To the fray

I'm glad to see that CILIP's taking a more active part in the fight against the destruction of the public library service. It's churlish of us to ask: "Where was you?" They're here now and they're getting their hands dirty and let's be glad of it.

This is part of an ongoing change in the way that CILIP's conducting itself. It's notable that this Summer is the first one in years that hasn't been overwhelmed by a multi-channel caterwaul about some navel-gazing inconsequence. It can only be a good thing if the annual Summer CILIP shitstorm has had its day: it never did The Profession any favours and diverted energies from more urgent and productive matters.

Providing a context

In the new year I'm going to be delivering some training sessions to colleagues in my team, showing them how to support the library systems we support particularly the LMS (Spydus), the public PC management system (iCAM) and the RFID kit we have from Bibliotheca. We're a generic applications support team these days though we each have our particular specialisms. For instance: besides the library systems I'm responsible for a transport management system, a CRM and a lot of the day-to-day housekeeping on the revenues & benefits system. Over the past couple of years we've been trying to build in a bit of resilience so that we've not got too many critical single points of failure.

None of my colleagues have a library background, though most of them are library customers. I know from my own experience of taking over systems from other people that getting your head round one without a basic understanding of the business operation it's supporting makes for a steep learning curve so I think it would be a good idea by starting the programme with an overview of the library operation. This would necessarily be very broad brush but it'll give us a landscape to work in.

Memory biases for unforgettable e-learning

I'm putting together a lot of documentation and training materials these days so I'm always on the lookout for helpful ideas. My style's always been more discursive than most instructional notes tend to be, not just because it's my natural style to waffle on a bit. I try to explain why something's happening and to give some type of contextual sense to the experience that I hope helps with both the navigation and the application of the training.

I enjoyed the infographic accompanying this article on the Pure learning site, it's a nice précis of some of the tools that make for effective learning activities:

• Bizarreness
• Humour
• Generation
• Picture superiority

As well as providing hooks for recall and review (and addressing at least four of Gagné's Nine Events of Instruction) it's interesting to see that they also address common barriers to learning:

• The need to be prodded into curiosity
• The need to be involved
• The need to find out for yourself
• The need for a quick reward