The demise of Training Magazine

It has been about seven months since I last blogged here or even read any blogs. Too much work at the office and too little energy at home.



However, I participated in an energizing online training today done by Kassie La Borie and Jane Bozarth and followed up with a visit to Jane's blog. In her most recent post she lamented the end of Training magazine. I could relate to her comments because I too, read Training cover to cover as I was transitioning from elementary school teacher to library staff trainer.

I no longer have to look up buzzwords like ROI but they keep inventing new ones like"webinar" BTW-Kassie and Jane both hate that term! I don't mind as I think it is easier than "Interactive synchronous online training."



I still am primarily a live classroom trainer but wish we had the budget for the tools like Articulate and WebEx. By the time I figure it all out I will be ready to retire.

Final Final Posting

Last post was directly from Word following what Megan said in her blog about how that was possible I didn't like the font, so I guess I could have fixed that before I posted. It is a good trick, though, and does save time.

Final blog for 27 things.

 

I can't believe I'm nearly finished with the 27 things. Some of them really stand out as exciting wonderful things and I can see how they would be useful to the library world and to individuals. Others I can do personally do without.

Some I never did really succeed at (magazine cover) and couldn't care less. Others, I may try to go back to and explore further. I apparently will have to go back to Thingfo as they are not currently accepting new registrants as they work on a new version.

I will keep the blog in case I have profound thoughts I need to share with you all. I will probably continue to study Italian via Mango for my next Mediterranean cruise ;-D although it did seem incredibly repetitious. "Salve, come sta" some 200 times. Twitter has been interesting for the past week but I can't see it in the long run although I have discovered fellow library trainers across the country.

YouTube is amusing and I can see the library possibilities for short online training segments. I wasn't planning on doing Facebook as it didn't seem to be one of the 27 Things but when I saw on Twitter that Sacramento Public Library now had a Facebook page, I tried to visit it. Seems that you need to be registered on Facebook to do that so I now have a Facebook page as well… and actually have a couple of friends. (Even my 24 year old son was willing to be my friend if I didn't embarrass him too much. The tweets from my friends that I had already read in Twitter seem to have appeared on my "wall" so I'm not sure how that interconnection works. That's one of the things I want to explore further.

Overall it has been a good experience and I'm glad we did this.

I Tube, You Tube, We all Tube

Just spent an enjoyable 20 minutes investigating You Tube. With the not very original search term of "library" I came across all sorts of wonderful stuff- both serious and funny. There were a variety of tours and tutorials. My favorite was this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHljR4LYmOA which I will try to embed later today if I can figure out how to do it. The title was Tour the Library and it was from Harper College. I also watched part of a very old vocational film entitled Your Life Work: the Librarian and a Trailer from the film Hollywood Librarian. Hmm-maybe we could get a copy of that for Training Day...

Side Effects

At the adult services meeting last week, several of us commented on the progress of our 27 Things program. Before the meeting, I had checked the numbers on the registration list and saw that we had ~130 who had signed up. Although I don't think there are quite that many on the official blog list, it certainly has been interesting to read what my co-workers have written. I've discovered a fellow bird lover and one dealing with house construction or remodeling issues. I've read some deep and thoughtful comments about the state of our libraries and I'm hoping that some of my favorite bloggers will continue to post occasionally even after the official program is over. It is this side effect of getting to know one another through our blogs (the 28th Thing, if you will) that has actually been one of the most useful for me.

Backpack-Web 2.0 winner

I just investigated Backpack as a Web 2.0 application. Because I was enjoying playing with zoho, I looked at the nominee and winner's lists until I found zoho. I saw that it had come in second in the category of organization. The application that came in first in that category was called Backpack and it was impressive-allowing groups to share everything from calendars and documents to maps and images. We can certainly do all that on Outlook 2007 - but Backpack seemed to do it more seamlessly and was completely web-based.

Alas, Backpack was not one of those free applications. In fact, for even a small group (say a small business or a work team of up to 6 people) it was about $25 a month.

I guess I'll stick to Outlook and try to master wikis...

zooming with zoho

As someone who has been teaching word processing since the late eighties, I didn't expect to have any trouble with the basic Zoho. Indeed, it is all fairly intuitive (or more correctly - similar enough to any other word processing program) and seems easy to use.

Now though, comes the test of all the other features. I can already see that it would be useful if you didn't need to copy and paste a section of text into your email or attach a file just to be able to work on a document from home or in a different location. And it would certainly be useful for team work like the Training Day group which gets going this week.

First, I will put in a link. Next, I will try to send it to my blog... Wow! I can't believe how easy that was. All I had to do was click on the share tab and there it was. I wish I had seen this two weeks ago- I still have a document on my home PC that was the blog required for Thing 14 or 15..Thoughts on Web 2.0