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

Training days

It's daft really: the hard slog of the past few months has felt like a phoney war, despite the fact that there's been a lot of work and a good number of real successes along the way.

• The test data load from Dynix to Spydus has gone surprisingly well, with scarcely any glitches (I'm still waiting for the first shoe to drop, let alone the second).
• The MARC mapping of the Dynix seems to be good enough to do the job of converting to MARC21 in Spydus. Hats off to Anne Whiteley who did the original mapping back in 1990, armed only with commonsense and a manual she'd borrowed as a Regional Loan. My contribution to the cause has been a rank lack of commonsense and whatever I can crib off the good folks on th'interweb.
• We've got a good project plan and we're making the Library Service work to it. The good news is that nearly everyone involved is relieved to have some sort of structure to hang onto when things start getting giddy.

Next week we start two weeks' worth of "subject expert" training, the hardest part of which is convincing some people that they really are the local experts in their field.

Once that's done I've got a couple of weeks in which to do as much configuration as possible before we start training the trainers. If we can get as much of the configuration as possible done during the subject expert training we'll have a fighting chance of hitting our end of July deadline.

We're hoping that two decisions will help us a lot. The first is that I won't be delivering the training myself, which is a blow personally (it's one of the things I seriously enjoy doing) but it's the only way I'll have the time to be able to work on the outstanding technical details, including the interfaces we're requiring with other systems such as smartsm, the Local Land & Property Gazeteer and the corporate finance systems. It'll also give me space and time to respond to any issues or ideas arising from the training sessions being delivered throughout June.

Which brings me to the second decision: we've selected a group of trainers who'll act as champions and first line of support within the library servce. These are all Library Service staff, some managers but mostly front-line and all volunteers. In fact, twice as many people as we needed volunteered to be trainers, which is a bit gratifying. They'll have three pretty intensive days in which to get to grips with the new Circulation system and put together a package that can be delivered in a one-day training session for front-line staff. Which start the following week.

Tight deadlines; some hard decisions to be made about what to leave out of the training packages; and impossible if you're not documenting what you're doing and communicating in minutes and hours, not days and weeks. I'm lucky: the Data Hub has a couple of Project Assistants and one of them will be working with me on this project. That should mean we can get some real-time communication between training sessions and myself so that we can address issues on the fly and record the changes as we go along. He's only been with us a week so he's walking in completely fresh with no preconceptions or baggage, poor devil!

Rethinking user education materials a bit

Am consciously neglecting this blog: a lot on at work, much of which is pretty grim, and other stuff I need to get to grips with. Let's try and find something positive to say for myself.

A chance online encounter prompted Ian Stringer to ask if he could come and have a chat with me about some work he and his son Paul are doing. It was an opportunity for Paul to have a look at a library management system and have an overview of how we use it. Classic Dynix is absolutely not what you would use as the textbook example of a modern LMS but it does what it does pretty well on the whole for the purposes of illustration. It's a shame that they hadn't come along a few weeks ago when I still had the schematic for the customer interface on the whiteboard. They went away happy. It turned out that this was a useful meeting for me, too. I needed to be reminded that I do actually know a few things.

I'd intended to spend this afternoon drawing pictures of a learning session, or programme of sessions, on the theme "Online reading for people without e-readers." It's an idea I've been kicking round the office for a couple of weeks: the majority of our various how-to-use-the-internet sessions and programmes are geared towards helping people learn how to use the hardware and software and not towards what you might want to do with them, except in a generally cursory fashion. My argument was that a lot of our customers wouldn't see themselves as being in the market for signing up for a Myguide session, say, but could well be interested in finding out more about things that interest them on the web. Signing up for Myguide would then be a way of helping them get more out of an existing interest rather than requiring a new interest in computers. So I was asked to put my typing finger where my mouth is and sketch out the learning paths.

That was the intention. So of course I followed an interesting-looking link a couple of people had flagged up on Twitter and the next thing I knew I'd signed myself up on xtranormal, spent a couple of minutes getting my head round the instructions and within half an hour I had this, admittedly very clunky, bit of user education video about how to renew your library loans. It wouldn't do for most of our audiences, especially in this state, but I can see some mileage in our putting together a few short, snappy "informercials" for younger (or dafter) audiences. Especially as it really is very easy to put together.

This in turn opened up a few more possibilities which, together with my getting my head around Bit.ly's new link bundling tool, means I'll probably need a bigger bit of paper to scribble on. Once I've started to define the shape of the work I'll do a tidier version on Prezi to share the details with colleagues at work.

I'll get it done tonight. There's a pile of crap on the telly.

Because it's that good: 10 Exciting Ways To Waste Your Training Dollars

Thanks, yet again, to Marianne Lenox for flagging this up. It's an excellent summary of common conventional mistakes that compromise the effectiveness of training activities.