Different ways to teach a user

• In person training
• Webinar
• Proxy-Desktop sharing
• Snag it-screenshots
• Video lessons

Wiki Gardener

Try this:

http://www.jspwiki.org/wiki/WikiGardener

Too much food!

There is way too much food at this TRIPLL event!

Dinner Music -- MV

The steel drum echoing through the dining room was a great accompaniment to the opening banquet.

Relections from Seattle - Bridget D.

TRIPLL 2008 has been an extraordinary learning experience. I cannot wait to take this information back to my reference team!

Blog Session

We love this blog

How and Why to Try a Blog for Staff Communication

If you want to get your feet wet with blogging before going public with one, you might want to create one just for the library staff. For more information, see "How and Why to Try a Blog for Staff Communication."

Blogs in the Classroom

Library school sure has changed since I was a student. In a blog entry by Michael Stephens (Tame the Web) called Emerging Technologies in Education he provides some interesting examples and insight into how blogs can be used in the classroom. Will this work in a law firm environment to foster discussion after the training? Hard to say, but it's something to think about.

The Webette

There's a great article in the May 2007 issue of Peer to Peer, the journal of ILTA entitled "The Webette: A Simple, Effective Training Delivery Approach."

The author, Randall Farrar, talks about the use web conferencing tools to offer quick, live, web based training sessions, on very specific topics.

While he suggests that webettes should be hour-long, I'd suggest making them even shorter.

The Ten Minute Trainer

I haven't read this book, but I'm certainly intrigued by the description. If anyone has read it, please let us know how you like it.

Oprah is Web Casting!

Web conferencing has entered the mainstream with Oprah's weekly web conference.

Web Conference Basics

Do you want more details on how to use web conferencing? c|net offers a tutorial that walks you through getting your conference up and running, picking the best software and leading a successful web conference.

How Much CO2 is Saved Through Web Conferencing

iLinc offers a unique tool in as part of their web conferencing software - a green meter! Their green meter is an automatic calculator inside the iLinc Web conferencing software that tracks CO2, cost, and travel reductions accrued by meeting online rather than traveling.

Blogging at Bryan Cave

The Bryan Cave librarians were early adopters of blog software for delivering current awareness information to the different practice groups.

For more information, see Blogging: One Firm's Experience, by Julie Weber and Karen Lasnick.

Training Day: Create a Mystery

Here's one idea for making training sessions more interesting and engaging. "Start with a problem and don't tell the learner how to solve it...just provide "clues" or instruction on methods that might be used and let the learner take if from there." Training Day: Create a Mystery

Ten Tips for Technology Training

While some of the tips and examples in this article are aimed at public libraries, most them are much more universal. It's definitely worth the read.

Ten Tips for Technology Training, by Michael Stephens

Common Craft - Explanations in Plain English

Common Craft "Plain English" videos on basic web topics have become quite popular. They don't use PowerPoint, they don't use screen captures, they actually use pictures and an anonymous hand! Here's just one example, Wikis in Plain English:



Somehow they manage to break down topics into easily understandable pieces. Regardless of your tool of choice for delivery, these videos are worth studying to try to pinpoint how they manage to explain and demonstrate web related topics so effectively.

Change the Way You Deliver Training

Tom Baldwin discusses the shift that he believes is necessary when delivering training to lawyers. Rather than one hour formal training sessions, he suggests short, 10 minute sessions focusing on the most relevant features/functions.

"Partners don't have the time (or desire) to spend an hour learning the latest and greatest tool being rolled out and the misnomer that food will bring them in is also a joke. These guys make plenty of money, they can afford to pay for their own Quiznos sandwich. Associates are equally pressed for time and many of them feel that they can usually pick up whatever new software you put in front of them within minutes. Unlike their senior counterparts, they were practically born with a keyboard in their hand and dismiss the notion that they need training on most anything."

The Generational Divide...

Boosting Teamwork with Wikis

It's easy to create a wiki, but not always easy to get people to use it. Ben Sutton at Rosen Law may be on to something. He offered his employees a $1,000 cash prize as an incentive to use the firm's new wiki.

Rosen chose PBWiki as his platform of choice to replace a much more sophisticated and expensive Lotus Notes platform. All kinds of information is being collected on the wiki including phone lists and case files.

This collaborative creation of a quick and easy Intranet replace and supplement training in that organization.

For more information see: Boosting Teamwork with Wikis (Fortune, Feb. 12, 2008)

Running an Effective Teleconference or Virtual Meeting

Here's an interesting column on CIO.com discussing tips for "Running an Effective Teleconference or Virtual Meeting" . The author mentions several things I hadn't thought of, including the importance of sending any background materials ahead, and also discusses how to meet the needs of both a local and remote audience.