I received this certificate and a nice letter in the mail today and that reminded me that it’s time to start thinking about and planning for Employee Learning Week which takes place December 8-12, 2008.

What is ELW?
Employee Learning Week is an awareness campaign highlighting the important connection between learning and achieving organizational results.

For last year’s ELW I kept things simple and sent out a daily email to all staff highlighting a learning benefit/opportunity available to them from the library. It seems like such a small thing but the response from staff was amazing. So this year I want to raise the bar.

So what ideas do you have? How will you celebrate learning at your library? And if you work at PLCMC what ideas do you have for this year?

p.s. You don’t have to be an ASTD member to participate.

LD5X8374 and LD5X8345 originally uploaded by illustrator_ian.

The staff at Morrison Regional Library built a play house out of weeded books. I love the creativity of our staff!

For the past three years I have been responsible for all of the technology training for staff at PLCMC. This past week my responsibilities changed to coordinating all of the training/learning for PLCMC.

I’m excited about the opportunity, and already have a huge list of projects to work on.

As I mentioned during Employee Learning Week 2007, PLCMC is participating in a library exchange program with the Yarra Plenty Regional Library system in Australia. Last Thursday I had the pleasure to host Lynette Lewis and Jane Grace the two staff from YPRL who are spending five weeks with us at PLCMC.

After a delicious lunch at Dean & DeLuca I took Lynette and Jane to South County Regional Library for a quick tour and a chance to observe the Introduction to PLCMC Online Resources class that we offer for staff. Interestingly enough YPRL subscribes to the same database that we teach in this class. Lynette does the technology training for YPRL so it is always interesting to get another trainers point of view and feedback on your classes.

Here is a photo of Lynette and Jane during the class:

And they came bearing gifts!

I am so glad that I had a chance to talk with Lynette and Jane and learn about their library system. One of the fascinating things they’ve done at YPRL is removed the traditional reference desk. The desk is literally gone. Instead staff walk around and offer to help customers similar to the way a bookstore operates. By eliminating huge reference desks they’re able to use that space for the public.

If you would like to follow along with Lynette and Jane’s visit to Charlotte add their Yarra Exchange to PLCMC blog to your feeds.

One of my department’s goals during our reorganization was to have the Human Resources staff together in one location. Up until last week we had a staff of four in three different locations. Last week I moved into a great office with the other training specialist for PLCMC.

It is a beautiful office located in Virtual Village. I can’t believe what a difference it makes to be in a quiet office out of the traffic that flows through my old cube farm.

The room is partitioned by a 5-foot wall across the center. Julia is on the left side right as you walk in and I am hidden away on the right.

There is also space in the corner for a small conference table, microwave, fax, and my tree that has followed me around the library during my 9 years here.

Today I had the pleasure of attending a celebration for Rosemary Lands a librarian in the Carolina Room at PLCMC. Rosemary is retiring after 36 years of service at PLCMC.

Pause for a moment and think about that. 36 years!

Rosemary has always been one of the most eager learners in my classes–never hesitating to dive right in whether it be taking a computer apart or blogging for Learning 2.0.

I wish Rosemary well in her retirement and hope that she will consider blogging again so we can all keep up with her adventures.

Rosemary you are an inspiration and you will be missed!

Congratulations to Tony Tallent, director of youth and outreach services for PLCMC on being selected as a 2008 Library Journal Mover and Shaker. I have the pleasure of working with Tony and the energy and enthusiasm he exudes is contagious. It is impossible to be around Tony and not he happy and excited. I love the idea he initiated for his department last year of Drop Everything and Learn Day. I hope it is something he will move to push system-wide throughout our library.

Earlier this week Tom and I delivered our first synchronous training to staff at PLCMC. We delivered three Learn to Learn Online* sessions and had about 10 participants in each session. The sessions were great. We only had one major technical problem and luckily that was on our side not the participants side.

Ironically this week Michele Martin at the Bamboo Project Blog delivered her first webinar. She wrote a great post, 9 Lessons I Learned From Running My First Webinar. Inspired by Michele’s post, I’ll share what I learned this week about delivering synchronous training.

1. Plan, develop, practice, then plan some more. Anyone who has delivered or for that matter taken online training will tell you it is more work than a face to face class. A lot more work! Give yourself plenty of time to plan and develop the training. Then try it out. Then revise it.
2. Don’t try to wing it. I can’t tell you how many face to face sessions I’ve had to teach with little or no time to prepare. The very first computer class I ever taught was on Microsoft Project and I’d never used Project before. Though it’s not a good idea, you can pull it off in a face to face class. But in a live, online class forget it! Why? Keep reading.
3. Silence is not golden! Silence will kill you in a synchronous environment. The minute you stop speaking without warning the participants will think they’ve lost their connection and confusion will begin. If you are starting a brainstorming activity, let the participants know by saying, “You have 30 seconds to _____ during that time you will hear silence. I will let you know when there are 5 seconds left.”
4. Script or notes? Know your style. Because you don’t want any silence, you need to have a script at least when you start rehearsing. Tom and I practiced a few times with a script then by the time we had our first class I was down to just a copy of the slides, an outline, and some key phrases I wanted to say. Some people, like Tom, are great with a script but when I use one it is painfully obvious that I am reading. I do better with just a few notes.
5. Have a producer. This is actually one of the most important lessons. Since we are going to be offering at least 60 LTLO sessions, I thought I could do some of them by myself. Tom and I quickly discovered why it is so important to have a producer. You want an active class. You want lots of participation. In order to keep that pace going, you need two people. One person just cannot talk continuously, annotate slides, and monitor and respond to chat. Additionally in our last session, Tom ran into a technical difficulty with his microphone. Had I not been there to back him up, the class may have come to a halt only 10 minutes in.
6. Record the session. I hate the way I sound on recordings! But I was able to pick up a few things after the first session and improve them for the subsequent sessions. For one, all that talking makes you want to talk fast. Don’t! Remember to breathe.
7. Let participants know up front who is monitoring chat. I noticed after watching the recordings that a few people were sending me private chat messages. I was not able to facilitate and monitor chat so some of the chat questions went unanswered or recognized by me.
8. No one knows when you make a mistake, so don’t call attention to it. This is true for face to face and online training. If you click on the wrong slide and it’s not glaringly obvious, just roll with it. The participants don’t know. Your presentation will seem more polished if you let the little mistakes go.
9. Each facilitator/producer needs to have two computers logged in to the live classroom. One computer needs to be logged in as the instructor and one needs to be logged in as a participant. You need to see exactly what your participants see. This is especially helpful if you are using application sharing. Additionally if you have technical problems on the instructor PC you can quickly grab the headphones and move over to the participant PC. This happened to both Tom and I during separate sessions.
10. Have fun! Yes it is a totally different experience to deliver live, online training. I was incredibly nervous before the very first session on Wednesday morning. But once we got going I started to have fun and forgot about how nervous I was. In fact once we really got going it was all about the learning and I didn’t even think about the two computer screens in front of me.

That is the goal with live, online training. It’s about the people and the learning and not the technology. I have to give credit here to Jennifer Hoffman and Kassy LaBorie at InSync Training. If you are still unsure about online training, take a free course from InSync. Once you experience synchronous training done right, you’ll wonder why you waited so long to jump in.

*These sessions were adapted from the Learn How to Learn Online sessions developed and offered by InSync Training.

Tom and I are presenting a pilot Learn to Learn Online class next Wednesday, January 23 from 10-11:30am EST. The session is one hour with 30 minutes tacked on at the end for feedback. The objective is to introduce staff to the synchronous learning environment. Eventually this will be required for any staff who take online classes. The session will be held online using Horizon Wimba. All you need is a computer with high speed Internet access. You can access the audio portion via VoIP or a landline (although the landline number is long distance).

We have several staff members attending but I’d like to have some input from other trainers or really anyone out in libraryland who feels he or she could contribute some constructive feedback.

Email me at lreed “at” plcmc.org if you are available and interested. Happy learning!

Today Tom and I delivered two drop-in sessions where staff had a chance to try out our new online learning platform Live Classroom. The sessions went very well. We only had two participants who had technical difficulties and I believe those may have been because they were accessing the network over a wireless connection.

The sessions were voluntary. Staff only needed to register in advance so that we could make sure they had an up-to-date version of Java on their PCs. We had full-time staff, part-time staff, front line circulation staff, managers, supervisors, collection management, administration — a wide range of participants.

My biggest fear, and I’m sure Tom’s too, was that we would have major technical problems. Thanks to all of Tom’s hard work and testing and to our IT department for getting our infrastructure upgraded to support this technology, it all went smoothly.

Most of the staff expressed immediate interest in what classes we’d be offering next and how can they get training as presenters so that they can use this tool for facilitate meetings and/or their own training. It’s going to be a busy year!

Here’s a screenshot of one of our whiteboarding exercises. I love the artwork that was added. Additional screenshots are on Flickr. There are several comments on the whiteboard that this will take some getting used to. I whole heartily agree! I’m confident though that if we create a positive learning experience for staff that they will come to love online learning. When it’s done right, you don’t even think about the technology.