context—was electric. Daren didn’t even use all the slides he had prepared; he took advantage of the lively interactions to cover the material, and the discussion continued informally for almost 45 minutes after the monthly meeting was formally adjourned.

 

Provokare Presentations Founder Roberto Giannicola, at the Chapter’s June meeting, took the process over the top. With visually stimulating slides, a puckishly engaging sense of humor, and a presentation virtually free of bullet points (except when he was using them to show how ineffective they can be), he set an enormously high bar for all presenters who will follow him at Mt. Diablo Chapter dinner meetings. He facilitated a very lively discussion on how the combination of  imagery and storytelling creates effective learning experiences, and it was again with reticence that everyone parted ways nearly an hour after the meeting ended.

 

It hasn’t taken long for the word to spread. That small community of regulars in March has quickly expanded so that the Chapter’s meeting last night, featuring ASTD Senior Chapter Coach Scott Wilson (based in Washington, D.C., but traveling under the auspices of ASTD to serve as keynote speaker for the event), drew 32 participants—nearly half of them first-time attendees, and two of them returning after at least a few years away from the Chapter. One after another, they confirmed that they were drawn to Scott’s presentation on “Current Reports and Best Training Practices from ASTD’s National Office” because colleagues have been telling them about the “incredible energy” that is coming out of the Mt. Diablo Chapter presentations and discussions. And, of course, it was no surprise to find two people standing outside in that warm summer evening weather 90 minutes after Scott’s formal presentation ended last night. Which suggests that we may not be far from seeing after-meeting discussions which exceed the two-hour time frame for the formal dinners and presentations themselves.

 

For more information about the Chapter’s activities, please visit its website.

Paul Signorelli

Paul Signorelli is a writer, trainer, presenter, and consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He works with clients to successfully facilitate the introduction of new technology into organizations; prepares and presents webinars and other online and onsite learning opportunities for a variety of clients; is actively involved in ALA and ASTD; continues to prepare articles for "American Libraries," the eLearning Guild's "Learning Solutions Magazine," and other publications; and co-wrote "Workplace Learning & Leadership" with Lori Reed for ALA editions. Paul can be reached at paul@paulsignorelli.com.

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Community, Training-Teaching-Learning, and CLENE

July 10, 2008 By

I’m not part of WebGen: I didn’t grow up wired, online, and connected to the world 24/7, and I do appreciate moments as well as hours of solitude. But, like most people who are honest about what is most important to them, I also value, crave, and am nurtured by community. So being in Anaheim for the annual American Library Association (ALA) conference earlier this month and spending every moment I could with colleagues in the library training-teaching-learning community provided lots of food for thought on the theme of what makes communities thrive when the Web 2.0 world and the face-to-face world of conferences with thousands of onsite participants converge.

 

The loosely knit community of trainer-teacher-learners who work in libraries throughout the United States—and who often feel incredibly isolated from each other, as evidenced by exchanges in the LibraryLearning Google Group started by Lori Reed less than a month ago—suddenly seems incredibly intimate and welcoming when you attend an American Library Association conference.

 

The central point of this convergence, for me, is my membership and increasing participation in CLENE—the Continuing Library Education and Networking Exchange (CLENE) training group. Right behind it are the overlapping connections resulting from the joint memberships and associations many of us seem to share through our affiliations with groups like Infopeople and the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD), and the online community of bloggers who so frequently and effectively build a sense of community where none might otherwise be found.

 

Although there were more than 20,000 library staff members in Anaheim for the annual conference, those of us interested in training-teaching-learning kept running into each other everywhere we went, and a large part of it was due to the community we’ve created through CLENE and its series of workshops; meetings; discussions; and its training showcase.

 

The group, like Infopeople, is fluid rather than rigidly structured. It’s welcoming. And it’s like being part of a large family where somebody is always bringing someone else home for dinner without bothering to phone ahead, knowing that there somehow will be enough food for everyone so no one will go to bed hungry that night. It’s the kind of group where everyone around the table jumps into the conversation, and everybody goes away enriched. It’s the kind of group where you’ll find the same sort of arguments and hurt feelings that come up whenever people let their guards down and say what they’re thinking, but we know that we’re not going to let the arguments and hard feelings go unacknowledged or unresolved. The result is that we’re always ready to get together again as soon as we possibly can to eat and talk some more.

 

And when we part ways, there’s already that numbing twinge of implied loss as we realize we probably won’t see each other again for at least six months—until we reconvene for the next conference which brings us all together. But what remains is the strength of collegial exchanges and the warmth we manage to create through a community of learning which benefits all of us and all we touch.

 

For more information about CLENE and how to join the group, please follow this link.

Paul Signorelli

Paul Signorelli is a writer, trainer, presenter, and consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He works with clients to successfully facilitate the introduction of new technology into organizations; prepares and presents webinars and other online and onsite learning opportunities for a variety of clients; is actively involved in ALA and ASTD; continues to prepare articles for "American Libraries," the eLearning Guild's "Learning Solutions Magazine," and other publications; and co-wrote "Workplace Learning & Leadership" with Lori Reed for ALA editions. Paul can be reached at paul@paulsignorelli.com.

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