Teaching a Blogging Workshop
August 17th, 2004Teri provides some advice on teaching weblogs, which I found useful. There is one area that I haven’t seen discussed yet: teaching weblogs to staff. Hopefully, the attendees will be going back to their respective libraries and showing off their new skills to their colleagues. But how do they teach what they learned to their staff? Do the same suggestions that Teri brought up apply. In many cases, I would say yes, but I think there is more to it.
Librarians who attend programs like Teri’s (and I have had this experience as well) are, in general, the “techies” or “semi-techies” in their library. When they go back to teach weblogs to their co-workers, the odds of discussing weblogs with more techies are small. Most likely, they will be talking to more “semi-techies” or even non-techies. We need to train non-techies differently. The classes need to be more basic, and they need to be less frightening. Weblogs work in libraries because everyone can contribute. Non-techies have alot to say and this could be their avenue. Try not to scare them.
I would also steer clear of RSS entirely. This can be brought up later after they are comfortable with the concept of blogging. Yes, RSS is important, but not at this juncture. Keep it simple.
Any other suggestions?
If you happen to be attending Internet Librarian, Michael Stephens and I are doing a presentation entitled, “Get ‘Em Started—Teaching Weblogs to Staff”. Here is the synopsis:
“In order to have Weblogs work in the library environment, be it corporate, academic, or even public, staff need to be trained on how to use the technology so that they can use it to best serve their clients. This session discusses methods and theories on how to best train your staff for the Weblog revolution.”