http://www.slideshare.net/LisaJeskins/presentations
PPTs from ARA2011, the CoFHE LASEC IL & Teachmeet Day, FIL 2010 and Hub PPTs on EAD and social media.
oh and – just thought I’d say – I’m getting the Liverpool students to create twitter accounts before the lesson.I’ll let you know how it goes.
Tags: presentation style, lasectm
I recently did a training event on social media for librarians and I wasn’t particularly satisfied with how it turned out. So I’ve had a think about some of things I did wrong/could have been better and thought I’d blog about it, so that you won’t make the same mistakes I did. (isn’t that a song?) and by the way, yes, with my experience of training, I SHOULD have known better.
Mistake 1.
First things first. If the course outline has been sent out, don’t add anything extra.
Even if the organiser asks you to.
I added extra topics into my session and it just didn’t work. I ran out of time because I was trying to cover 5 things in 2 and half hours. I ended up asking the room which topic they would rather I cover, blogging or youtube? The majority voted for youtube but I still feel I let those down who wanted to learn about blogs – after all that’s what I said I’d cover in the course blurb.
You end up trying to cover too much in too little time. After all, there was a reason for your original lesson plan and timings and people signed up for that original plan and are expecting to get that. If a course organiser wants you to cover extra stuff then you can always provide extra handouts to ‘plug the gap’ or re-negotiate the timetable so that you can fit everything in.
Learning outcome 1. Above everything else, always match what you are teaching to what the attendees (argh) are expecting and don’t try to do too much.
Mistake 2
Now for the real rookie mistake. Remember if you are the only trainer and you are doing hands on, that your maximum limit for participants is 12. TWELVE. Not 24.
You simply cannot get around to checking that 24 people are all ‘getting it’ and helping all those that aren’t. You also end up running around the training room like a lunatic which is not a good look. AND exhausting. It is also really easy to ‘lose’ someone when there are so many people in the room, which means they won’t have a satisfactory learning experience, they won’t ever book on one of your courses again and your evaluation won’t be great.
Learning outcome 2. Always place a maximum limit of 12 on all hands-on training, if you are the only trainer. (This could be even lower if your personal levels of becoming flustered are high! Or if all else fails – get someone to help!)
Mistake 3
I always tell people to check the venue and the equipment if you are training in an unknown location – as I’ve been scuppered by this in the past. I still remember getting to one room and there not being a projector. Or a teaching pc. Luckily our slides were on Slideshare and so everyone could look at them on their own pc. Even knowing this golden rule, I forgot to ask about sound. And that library induction video from Brigham Young University which is a parody of the Old Spice ads – NOT funny without sound. For those of you who do have sound – New Spice:
Learning outcome 3. When checking venue/equipment/software – look at what you are planning to do and remember to ask about sound! If there’s no sound – re-think your lesson plan.
Mistake 4.
I’ve done similar sorts of social media training before probably about 3 or 4 times now, and one thing has happened every time. Twitter crashes. Seems to be if 15 or more people are all creating accounts in the same room at the same time. (Or if Wills and Kate announce their engagement, but then NO-ONE could create an account) This means at least 2 or 3 people won’t be able to do the exercises properly.
Learning outcome 4. Not completely sure yet. I have thought about where possible getting people to do some pre-workshop work and come to the session with their new twitter account created but I am concerned as to whether people will do it. I know it really does only take 5 minutes but will they? Is this just lack of training confidence on my part? My other plans are to ask other social media trainers what they do and also to ask twitter and see if anyone else has reported this.
So those were the out and out mistakes, but I also didn’t feel that everyone was prepared to share their thoughts and ideas and I think I need a better (but not groan inducing) ice-breaker. So I’m going to do a little research and see what I can come up with. Something short – that can be done just after the intros, that gets everyone into the spirit of things! Any ideas gratefully received.
So there you go. Judging by the evaluation it wasn’t a disaster – but it certainly felt like it at the time. But then I am a bit of perfectionist – so there’s another learning outcome – don’t be so hard on yourself!
…the following blogs and articles:
DELILA (Developing Educators Learning and Information Literacies for Accreditation. Or my friend Jane’s project @jsecker & http://elearning.lse.ac.uk/blogs/socialsoftware/):
DELILA Project blog: http://delilaopen.wordpress.com
DELILA Outcomes and reports: http://delilaopen.wordpress.com/outcomes-and-reports/
Journal of Information Literacy: http://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL in particular the Welsh IL project – great work in getting IL embedded in the curriculum.
Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade By Virgina Heffernan: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/education-needs-a-digital-age-upgrade/
David Lee King’s blog: http://www.davidleeking.com/
David Lee King’s article on facebook for libraries: http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/features/05272011/facebook-libraries (good practical advice if your thinking of having a library facebook page)
Ned Potter’s blog http://thewikiman.org/blog/ – in particular: 7 reasons people don’t use twitter… : http://thewikiman.org/blog/?p=1506 and the library sterotypometer: http://thewikiman.org/blog/?p=1671 (and yes I like gin, social media and cats)
Phil Bradley on Google +: http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2011/07/google-plus-an-overview.html
Tags: DELILA, facebook, google+, infolit, information literacy, twitter
Today I had a great day. I was delighted to be asked to help Jane Secker, facilitate an information literacy and library teachmeet day at Kingston College in Surrey.
The day was really enjoyable and I got chance to meet some tweeps 
and further education librarians that are passionate about IL.
I’ve decided to put my notes and slides up so that people can have a look at what I said in my talk – apologies though there is a bit of duplication from my ‘Working abroad‘ and ‘Library Routes‘ posts. For the session I considered what IL means to me and for my institution.
What does information literacy mean to me?
Good morning everyone, my name is Lisa and I’m the promotions and outreach officer for Library and Archival Services at Mimas.
Does everyone know what Mimas does?
We’re based at the University of Manchester and funded by JISC to create online services for research and education. Mimas creates services such as my services, Copac and the Archives Hub but also things like Zetoc, Landmap, Jorum and Hairdressing Training and we were also responsible for Intute & the Virtual training suites.
I want to talk to you today about my experiences of info lit and what it means to me.
I started out in libraries volunteering at an FE college, just to see if I liked working in a library. And I did. I liked it a lot. So then I did the usual – graduate traineeship, library school and the whole shebang and I ended up back in Manchester as a first professional at MMU in 2000 I first started being interested in IL when MMU started the Big Blue project in 2001. As a result of the big blue MMU created a specific post for IL which I was then lucky enough to get. I was responsible for creating a generic WebCT tutorial that was customisable. The aim was that I was to teach all of the subject librarians how to make it subject specific. The role also involved a lot IL advocacy with academics as we tried to sell them on the idea of assignment specific, just-in-time and iterative IL training from the library.
The role gave me a passion for teaching IL and also a CLIP teaching certificate. The teaching certificate has been invaluable to my career. As well as giving me the knowledge of how to plan, design and deliver different types of training, it’s also given me a lot of confidence in presenting and facilitating sessions. It’s basically been an overriding theme in my roles and responsibilities over the span of my career.
People
One of the things that I that really enjoy about being involved in infolit is that you get to talk to and teach people. All sorts of people. I love seeing someone get the light bulb moment, which I’m sure is the same for everybody in the room.
A few years ago I worked as a Faculty Liaison Librarian at Dubai Women’s College. DWC was a further education college that was for 16-20 year old Emirati women. One of my major responsibilities was to redesign student orientation and to introduce an information literacy programme. Luckily my boss Garry was an Australian who had worked at QUT and was a big fan of Christine Bruce so I got a lot of support, but it really was a challenge for me. Extremely rewarding, but a challenge none the less.
Teaching IL to women in English when English isn’t their first language means that you have to re-think a lot of your approaches. Particularly when the women you’re teaching are from a completely different culture to your own. The same old examples won’t work, these women haven’t got the same freedoms or experiences as you, so there isn’t the same shared common knowledge. In a country that has a predominantly oral culture, reading is often looked down on by older family members as this takes time away from spending time talking with your family. This also means that anything that is written down, either in a book or on the Internet is treated as the truth.
Plagiarism is rife because in an Islamic culture students see copying work as sharing and helping their friends. Something which is considered to be an extremely good thing within their concepts of Islam. They also seem a lot younger and more naïve than their western counterparts because they are more sheltered and aren’t exposed to information that hasn’t already been censored for their consumption. This meant I had to go right back to basics. I even produced a library vocabulary sheet for them that defined terms such as reference books, dictionaries and the issue desk. I got the older students involved by taking photographs of them using the things I was describing and including them in the sheet so students would also have visual clues to what the words meant. I had to make sure I had their permission and it is sensible not to photograph students who are completely covered. However the students involved really enjoyed being a part of it and loved seeing themselves on the library documentation. Every aspect of what I had come to think of as ‘the rules’ had to be modified in some format.
Training
As I said previously, I’m the promotions and outreach officer for the Archives Hub and Copac and I plan and deliver our user training. I also train masters level archive students in online cataloguing and how to use social media, for networking, current awareness and marketing their archive services. Because of the nature of the services that I work for, the majority of my user training is to post-graduates. It’s also something that I’m finding increasingly challenging in the light of the current economic climate and the more I consider this challenge the more questions arise that I’ve not found the answers for yet.
I work in a small team and I am the only trainer. Fewer and fewer people seem to be coming to our courses as they are usually optional. This means it can end up being quite a poor return on investment, especially if you consider the time taken to design the training, my travel expenses and possible overnight accommodation and then the time where I’m not in the office because I’m training. I do have some very good links with our local universities and London Met. I’ve managed to get a couple of my training courses into the taught part of the Masters English programme at Salford which is obviously ideal and Postgrads at London Met have a great programme of research methods training, which although optional, they really value and I recently taught 20 postgrads how to find primary and secondary source materials using Copac, the Archives Hub and Zetoc, but these are the exceptions not the rule. We’re not sure how to get at researchers, and as there is only myself I simply can’t travel to every university offering them our training and attempting to develop the same level of personal networks that I have in Manchester. I’m just about to review our marketing and communication strategy to try and come up with some hopefully innovative solutions to these issues.
Market research, motivation and marketing
So to this end, Mimas has been working on what we are calling the market penetration project, specifically aimed at finding out why researchers don’t use the services, Archives Hub, Copac and Zetoc. Focus groups and interviews have been done with researchers who haven’t ever used the services. The results are starting to come in and they’re fascinating and for me, have such meaning for IL training and the way that we’ve been doing this at Mimas. The results are showing that those undergrads that were only using Google to find information are now Post grads and their information seeking behaviour hasn’t changed.
This has really underlined, the fact, that as with all IL education that we really need to get to students in their first year, but the issue we have, is that undergraduates rarely have to find information from anywhere other than their own library. I’m really looking forward to the seeing the whole report and believe it will mean not only a change in how we train our users but I think it will radically change how we develop our services in the future.
I’ve also used the terms motivation and marketing here. I believe the two are inextricably linked together. Over the past few years we’ve been seeing libraries and information services moving away from feature led marketing to benefit led marketing, which is crucial in trying to reach students – the age old questions of ‘Why?’ and ‘What’s in it for me?’ are vital in any successful library marketing programme, and, as I’m sure you’ll all agree, in IL training. In my opinion, marketing and IL are extensions of each other. In marketing your services you have to find those hooks which will motivate your students to use your library services. You have to do the same for IL training, and your training shows them how to use those services. I’m sure the first things you include in a training session are the benefits of attending that session.
I’ve come to think that developing a good working relationship with your marketing team (person?) is important so that you can be sure that they consider aspects of IL in everything that they produce and so you always think of those marketing links in your training. I realise that if you work in an FE library that you might not have a designated marketing person for the library. However the college might have someone and it might be useful to chat to them about how they go about marketing the college to prospective students. I’ve found incorporating marketing ideas in my training has really made me focus on the benefits of our services. Last year for example, I did a series of telephone interviews with users of our services. We wanted to know why they used the services and what they would do instead, if they weren’t there. We got some really interesting responses and we were able to use these to show the value that our services add to researchers’ work, but also we managed to get some great quotes. These quotes have been invaluable in showing our value and impact to our stakeholders in marketing our services but they can also show benefits during training. I can say that using Copac will save you time when you are doing your lit. review, but will they really believe me? I feel it means more when it’s coming from a peer or a lecturer and makes it more relevant to them. We anonymised our quotes, simply stating things such as ‘postgraduate law student’, but in future interviews I’m going to ask for permission to use people’s names as I think this helps in making the quote feel real.
Communication
For me, after considering marketing then it’s time to talk about communication. Think about every time you talk with student, whether it be at the enquiry desk, when you’re roving, or answering email enquiries. I believe that what you are doing is marketing and Information Literacy. Having a communication plan as part of your marketing plan allows you to examine all the opportunities that you have to interact with your users. Thinking of them as short moments of marketing and IL may allow you to revamp some of your existing practices and make each interaction more meaningful. Are there any barriers to the communication? Are there things you can say each time? What documentation do you have that can back you up? Are you doing and saying things consistently? Having a strategy that synthesises all of this, will not only help with your workflows, but can also help give your students learning cues if they have a similar experience each time. It could also help new members of library staff as they learn how to answer enquiries and feel more confident about their interactions with users.
LILAC and the IL group
My last slide is a picture of Duncan Chappell, with IL award judges, Gaynor Eyre and Liz Chapman, Duncan was the 2011 IL practitioner of the year. As well as IL being a part of my role at Mimas, I’m also involved in helping to organise LILAC and am the newly appointed training officer for the IL group. As part of the LILAC committee I am responsible for sponsorship, a position I was given because of my experience as an exhibitor for Mimas. (I’m often to be found at a stand pontificating on the joys of Mimas services). This year was my 2nd yr as sponsorship officer and it’s something I’ve really come to enjoy – even when couriers misplace sponsor equipment! Luckily LILAC has some of the nicest, most laid back and low maintenance sponsors on the conference circuit! Being involved in the LILAC conference is hard work but I really enjoy it and always learn tons of new stuff to take back to my role. One of the highlights for me this year was being involved in the pecha kucha sessions – some of them were just fantastic, particularly “Can we do it? Yes we can! Information literacy perceptions among Croatian school librarians” by Sonja A Špiranec and Mihaela Banek Zorica. They described an initiative from academics and school librarians in Croatia in the form of a fairy story… AND they used PREZI! I’m only just starting my new role as IL group training officer so still have a lot to learn. My next task is to sort out the training bit on the IL group website.
So that’s what IL means to me. Does anyone have any questions?
Tags: infolit, information literacy, lasectm, training
In November I did my first session teaching social media and using social media.
We had two 2hr slots with the Liverpool Archive students. Our first session was to introduce them to EAD and the EAD editor. Our second slot was an Introduction to Social Media and Archives.
The EAD session can be quite a complicated session for them to get their heads round but they all mastered it pretty quickly. We finished off Session 1 by showing them how to create a Twitter account. The idea being (and these ideas are adapted from Jane Bozarth’s book ‘Social media for Trainers‘) that we’d get them set up and following myself, @bethanar, @archiveshub and @UkNatArchives and to have had a quick search for #archives. They then had a few more suggestions of who to follow and then they had a week to post one thing they had learned about twitter or from twitter since they had joined. They also had to mark the post #hublucas.
Well that was the idea. Best laid plans of mice and women etc. Wills and Kate announced their engagement. Twitter crashed. And then it crashed a little bit more. Luckily I’d produced step by step instructions on how to create an account and told them exactly how to use hash tags and provided suggestions of who to follow. So I asked them to create their accounts in their own time. I also said that we would go over their findings in the next lesson and that I would of course be looking for what they’d written using #hublucas.
I really wasn’t sure whether anyone would do it. I was really pleasantly surprised that the majority of students did their ‘homework’ . Some of them only just before the lesson. But they did it. One ‘wag’ when asked by a friend what #hublucas was, commented ‘just a way of forcing us to join twitter’.
(Having also run workshops on social media for peers and colleagues, I have learned that resistance is ALWAYS part of social media training. Some people just don’t want to engage with it. It might be that they are frightened by technology. They might not want to let go of the control that they have with their own website or library/archives management system. It might clash with their learning style. They might be introverts and not want to put their personal ‘self’ out there. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t know it’s out there. It also doesn’t mean that they won’t come to see the benefit of an institutional use of social media. It just means it might take a bit longer for them to accept it or they might only ever have an organisational twitter account. )
When we rejoined the next week I did a presentation about what Web 2.0 and Social media was. I then asked Beth (@bethanar) to explain how social media has helped with networking and professional development or as I dubbed it for the session ‘Marketing yourself’ (Much to Beth’s distress.) I then told them how I use and have used social media to market the Archives Hub, Copac, the LILAC conference and our launch of the new Mimas brand.
I then got the group to discuss twitter after having experienced it for themselves and then seeing how we used it. During the week the students had posted a lot of the negative comments. They couldn’t see the benefits and some of them just thought it was trivial. However once we’d explained the benefits as we saw them for our services they were a lot more convinced but Twitter and could see why an archive might want to have an account.
It occurred to me that I could offset the negative comments by doing this the other way round and have subsequently tried this with the Aberystwyth archives students. Funnily I’m not sure it really matters and part of me, likes the instilling of learning that happens when you change someone’s mind in the way we did at Liverpool.
After twitter, I got the students to look at Facebook fan pages and Blogs and then in pairs talk about what they thought of the pages and blogs they were reading. I got them to think about the voice which was being used in each case, what was different about each one, Did they like it? In the case of the Fan pages, I also asked them “Would you want to work in this institution?”
The students seemed to get a lot out of the sessions and so did I. I was gratified to see them really examining the pages and blogs that they had been introduced to and felt they were really starting to think about social media in terms of the ‘business case’ or as a marketing tool for their archive.
Pretty pleased all in all and not bad for a first effort. (Well I didn’t think so)
Firstly sorry for huge gap between posts, I’m going to endeavour to get act together and write more this year.Think I got into that rut where you’re busy so you don’t feel like you can blog as you suspect it might be frivolous and self-indulgent when you have lots to do.
Then there’s whole thing of what to write about and my whole anally retentive perfectionist thing, which can be my worst enemy and can paralyse and cause writer’s block.
There, I think I’ve finally written enough excuses. I’ll stop now. And as Gibbs says, apologising is a sign of weakness. (Naff reference to NCIS. Sorry. DOH.) Anyway from now on – it’s not going to be perfect (was it ever?) I’m just going write. or ramble or note down what ever occurs to me.
Right. Onwards and upwards.
So I was in London yesterday to do a user training session for researchers on Zetoc, Copac and the Archives Hub. I was pretty excited as 22 had booked on the course and sent in their research areas. I prepared what I thought were great demos relating to their subjects and I’d written some new handouts that gave the students a step by step guide of what to do during the hands on sessions. I was really pleased with what I’d done although still secretly feeling like I’d copped out a bit and hadn’t done enough to make it different or have more engagement but more on this later…
Anyway I arrived and met my contact/liaison at the Uni and went to the training room. After having scrounged up a remote for the projector, which we couldn’t get to work and had to ask for help with, we discovered that the teaching pc, the one linked to the projector wouldn’t log on. The IT guy tried to make it work but in the end they decided that the best thing to do was to decamp to another room. (with obligatory notes on room doors, natch.)
Got to the new room, I was chuffed, this looked like a much nicer room, better set out and with way fancier pcs, a proper lecturn to stand at and present from. Snazzy I thought. Way to upgrade. Silly woman. Should have kept my thoughts to myself. Or just not thought them. Students started to come in and couldn’t log in. At least 6 pcs seemed to have issues. A 2nd IT guy arrived. He managed to get all pcs working instantly and generally made us feel daft.
I obviously trotted out the cliché that you should never work with children, animals or technology.
So the IT guy is just finishing up with one of the student pcs and I turn around to go back to the teaching pc to start the session, and the PPT on the projector had disappeared…and when I say disappeared I mean the projector wasn’t working. This produced much gnashing of teeth from IT guy number 2. He tried a few things and then rang IT guy number 1.
Whilst they were fiddling with stuff I started talking in the hope that by the time I got to the demo bit it would all be sorted! Wishful thinking on my part so basically started the demo by standing in the middle of the room and telling the students what to do. (Whilst IT guy number 1 is sat on a chair on a table trying to get the projector to work) I’m now completely off script and winging it like there’s no tomorrow.
Towards the end of my Zetoc ‘demo’, IT guy number 1 fixed projector. WOOT! we can go back to the plan. (I had liked the plan) so I was able to quickly demonstrate how to add journals to a Zetoc alert. We then had a few questions and I went to have a look at a few of the students’ searches. However leaving the projector unattended in this way caused it to switch off again. (Separation anxiety obviously) and I say switch off but that suggests that you can turn it back on again.
I could have rung the IT guy again but by this point I didn’t want us to have any more disruptions, so back to winging it. And back to standing in the middle of the room to avoid the badly placed pillar and so that I can still see everyone. (I do wonder if I looked demented at this point). The students were really good natured about everything though and still really enthusiastic which was lovely and they were asking questions throughout.
I also ACTUALLY used a whiteboard marker and a pad of A4 paper to show people how to phrase search and use wild cards. I then held up the pad and showed everyone in the room. Seriously.
A couple of things struck me afterwards, 1. if you’re training in unknown venues and if you are planning on demonstrating live sites, you really DO need to be flexible and able to think on your feet. Otherwise not only would you be unable to keep the session going but it would be unbelievably stressful! (as opposed to just stressful? ) 2. it REALLY helps if you’ve done a lot of preparation and/or you know your stuff.
Anyway we got through it, not my finest hour or slickest performance but they all seemed pretty pleased and I even got a “this was REALLY useful”… so I suppose that having understanding and kind students is also great too.
Other things that occurred to me about my actual session…
Although they were Ph.D students, international students might not have the same awareness of different forms of information so I’m going to include a more detailed section about what the difference is between journals and journals articles is. Possibly even create a jargon buster sheet as a handout. (DOH! I really should have thought of this before, especially having worked in an international context!).
I really do want to add more engagement to sessions like this, but I am a little scared of it. I’m not quite sure what to do. So possibly quite scared indeed. I think as well, that part of me feels that if I’m showing Ph.D students how to use Copac, really the best way of getting them to take the knowledge they have learnt in the session away, is by showing them how to do it and then getting them to do it on their own.
I don’t know why I’m being unusually pedestrian in my thinking about this though as I’m normally quick to embrace new training ideas but I appear to be a bit stuck.
I have been told about using ‘anti-demonstration’. (Deborah Dalley explained this to me recently so am really grateful to her for the info.) This is where you get the students to tell you exactly what to do with the website and you cannot deviate from what they’ve told you and you’re not supposed to talk whilst your doing it. (Apart from the odd, ‘What next’.)
I’m not sure I could manage the not talking bit and I think this is a really nice idea for showing the pitfalls of Google, but I think if you’re demonstrating your service, it could fall a bit flat. Essentially I think I like the idea, but am frightened of it.
Has anyone else managed to bring in elements of engagement into Database training? If you did what level were you teaching? Did it work? Did it work differently with different types of students? How far did you go?
Enquiring minds would honestly like to know what you think. I’m hoping it’ll prove to be a bit of a kick up the … erm … jacksie to change my training.
Tags: databases, demos, training, user training
I haven’t written in an age. So I’m stopping beating about the bush and thought I’d quickly share with you a blog post which I just read on how to create engaging elearning with PPT.
I’m reading Jane Bozarth’s Social Media for Trainers at the mo (see link to Jane Hart’s post). I’m planning on doing a review/thoughts shortly but I was reading about twitter use at conferences and Jane mentioned a talk that she gave called Better than Bullet Points.
Cammy Bean attended and used Twitter to take notes. She then wrote this blog post. Thought it sounded pretty good and I should share:
http://cammybean.kineo.com/2009/08/jane-bozarth-better-than-bullet-points.html
Really liked idea of applying Richard Mayer’s SOI model to learning with PPT.
“Select, organize and integrate”
- Select important information
- Organize it into meaninful wholes
- Integrate it with real world problems
I’ve never come across this before so I’ve obviously got a lot of reading to catch up on.
Acknowledgements: Jane and Cammy are both trainers who use social media.
Jane Bozarth
Blog: http://bozarthzone.blogspot.com/ Twitter: @janebozarth
Cammy Bean
Blog: http://cammybean.kineo.com/ Twitter: @cammybean
…and I found out about the book from Jane Hart and her pick of the day. http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/2010/09/social-media-for-trainers.html
Phew, think that’s everyone I need to mention…more soon honest. 
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