Half way there......................

So halfway there and what have I learnt so far?

Well one of the roles I have at work is as a trainer and one of the maxims I have always stood by is that the best way to learn something is to actually go off and teach somebody else how to do it and this is one of the terrific things about this programme. It has been great to see and hear about the other learners in our organisation helping each other out with the vagaries of Flickr and the intricacies of RSS feeds - a tip of the hat to Webgurl and Space Cadet Beta for their helpful and informative blogs. It has also been valuable getting all those tricky questions about Blogger from my fellow learners and then having to go off and track down the answer - again a big hurrah for the Help Group on Blogger.

We are also a large organisation with close to 200 staff spread over 17 locations and a reasonably large part of Victoria so the concept of offering training via the internet makes sense on a number of different levels. People aren't always able to make training sessions because of the tyrannies of time, distance and branch duties. In order to address this I have taken my first faltering steps in online learning and set up a training blog for ERL prosaically called "Learning @ ERL". We have recently been doing some refresher training on the Reference Interview for staff and instead of handing out sheets of paper at the training we have been directing the participants towards the blog so that if they feel the need to review what they have learnt they have access to all the material from the session. Discovering Zoho was great because it allowed me to put up the Power Point slides that we used in the training.

I have also been playing around with the idea of short and sweet introductions to the numerous databases we subscribe to (28 so far) so that staff, and eventually our customers, can check them out in any spare moments they may have off desk and get a feel for what they contain and how to search them. Again an example can be found on the "Learning @ ERL" blog - it's about the ANZ Reference Centre one of the new Gulliver core databases. Many of the vendors have some excellent training material on their sites but it is often buried several clicks or layers deep - I have just made it easier to access the Flash tutorials on the EBSCO site by adding links from the blog. I haven't added any other databases at the moment because I have the feeling that a wiki may be a more useful vehicle for collecting this information in one place - I shall explore further in week 7.
TTFN.