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Posts tagged Peter Bromberg
Learning Round Table Programs, Events, Battledecks at ALA Annual
Jun 9th
The Learning Round Table has something for everyone at the ALA Annual Conference this year. The following is a list of programs, meetings, and events.
Also note the icons next to each event. These icons have links that will download the program as an appointment to your calendar. If the icon does not work, try right clicking and saving the .ics file before opening it. We also have a flyer that you can print and bring with you (click the image below to download).
Friday, June 25
Beyond Face to Face: New Methods for Staff Training
8:30am-12pm 
Renaissance Hotel Congressional Hall C
Limited time and busted budgets make it increasingly difficult for library staff to leave their buildings to attend training events. Maverick library trainer Jay Turner along with T is for Training host Maurice Coleman and instructional designer Mary Beth Faccioli will demonstrate how to engage learners with effective and innovative uses of e-learning. Walk away from this pre-conference knowing how to: Identify free and cost-effective resources for presenting e-learning; Apply best practices in instructional design to e-learning; Recognize technical constraints in publishing e-content. Tickets Onsite: $150. Event Code: LEA1.
Saturday, June 26
Open Board Meeting I 
8am-12pm
WCC-159 A/B
Our Board meetings are open to anyone interested in the activities, mission and work of the Learning Round Table. We discuss both old and new business, review goals, strategize and plan for the future, plot out committee work and have fun, too. Join us for all or part of our two meetings. We’d love to meet you!
Building with Competencies
1:30-3:30pm
Grand Hyatt Constitution A
Once you’ve determined the competencies needed by your staff, what next? Competencies are building blocks—there are a variety of constructions to be built with them for guiding staff training, recruitment, and other personnel strategies. Join us as we explore strategies and case studies of competency based staff development efforts. Presented by Betha Gutsche and Sandra Smith.
Sunday, June 27
Library Trainers as Leaders
10:30 am-12pm
WCC-201
Library staff development programs are in a state of flux. It is no longer enough for administrators to tell staff what training to offer. Workplace learning and performance professionals need to be part of the strategic planning of the organization. This interactive session will include audience participation and sharing of best practices as to how library trainers can step up their leadership skills and get a place at the library strategic planning table. Facilitated by Paul Signorelli with panelists Maurice Coleman, Sandra Smith and Louise Whitaker.
Training Showcase: Best Practices in Training, Staff Development & Library Continuing Education
1:30-3:30pm
WCC-Ballroom
The training showcase is a poster session type of program celebrating innovative continuing education, staff development, and training initiatives in all types of libraries and library organizations. Participants present best practices from their organization or institution.
Membership Pavilion Learning Round Table Lightning Talk
3:30-3:45pm
Exhibit Hall
Monday, June 28
Open Board Meeting II
10:30 am-12pm
WCC-156
Our Board meetings are open to anyone interested in the activities, mission and work of the Learning Round Table. We discuss both old and new business, review goals, strategize and plan for the future, plot out committee work and have fun, too. Join us for all or part of our two meetings. We’d love to meet you!
Staff Development Discussion
1:30-3:30pm
WCC-143A
This discussion is a great energizer for those new to staff development as well as for those who’ve been doing it for years. Come early and stay for the raffle at the end of the program.
Battledecks: The ALA Rumble Royale
5:30-7pm
WCC-103A
Battledecks represent the ultimate challenge for public speakers as they are challenged to give a coherent presentation based on hand-selected, seemingly unrelated slides that they see for the very first time live on stage. This competition, often referred to as “PowerPoint Karaoke,” will see our brave and willing participants compete for the glory of being crowned ALA’s reigning Battledecks champion. The participants will face judgment from a panel of four judges, with the winner to be determined based on a variety of criteria and general overall awesomeness. Hilarity, along with some learning, is guaranteed for all!
Defenders of a title:
Michael Porter(Battledecks champion from Internet Librarian 2009)
Andromeda Yelton (Battledecks co-champion from ALA MW 2010)
JP Procaro (Battledecks Champ from Pres4Lib)
Bobbi Newman (Battledecks co-champion from ALA MW 2010)
Contenders for the title:
Jason Griffey
Buffy Hamilton
Lisa Carlucci Thomas
John Chrastka
George Needham
Judges:
Peter Bromberg
Julie Strange
Maurice Coleman
David Lee King
Jenny Levine
Emcee: Janie Hermann
Timekeeper/Vanna White: Patrick Sweeney
Slidemakers: Alice Yucht, Patrick Sweeney, Janie Hermann, Jaime Corris Hammond, Andy Woodworth and anyone else who volunteers.
Event and Prizes sponsored by American Libraries and The Learning Round Table.
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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 ...Tipping Points and Cows
Mar 31st
It’s not as if trainer-teacher-learners—a group which includes nearly anyone currently affiliated with or using libraries—have any extra time on our hands. There are mornings when the act of opening our eyes and glancing at our to-do lists is enough to make us want to dive back under our blankets, close our eyes, and hope that visions of things to be done will somehow miraculously vanish before we move out of the comfort of our beds.
That, however, didn’t stop several of us from immediately rising to the challenge posed by our fellow CE Buzz blogger Peter Bromberg this morning when he noted–in much kinder and gentler words than I’m using here–that we’ve become somewhat slothful about keeping up our commitment to contribute to CE Buzz and the community of learnersit represents. In asking us whether we wanted to continue as contributors and, more importantly, whether we were willing to commit to a fairly easy schedule of posting articles so that fresh content appears regularly, Peter inadvertently reminded us why we were so attracted to the site initially.
My immediate reaction was to call Peter; discuss what we’re doing and what we might be doing better; and promise that I would return sooner than later. Excited and encouraged by what we know will come of this, we both noted that there seems to be a rising wave of energy and excitement around the work CLENE is currently doing and the level of commitment CLENE members bring to the organization and to our parent organization, the American Library Association.
The blog, for many of us, is both an extension and an integral part of what CLENE provides and inspires—a 21st-century physical and online variation of the Third Place which Ray Oldenburg, inThe Great Good Place, suggested we need in addition to home and workplace. It should and deserves to be nurtured. And it’s only going to grow if those of us who are committed to contributing to it meet our commitments, and those of you who are drawn into this community of trainer-teacher-learners become active participants through your responses and engagement with all that CLENE and CE Buzz can offer.
“It feels as if we’re right at a tipping point,” Peter commented, and I began to laugh, for even though I recognized the term “tipping point” as coming from Malcolm Gladwell’s book which uses the term as its title, my mind—in equal states of exhaustion and hyper-caffeination—began to latch onto the word “tipping,” picture things being tipped, and—for no reason I can offer other than my penchant for always enjoying word and visual playfulness—started thinking about things being tipped over. Like a glass of wine. Or a glass of milk. Or, in the oft-cited image which must hearken back to our rural roots and people with too much time on their hands, cows—as in “cow-tipping.”
Now please understand that neither Peter nor I are suggesting that we’re going to pursue cow-tipping as a learning technique or a fundraising effort on behalf of CLENE or any of its activities under the auspices of the American Library Association. (I frankly doubt that ALA and its incoming president, Camila Alire, would be very supportive of this kind of endeavor.) On the other hand, the trainer-teacher-learner in me did spend a little time this afternoon with Wikipedia and other sources to learn more about the alleged practice of cow-tipping and read the wikipedians’ report that “According to popular belief, cows can easily be pushed over without much force because they are slow-moving, slow-witted and weak-legged, have a high center of gravity and sleep standing up. Numerous publications have debunked cow-tipping as a myth. Cows do not sleep standing up, nor do their knees lock, making the act of cow-tipping impossible.” (See, you actually learned something by staying with me this far into the blog.)
Please, furthermore, don’t expect us to suggest that current efforts to find a new look and logo for CLENE’s materials might somehow involve the image of a cow being tipped over while engaged in learning—at least not unless other CLENE members and ALA’s wonderful membership director, John Chrastka, want to make a connection I’m not willing to make right now. (No, John, I won’t hold my breath waiting for you to take the lead on this one.) But do understand that if we could take the time it took to have that conversation this morning and giggle over improbable images and apparently non-existent pastimes, we and our fellow CE Buzzers certainly can carve out the time to continue thinking out loud here on the blog in the hope that some of the more serious ideas and practices which we document and propose will somehow contribute, overall, to the improvement of the training-teaching-learning arena which we all so clearly cherish. And we hope you’ll join us here on the blog, as well as in CLENE, as we continue promoting creativity and innovation in workplace learning and performance to the benefit of libraries and all we serve.
For more information about CLENE and how to join the group, please follow this link.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Trainers Dreaming
Feb 17th
If this were the early twentieth century, we might be sitting in a Parisian Left-Bank café. If this were the late twentieth century, we might be sitting in Caffè Puccini in San Francisco’s North Beach District—as many still are. But the early twenty-first century has swept us up, and we’re finding new places to meet and talk and share ideas. And dream.
Which is exactly what happened in the OPAL (Online Programming for All Libraries) Auditorium yesterday when Tom Peters interviewed Michelle Boule, a librarian, blogger (writing under the name “Jane” in “A Wandering Eyre”), Infopeople instructor, and mother-to-be. The session, part of OPAL’s “Casual Conversations” series, was not so much the sort of session to be taped and played back later (although the session soon will join the archived interviews on OPAL’s site) as it was a chance for 22 of us from all over the country to gather in a virtual setting.
We listened to Peters and Boule discuss a variety of topics ranging from temporarily replacing work with motherhood to why trainers (and others) leave large library systems and other organizations to seek more rewarding challenges. And we joined the conversation by typing electronic notes back and forth with colleagues like fellow “CE Buzz” author Peter Bromberg—sort of like passing slips of paper in an elementary school classroom, but this time the teachers were included. That meant that if we weren’t listening to what was being said and reading what was being written, neither part would have made sense since the aural and written conversations were completely intertwined.
Boule was explicit in talking about what has prompted her decision to leave her University of Houston position; she wants to spend time with the child who is about to be born, and she plans to seek more rewarding work doing what she loves to do: “teaching people about technology and teaching people about stuff.” The day-to-day responsibilities of trying to do multiple disparate jobs, she noted, wore her down and kept her from accomplishing what she knew she was capable of doing—not a foreign concept to many of us who have tried to effectively run library training programs while also being expected to handle numerous other unrelated tasks. So Boule is joining those of us who have recently decided we can be more effective in providing first-rate training experiences for library employees by working in a larger venue rather than staying with one library system.
Wouldn’t it be better for everyone, Boule asked, if libraries became better at sharing resources, including trainers? Perhaps establishing groups of traveling trainers who served everyone much more effectively?
“The Northeast Kansas Library System has people who do things like that,” one participant in the conversation offered.
Infopeople does the same thing throughout California, I noted, and I’ve heard from colleagues in other states that similar programs would be highly in demand if someone were to offer them.
“Might we not be looking at informal connections (like this discussion group) to help spread and advocate for what so many people obviously want to see?” I asked.
“That sounds like a job for the Library Society of the World,” Joshua Neff responded, and it was only after the session ended that I had a chance to do a quick online search and discover that he wasn’t joking, that he actually has, from Kansas, started that group to further the role of librarians, archivists, information professionals, and information educators through communication and collaboration.
So here’s to thinking outside the physical and virtual walls of large organizations, classrooms, and cafes while remaining actively involved with them. We have role models in the form of the Northeast Kansas Library System and Infopeople, and we have resources such as the ALA Continuing Library Education Network and Exchange (CLENE) Round Table itself. Perhaps one of the best roles we can play as trainers is to train ourselves in how to better use the resources at our fingertips to help our colleagues gain what they need to thrive in twenty-first-century libraries.
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