When you go to write your first blog in word press it says “Hello world”. Hello world indeed. First blog. Of my own.
Woah. Slightly scared now.
Ok – get it together Jeskins.
I have blogged before but only under the guise of the Archives Hub – which felt very safe and protected and now I feel like Dad’s taken the stabilizers of my bike. Wobbly. I’m sure I’m not alone in this feeling of panic and paranoia but I’m hoping that it will pass. (and that I won’t feel like shouting “PLEASE BE NICE” every time I blog. 
As I’ve said already if you’ve read the ‘about’ bit…I’m really interested in training. I like the engagement, the activity, the challenge, the thinking on your feet and let’s face it – the talking. Last week and this week, the Hub team – myself, Jane Stevenson and Beth Ruddock gave 3 lots of training to Archives Hub Contributors teaching them how to use the EAD editor. (A fabby and whizzy tool that enables archivists to create descriptions in EAD without having to know any EAD.)
We did the training in Manchester, London and Glasgow and the Glasgow session is particularly challenging as there isn’t a projector in the room. A great tip for presenting without a pc/screen you can demo on (apart from don’t do it?) is to make sure that you have very detailed handouts and that you’ve uploaded your PPT to Slideshare so that each delegate can go through it on their own pc.
The training included a mixture of presentation, demos and hands on. I find that having step by step instructions is a useful tool, especially if you’re including hands on and teaching people how to use databases, software or other IT applications. It allows those trainees that don’t need much instruction to go at their own pace. It also means if someone gets behind they can try to get themselves out of it. I think that giving people a certain level of learning autonomy is good. (I always appreciate it anyway)
The other thing that we did was to re-do our feedback form. Our old one wasn’t really asking anything useful, and I felt it was more a case of us ticking the box – feedback form, yes we have one! I wanted to ask slightly different questions so that we could actually do something with it afterwards.
We put the new set of questions online using surveygizmo: (http://www.surveygizmo.com/) a piece of software so simple to use that you actually don’t need to read the instructions…I did it in 5 mins – although this did obviously lead me to over-confidence and there was a typo in one of the questions that meant it didn’t really make sense. Oops. and I thought I’d checked it and checked it. Should have got Beth to check it and check it. (Proofread proofread proofread)
As well as the usual type of questions asking about content/pace and teaching style we also asked “Please say which aspects of the workshop you felt benefited you the most and why”. and “Please say which aspects of the workshop you felt benefited you the least and why”. Having looked at the feedback today, these questions have given us much more meaningful feedback than some of the questions on our old form:
- Are there any other topics you would like to have seen included?
- Were there any parts of the course you found difficult to understand?
- Can you suggest any ways in which they could have been made clearer?
To come up with the new questions, I tried to have a think about what I wanted to know and then I looked at a colleagues’ (from a different org) feedback form and then spoke to Lisa C (Charnock that is – the other Lisa from the Lisa and Lisa Show that often hits the conference trail.) Then I took the questions I liked best out of them. I’m fairly sure what I should really do is to read some stuff on evaluation though and then review the form again. 
Anyway – we’ve been really pleased with the sessions and how well they’ve been received (helped by colleagues who work well together and a piece of kit that has a bit of the wow-factor going on – it really is intuitive to use and really will save archivists time. This helps A LOT)
So…think I’m going to stop writing now. Not entirely sure I have a point here and if I did whether I made it. Or are these just the ramblings of a mad (or maybe just incoherent) woman?
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