We might mistakenly think we’re moving into a place where technology becomes more important than people and engagement in the training-teaching-learning process as we look at the farthest reaches of the recently-released New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Report > 2015 Higher Education Edition on key trends, significant challenges, and developments in educational technology. This, after all, is where we find concise descriptions of adaptive learning technologies (learning opportunities programmed to respond and adapt in an apparently personal way to an individual learner’s progress, performance, and unmet learning needs) and the Internet of Things (automated tracking and control of objects within our world) discussed within a four- to five-year time-to-adoption horizon. We would even be well-justified in approaching these developments—particularly adaptive learning technology as part of a larger movement toward new levels of personalized learning—with a great deal of skepticism. We have, after all, seen well-intentioned colleagues in instructional design create asynchronous online learning modules that appear to offer learners different learning paths with personalized responses based on learners’ choices, only to discover in the worst of cases that the "different" paths all lead to one generic screen of feedback that is so broad as to be meaningless—particularly if a curious learner works his or her way back through a lesson and sees that the various allegedly personalized and divergent pathways all lead to the same meaningless one-screen-serves-all response. But this is not the world of adaptive learning technologies described within the Horizon Report. Here we really are seeing a well-documented "emergence of adaptive learning technologies" reflecting "a movement in academia [and in other learning environments] towards customizing learning experiences for each individual" in meaningful ways (p. 44): if a learner is clearly mastering a topic, the adaptive programming advances the learner to an appropriately more-challenging set of problems or to the next topic to be studied, while a struggling learner is moved to different content that offers additional supportive learning opportunities to plug that person’s learning gaps. The winning element in the best of these examples is that learning facilitators are encouraged to remain integrally involved in the design and use of this technology to the benefit of the learners they serve; those trainer-teacher-learners understand that adaptive learning "is best suited to take place in hybrid and online learning environments" (p. 44), Report co-authors Samantha Adams Becker, Alex Freeman, and Victoria Estrada note. Following resources cited within the NMC Horizon Project 2015 Higher Education Edition, we find descriptions of a "flurry of activity and experimentation around adaptive learning," "the relatively recent emergence of sophisticated adaptive learning software and platforms," and plenty of collaboration and partnerships between key players in training-teaching-learning (John K. Waters, "The Great Adaptive Learning Experiment," Campus Technologies). If we follow that article to first-rate adaptive-learning technology reports prepared and posted online by Tyton Partners (formerly Education Growth Advisors), we are rewarded with two additional reports well worth reading to quickly immerse ourselves in the state of adaptive learning: the overview "Learning to Adapt: A Case for Accelerating Adaptive Learning in Higher Education" and "Learning to Adapt: Understanding the Adaptive Learning Supplier Landscape," a survey of several vendors engaged in producing and supporting adaptive learning technology. The authors of the Tyton Partners "Case for Accelerating Adaptive Learning" conclude their white paper with comments providing a fair assessment of where we remain for the moment: "…adaptive learning applications…still remain long on promise, and we must start where we are. But we are already somewhere quite interesting…fostering more personalized collaboration among students and with instructors by virtue of new tools and new data that promise to bring the power of learning to more learners more effectively and more efficiently than ever before" (p. 16). If trainer-teacher-learners collaborate to drive the process in ways that focus on learners rather than putting the tech tools at the center of the learning process, this remains a world well worth exploring, as we see in a brief video produced by Knewton, an accelerated-learning vendor. When we turn our attention to the "no longer far-fetched" world of the Internet of Things/The Internet of Everything, we find ourselves in "a world where all people, objects, and devices are connected to act in concert, regardless of brand or vendor" (Horizon Report, p. 46). Our New Media Consortium guides, in this instance, write about how this technology provides the potential for learners to "carry connected devices with them" so they can "benefit from a host of interdisciplinary information that is pushed to them from their surroundings" and to "create an environment where learners are informed by crowdsourced contributions and observations from the community via networked objects" (p. 47). Examples of the Internet of Things in action within learning settings include those fostered by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Internet of Things Lab, which features hands-on experimentation by learners, and efforts by University of Pennsylvania students to engage in product development. If we engage in the spirit of the Horizon Project reports, we don’t stop here; we continue exploring the numerous resources available to us to learn more about the Internet of Everything and its potential to combine people, process, data, and things in ways that further support learning innovations, as described in Cisco’s brief "Education and The Internet of Everything" video. This ultimately reminds us that reading Horizon Project reports is the beginning, not the end, of an important process in our own lifelong-learning efforts; what matters most is what we do with the information and inspiration these reports consistently provide on educational technology, its key trends, and the challenges we face in the dynamic world of training-teaching-learning.  NB: This is a final set of reflections in a six-part series of articles exploring the latest Horizon Report.

One of the benefits of participating in a very small conference—in this case, one that had no more than 30 colleagues onsite—is that the lines between presenters/learning facilitators and learners quickly blurs to the advantage of all involved. The 2015 Knowledge & Information Professional Association (KIPA) Conference, held in Denton, Texas, last week was, from the beginning, planned as a small gathering, with approximately 50 people registered to attend. Unexpected snow and icy roads in the days before the conference began cut the attendance substantially, reducing the number of onsite attendees to approximately 30. Because nearly every one of those attendees was, at some point, scheduled to facilitate a learning session alone or with a co-presenter, there was no way to be present without gaining a dynamic view of what many of our onsite colleagues are producing; it was also a wonderful opportunity to quickly observe a variety of presentation styles juxtaposed against each other—a great learning opportunity for any trainer-teacher-learner. Presentations were scheduled throughout the first of the two days of activities, with two 45-minute opening plenary sessions in the morning followed by two concurrent mid-morning sets of break-out sessions featuring up to four different 30-minute presentations. A lunch break was followed by another two plenary sessions and a second concurrent pair of break-out sessions. What this ultimately meant is that those of us facilitating the plenary sessions had plenty of opportunities to be on the other side of the learning landscape by switching from presenter to audience member/learner in those shorter break-out sessions led by the same people who were our co-learners at some point during the day. The result was magnificent—a fantastic experience in which it was impossible to not become familiar, at some level, with the work many of our knowledge management and information-professional colleagues are producing in the field of knowledge management, librarianship, and a variety of other inter-related endeavors. Using Storify to capture conference tweets extends the learning space   As we became more acquainted with each other throughout the day, we were able to consciously and overtly make connections between the various discussion threads inspired by content within each session. By the time I led colleagues through a discussion about creative approaches to onsite and online learning spaces early that afternoon, for example, I was able, on the spot, to build upon what we had already heard, build upon experiences others brought to the topic, and engage in several spirited exchanges which helped all of us deepen our extensive understanding of and appreciation for the way our learning spaces are evolving and expanding every time we use them. I also helped extend the learning space itself by tweeting throughout the day; those interactions on Twitter added an additional 10 co-learners at varying levels of engagement from elsewhere in the U.S. and other countries—providing yet another example of how our "learning spaces" quickly expand beyond our initial expectations when we invite others to the party. That expansion, in fact, is still continuing nearly a week later as I see new retweets from people who were not able to be at the onsite portion of our extended onsite-online learning space. KIPA President Joe Colannino, via his session exploring how collaboration and innovation are producing interesting (and potentially world-changing) results in the Seattle-based ClearSign technology company where he works, unintentionally expanded the learning-space conversation a bit by taking us to company website and a video on "The Future of Fire." It was a great reminder of how accessible offsite resources are to us in our onsite-online learning spaces, and how engaging a learning opportunity becomes when we draw those resources into our rooms. Kimberly Moore, a University of North Texas adjunct faculty member and head librarian at All Saints’ Episcopal School in Forth Worth, led us through one additional unintentional extension of the learning-space exploration by using a course website (rather than a PowerPoint slide deck) to talk about how her young students learn about Web 2.0 by working on and with online spaces. Her website includes an infographic designed to help us see that our digital natives are "technologically savvy but not [digitally] literate," and incorporating that infographic into her presentation was another reminder that our learning-space resources are as expansive as our imaginations are. Colannino, toward the end of his presentation, talked about how research and development in corporations is all about finding opportunities and then finding innovative people to take advantage of those opportunities. Being with those innovative colleagues at KIPA 2015 and seeing how effective it was to have my session built around plenty of interactions and an image-laden (rather than text-heavy) PowerPoint slide deck followed by Colannino’s session with a different style of deck that included the video, and then followed by Moore’s session built around a website that became part of our learning space shows just how much fun trainer-teacher-learners—and those we serve—can have when we all bring our best ideas and resources to the learning table.

Joining the hour-long discussion about pursuing careers in training-teaching-learning today on the latest episode of Maurice Coleman’s T is for Training once again helped make something obvious to me: it’s all about love. T is for Training Logo You could hear, as each one of us on the audio recording described how we began working as trainer-teacher-learners in library settings, the same theme that runs through most conversations I have with colleagues engaged in designing and facilitating learning opportunities onsite and/or online throughout the world: we really love what we do. We love the opportunities the work provides for us to make a difference among the learners we serve and the patrons-customers-clients those learners ultimately serve. We love the shared sense of achievement we have with learners when our efforts help them become better at or more knowledgeable about something they wanted to pursue. We love the never-ending challenge of having to learn new things so we can stay at least a couple of steps ahead of those we serve. And we love the fact that many of us involved in workplace learning and performance (staff training) found our way into the profession in ways other than through overt decisions. It’s not as if any of us can remember a conversation in a kindergarten playground that included the words, "When I grow up, I’m going to be a trainer," much less the even more specific, "When I grow up, I’m going to work in staff training for libraries." One T is for Training colleague, in fact, noted that she did pursue an academic degree in teaching elementary-school students before realized she didn’t even like other people’s children—a somewhat discouraging obstacle to her initial plans; my own feeling is that we’re tremendously fortunate that she found a more compatible audience in the adult learners she so effectively serves today. For those of us in the T is for Training conversation and for numerous other colleagues with whom I’ve had this conversation, training-teaching-learning was something that came our way when a colleague or an insistent manager or supervisor told us that we seemed to have an ability to help others learn what they have to learn, assured us that we "talk real pretty," and decided that we would be great at designing and delivering learning opportunities for others. After the initial elation of being acknowledged for being good at anything at all began to subside, we generally were overcome by sheer terror when we realized we had very little formal training in how to help others learn, so we spent the next few years scrambling to absorb everything we possibly could about a subject and a skill we were supposed to have already mastered. It is, during that catching-up-to-be-where-we-were-supposed-to-be-yesterday process, that love sets in. We love the fact that we discover many colleagues who not only have suffered through this "Great! I’m a trainer. Now what do I do?" experience but who are also quite willing to share tips and experiences and resources. If we’re in libraries, we discover that the American Library Association has plenty of groups that include our best training-teaching-learning colleagues, e.g., the Learning Round Table, the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), and the Library Instruction Round Table (LIRT). If we’re engaged in exploring ways to effectively use educational technology to support learning, we find plenty of wonderfully innovative (and very patient) colleagues in the New Media Consortium. If we are looking for a global learning organization comprised of colleagues in training-teaching-learning, we find a first-rate professional family in the Association for Talent Development (formerly ASTD, the American Society for Training & Development). We also love the fact that nearly everything we do contributes to our increasing skills in training-teaching-learning. If we have an engaging learning experience, we incorporate the best of that experience into the learning we design and facilitate. If we have a terrible learning experience, we add it to the list of indignities we will never (intentionally) inflict on other learners. If we hear a colleague describe a successful learning exercise or instructional-design technique or engaging way to prepare slide decks for onsite or online learning sessions, we absorb them and share them. We write articles about them. We do presentations about them. We discuss them within T is for Training and our numerous other communities of learning. And we sustain that insatiable hunger for constant improvement by immediately following that successful acquisition of a new training-teaching-learning tip or technique with the words, "That was great. What’s next?" That love of training-teaching-learning extends to a love of sharing our enthusiasm with those who may be following in our footsteps sooner than later, as was clear when we discussed tips for those currently earning the academic degrees necessary for successful careers within libraries. Not surprisingly, we all encouraged current MLS/MLIS students to pursue any opportunity available to take courses about training-teaching-learning. The less-obvious advice that we consistently offered was to "take initiative and be creative" in seeking and developing those opportunities. If an information-school program isn’t specifically offering courses in the fundamentals of teaching and learning or isn’t offering courses in instructional design (and this appears to be a huge gap in most programs I’ve explored), students can shape those learning experiences by seeking a willing faculty member who will oversee independent, semester-long individual-study projects that allow the student to learn by creating his or her own curriculum that results in a concrete final project which, in turn, may be publishable—a winning situation in that the learner gains recognition for the effort expended, and the entire community of learning has grown through the addition of what that project documents and suggests. Although our T is for Training conversation didn’t explicitly move in this direction, it could easily have included suggestions that those seeking careers in training-teaching-learning (and those needing new, engaging, inspiring trainer-teacher-learners) work to establish formal mentorships and apprenticeships. It’s obvious to my colleagues and to me that lifelong learning is an essential element to success in contemporary workplaces, and it’s obvious to me that our commitment to lifelong learning is what makes us competitive—and useful to those we serve. The more we can do to draw people into the ever-evolving world of training-teaching-learning, support them in their growth as part of our own professional growth process, and draw them into our professional associations (e.g., ALA and ATD) as well as our formal and informal onsite and online communities of learning, the more successful we all will be. And the more love we’ll have to share.

"I was on a bit of a rant the other day…" may not seem to be the most auspicious way to begin a dynamic, wide-ranging, and inspiring conversation about fostering self-motivation among learners. Nassau Library System Outreach Services Specialist Andrea Snyder, however, may have hit upon a training-teaching-learning truism when she made that admission earlier today on the latest episode of Maurice Coleman’s T is for Training—the unspoken truism being that we are often motivated (to rant as well as to learn) by our levels of passion about a given topic or situation. Snyder’s alleged rant—and the entire T is for Training discussion—was inadvertently inspired by one of her colleagues who not only seemed completely unaware of an important element of contemporary librarianship, but displayed little interest in plugging that knowledge deficiency. Listening to Snyder’s description of the situation, we couldn’t help but understand the underlying challenge: how do trainer-teacher-learners help their colleagues in learning fill critically important gaps in their knowledge when those learners don’t even seem to be aware that those gaps exist? The underlying problem for so many of us, as Coleman noted at the beginning of the discussion (available online in an archived recording and briefly described on the T is for Training site) is that we don’t know what we don’t know. That, as we all agreed during our discussion, is where trainer-teacher-learners play important roles grounded in our own passions about learning—our own learning as well as the learning of those we are committed to supporting. "It’s tough because there are students who are self-motivated…and then there are students who come into a program…and think ‘You’re going to tell me what I need to know,’" T is for Training colleague Jill Hurst-Wahl suggested. And it becomes even more difficult when contemporary learners don’t seem be aware of the need to commit to a program of lifelong learning: "You don’t just come out of a degree program and stop learning." For me, it begins with acknowledgement of and commitment to fostering collaborative learning—the type of learning where everyone has a role to play and there isn’t necessarily a single person serving start-to-finish as the primary mover in the process. It’s the type of learning that we see in connected learning settings, in the best of our connectivist MOOCs (massive open online courses), in well-nurtured communities of learning, and so many other settings where the role of learning facilitator is shared in an ever-changing way between the person or people designing and delivering a course or other learning opportunity and the learners themselves. In terms of workplace learning, it’s the difference between a learner showing up to a mandated two-hour "Preventing Sexual Harassment" session online (where the learner passively absorbs canned lectures and then completes the learning experience by taking a quiz) and the same learner showing up for an interactive onsite or online session that provides essential information, includes discussion and chances to absorb and immediately use the information through deeper and richer explorations, then extends to opportunities back in the workplace to demonstrate an ability to apply, in a positive way, the lessons learned. If we’re serious about supporting our learners, nurturing their self-motivation to learn, and gaining the most from the time and resources invested in learning opportunities, we need to passionately and with great dedication show that appropriate application of learning is more important than simply attending a session and passing a test. What is abundantly clear from that T is for Training discussion and numerous conversations I’ve had with colleagues in training-teaching-learning is that the best of those colleagues really do care about the learners they serve and are motivated to support their learning—which is why we spend relatively small amounts of time ranting about the sort of situation Snyder described and much larger amounts of time seeking and implementing ways to help learners identify what they need to know and then supporting their efforts to fill their knowledge gaps. Again, this is collaborative: if we make ourselves accessible to our learners by visiting their worksites, listening to their concerns and watching for gaps they themselves might not have identified, and working with them to create effective, creative, engaging learning opportunities, we all rise together in our learning efforts. Jill Hurst-Wahl It’s far more than an attempt to justify the time, energy, and money that goes into workplace learning and performance/staff development/staff training programs; it’s an acknowledgement that those who aren’t self-motivated and well-supported are not going to survive in contemporary workplaces: "We’re in an economic environment where if you’re not a self-directed learner…you’re going to get left behind," Hurst-Wahl observed. "That being left behind may not happen immediately [but] in some way, you’re going to be left behind. People are going to look at you and say, ‘Oh, you don’t know that thing? Huh. OK. I’m moving on.’" None of which is to say that learning facilitators don’t have important roles to play and that a commitment to the learning process is anything less than an essential element to be cultivated by all parties in the learning process: "I talk about things that I have at least some sort of feeling about," Coleman noted. "When I’m out presenting or training, usually I feel some affinity for the material…I’m energized; I’m buzzed by it. I want people to be energized by it, too [and talking about it]. If you’re talking, you’re engaged"—and, I would add, cultivating the passion that fosters self-motivation among learners as well as among those of us supporting those learners.  

We don’t have to go very far into Sandra Hirsh’s newly-released anthology Information Services Today: An Introduction to reach the first of the challenges many of us face in the contemporary workplace, where job descriptions and workplace responsibilities evolve and increase at a dizzying, overwhelming pace : our language has not been keeping up with the changes taking place within our professions. It’s not as if the words "librarian" or "library" are in any danger of disappearing anytime soon; they do, at significant levels, remain evocative, familiar, and comforting even though they inadequately describe the people and the organizations under discussion. On the other hand, we see throughout Information Services Today the use of "information professionals" and "information organizations" (defined at the beginning of the book’s preface as "all places that manage, create, store, or provide information") as terms more suggestive and reflective of what those organizations and those people who staff them offer to members of the onsite and extensive online communities they serve. Proposing and supporting changes in our workplace nomenclature is far more than an intellectual exercise; it’s an essential element of the process of acknowledging change by seeking and adopting terminology that reflects what we do and—equally importantly—helps others understand what we offer in our continually-evolving workplaces. It’s the same issue described by Theodore Levitt in his widely-read Harvard Business Review essay about how railroads made a mistake by describing themselves as being in the railroad rather than transportation business. It’s visible in the discussion about using "information professional" and "information organization" as alternatives to "librarians" and "libraries"; it’s visible in the continuing discussion of using "library member" or "library user" in place of "library patron," which I first documented in an article for Infoblog in 2008; and it’s visible in the field we most commonly refer to as "staff training" but more accurately could be described in numerous other ways, including "learning facilitation." This challenge of deciding what to call ourselves clearly isn’t new for any of us involved in training-teaching-learning—an endeavor that is a core part of what many library staff members/information professionals do every day. Four years ago, Lori Reed and I (in our book Workplace Learning & Leadership) were already documenting some of many terms being applied to those of us involved in training-teaching-learning just in libraries and nonprofit settings: "…director, volunteer services and staff training; training coordinator; training and development manager; training manager; training officer; chief learning officer; learning and development coordinator; staff development and training coordinator; staff development librarian; staff development manager; continuing education coordinator; learning manager; and organizational development manager." The situation has only become more challenging as our ASTD (American Society for Training & Development) colleagues began the process (in 2014) of changing the organization’s name to ATD (the Association for Talent Development) and replacing "workplace learning and performance" with "talent development" to reflect the idea that "talent development" is the overall, far-more-nuanced description of what our efforts are designed to offer and foster. The importance of what we are facing and attempting to address became even clearer to me during a dinner conversation with colleagues at the 2014 New Media Consortium Summer Conference (held in Portland, Oregon). My personal moment of revelation struck as I listened to a colleague describing how a "school library" had been replaced by an "innovation center" and how school administrators, teachers, and students were struggling to come to terms with what that change meant in terms of what was available to them within that redesigned and renamed space. As I noted at the time, "the challenges we all face as our learning environments quickly change to reflect the rapid rate of technological change…reflect the rapid rate of technological change that is all around us: we literally don’t have the words to describe what we are doing in a world where our old labels (e.g., teacher, trainer, learning facilitator) are simply not broad and rich enough to capture the nuances of all we are doing. It’s as if we’re facing a vocabulary deficiency…" As we read through the 39 chapters provided written by a large group of information professionals for inclusion in Information Services Today, we gain an understanding of the magnificent range of services and resources information professionals provide through information organizations. And, in the process of absorbing that content, we gain a better understanding of why it’s worth looking for alternatives to "library," "librarian," "library patron," and "trainer" within the dynamic and enticing worlds we are lucky enough to inhabit, foster, and support. N.B.: This is the first in a series of reflections inspired by Information Services Today: An Introduction, which includes Paul’s chapter on "Infinite [Lifelong] Learning."

The topic of embedded librarians receives no more than a few pages of direct attention in Sandra Hirsh’s newly-released anthology Information Services Today: An Introduction, but it’s one that librarians and other trainer-teacher-learners would do well to explore, for it suggests an interesting twist on the concept of mobile learning—one in which the learning facilitator is physically or virtually mobile. Todd Gilman, in his Information Services Today chapter on "The Learning and Research Institution: Academic Libraries," suggests that "[e]mbedded librarians seek to reach students where they are rather than wait for students to come to them"—something that I see our best training-teaching-learning colleagues also striving to achieve with learners of all ages. "They might serve as a co-teacher by means of a virtual presence in an online course offered to their institution’s students or to students enrolled in a faculty member’s MOOC (Massive Open Online Course); hold office hours in an academic department, student union, cafeteria, or writing center; or offer brief introductory visits to face-to-face classrooms at the invitation of teaching faculty" (p. 65). Michelle Holschuh Simmons, in her chapter "Finding Information: Information Intermediation and Reference Services," carries the theme much further, beginning with a brief summary of how the term developed: "Coined in 2004 by Barbara Dewey, the term ‘embedded librarian’ has come to mean an information professional who is focused ‘on the needs of one or more specific groups, building relationships with these groups, developing a deep understanding of their work, and providing information services that are highly customized and targeted to their greatest needs.’" And this is the point at which any trainer-teacher-learner begins to see parallels between that embedding concept and what we strive to achieve: building relationships with our learners so we can determine, understand, and facilitate the process of meeting their learning needs. Simmons leads us to David Shumaker’s book The Embedded Librarian: Innovative Strategies for Taking Knowledge Where It’s Needed as a resource for anyone wanting to see how embedded librarianship works in action, and we can also find Shumaker’s latest embedded-librarian reflections on the blog he started in 2007. Simmons further brings the topic to life by providing examples: an embedded librarian conducting weekly office hours in a campus computer lab, and an embedded librarian who "took his role…to an unprecedented level by participating in the Faculty-in-Residence program and living with students in a residence hall." She also gives us a glimpse of public-library embedded-librarian practices by quoting from an American Libraries article by Colbe Galston, Elizabeth Kelsen Huber, Katherine Johnson, and Amy Long: "The DCL [Douglas County Libraries] staff are embedded ‘throughout the county in local schools, city councils, metro districts, economic development councils, and even a local women’s crisis center.’" It’s not at all difficult to make the leap from the embedded-librarian model to a broader embedded-trainer-teacher-learner model. Working with a group of colleagues delivering a series of tech trainings for hospice workers a few years ago, for example, provided me with a wonderful post-classroom/workshop opportunity: we took turns staffing an onsite help desk next to the hospice workers’ offices for up to two weeks per series so those learners could stop by for additional one-on-one support during the final phase of their transition from familiar to unfamiliar technology. I’ve also been involved in online variations on the theme by offering virtual office hours via Facebook and Google Hangouts for learners who otherwise were limited to asynchronous interactions in an online course; an encouraging aspect of those ongoing experiments is how easy it is to travel virtually to the learners’ moments and points of need—and how quickly the learners (particularly in a hangout) come to realize that our expanding set of tech tools go a long way in eradicating the distances and other barriers that previously limited our ability to become embedded in a variety of ways. None of this is big news to the librarians who have been exploring opportunities to become embedded virtually with an eye toward engaging learners and meeting their learning needs. Ann Schroeder, in her "Replacing Face-to-Face Literacy Instruction: Offering the Embedded Librarian Program to All Courses" chapter (pp 63-75) from the anthology Embedded Librarians: Moving Beyond One-Shot Instruction [edited by Cassandra Kvenild and Kaijsa Calkins] provides plenty of documentation for how any trainer-teacher-learner approaches the challenge. Laura Skinner’s "Librarians in Your Midst: The Embedded Librarian Program at PVCC [Piedmont Virginia Community College]" provides a first-rate case study of how to effectively design, promote, and deliver embedded services in online-learning environments.  And Steven Bell’s "Being Present with Learners in the Library" takes us beyond the embedded-learning-facilitator discussion to remind us that our best efforts are grounded in a commitment to "develop a presence that leads to connections and relationships." With these and many more resources available to us, we’re well on the way to creatively and effectively finding ways to go where our learners most need us. N.B.: This is the third in a series of reflections inspired by Information Services Today: An Introduction, which includes Paul’s chapter on "Infinite [Lifelong] Learning."

Trainer-teacher-learners reading Michael Stephens’ "Hyperlinked Libraries" and Kristin Fontichiaro’s "Creation Culture and Makerspaces" chapters in Sandra Hirsh’s newly-released anthology Information Services Today: An Introduction will find inspiring reminders of how learning organizations are evolving to meet community needs. In fact, if we substitute the term "learning organization" for the word "library" in a set of observations Stephens offers at the top of the Hyperlinked Library page on his Tame the Web site, we have another first-rate manifesto for trainer-teacher-learners working within libraries as well as for those working in other settings: "The Library Plays. The Library Learns. The Library Tells Stories. The Library is Transparent. The Library is Participatory. The Library harnesses user-generated content. The Library makes Connections." Stephens, furthermore, has provided a bridge from hyperlinked libraries to a concept of hyperlinked learning that carries us into themes trainer-teacher-learners are exploring worldwide; it encompasses learning models and tools including massive open online courses (MOOCs), a combination of formal and informal learning, Douglas Thomas and John Seeley Brown’s A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, mobile learning (m-learning), connected learning; reflective learning, production-centered learning, personal learning networks, and flexible learning spaces. His description of hyperlinked libraries in Information Services Today offers us a straightforward point of departure: "Hyperlinked library services are born from the constant, positive, and purposeful adaptation to change that is based on thoughtful planning and grounded in the mission of libraries. Information professionals embracing the hyperlinked model practice careful trend spotting and apply the tenets of librarianship along with an informed understanding of emerging technologies’ societal and cultural impact. Information professionals communicate with patrons and potential users via open and transparent conversations using a wide variety of technologies across many platforms. The hyperlinked library model flourishes in both physical and virtual spaces by offering collections, activities, trainings, and events that actively transform spectators into participants. In participatory culture, everyone is in the business of advancing knowledge and increasing skill levels. The community is integrated into the structure of change and improvement" (p. 185). Hyperlinked learning includes elements of much of what colleagues and I explore and document through our participation in the New Media Consortium Horizon Project: how we are incorporating technology into the learning process; how tech tools support and expand the collaborative opportunities we have within learning organizations and the communities they serve; and what we should and can do to keep our skill levels where they need to be to meet the needs of the organizations and learners we serve. When we turn our attention to makerspaces within the framework of  hyperlinked learning, we easily see how makerspaces fit into our experiential (learn-by-doing) learning landscape and how much less vibrant that landscape would be without the creative, collaborative nature of what those spaces produce. They provide a huge and much-needed leap from lecture-based learning—where success is measured by quizzes and other ineffectual measures of long-term learning—into a world of learning that supports the development of the collaborative and creative skills so many people promote as workplace essentials. They are engaging. Dynamic. And transformational. And they build upon some long-established traditions. "Information organizations have a long tradition of supporting a community’s intellectual and personal interests through rich collections available for checkout and through interactive activities online and in the physical space," Fontichiaro explains in the conclusion to her makerspace chapter. "By unifying the how collections of the information organization with the let’s-do energy of the community, information organizations can create maker learning communities and opportunities that delight, motivate, and inspire communities" (p. 198). We don’t need to make this overly complex. It really comes down to some simple concepts: Our approaches to learning and to designing/redesigning the spaces in which we learn, while grounded in well-established patterns and practices, offer intriguing possibilities for dynamic change at least partially made possible by the rapid rate of change in the technology we have. Learning is not something with defined beginning and ending points; when supported effectively, it’s a fascinating, rewarding, meandering, lifelong endeavor comprised of informal as well as formal elements carrying us between a variety of learning organizations including academic institutions, workplace learning and performance (staff training) programs, museums, libraries and other information organizations, conferences, and onsite as well as online communities of learning. We don’t have to subscribe solely to a single element of hyperlinked learning or what learning spaces—including makerspaces—contain. Remaining open to an evolving set of options serves us and our learners well. The tools available to support training-teaching-learning are continuing to evolve in intriguing ways, and we have a responsibility to ourselves and to our learners to explore those tools as time allows so we can most effectively support the varied, lifelong learning needs successful participation in our workplaces and our communities requires. We have, as so many of us have repeatedly observed, come to expect that learning will occur when and where we need it. Our greatest challenge is to find ways to embrace and meet that need through effective collaborations—without becoming overwhelmed by options. N.B.: This is the fourth in a series of reflections inspired by Information Services Today: An Introduction, which includes Paul’s chapter on "Infinite [Lifelong] Learning."

Preparing a personal learning networks (PLNs) webinar and reading Jan Holmquist’s "Global Learning Networks" chapter in Sandra Hirsh’s newly-released anthology Information Services Today: An Introduction makes me realize how wonderfully expansive and rewarding our PLNs have become. The idea driving the creation of a personal learning network—the ever-changing informal group of people each of us personally and uniquely defines, forms, and turns to in our lifelong learning endeavors—appears to be timeless; I can’t imagine a period of our recorded or unrecorded history during which people didn’t learn from each other informally, beyond the confines of classrooms or other formal learning spaces. And yet, as Holmquist notes at the beginning of his chapter, changes in the technology we use are expanding the pool of potential PLN members from which we can draw tremendously: "The world keeps getting smaller. Technology has challenged the need for physical presence regarding how, when, and where learning, collaboration, and sharing information takes place" (p. 374). PLNs, he continues, provide a tremendous set of benefits by offering us connections to colleagues with whom we can "interact and exchange information and resources; share knowledge, experiences, and ideas; and collect and create an informed guide to professional development opportunities and lifelong learning" (p. 377). We don’t want or need to become too technical or academic in exploring what personal learning networks mean to us to fully appreciate how they operate and what they provide. They are flexible (because we continually modify them to meet our learning needs). They are responsive (because we define them, nurture them, and turn to them in our moments of need, not someone else’s). They can be collaborative (although there are times when we learn from members of our PLNs without directly contacting them, e.g., when we learn by reading a PLN colleague’s writing on a topic we’re exploring or drawing upon a list of resources curated by members of our PLNs). They thrive on our willingness to contribute to them rather than seeing them solely as one-way resources—something where we take but never give. They are as local or as global as we choose to make them, drawing upon colleagues we see face-to-face as well as colleagues with whom we might have only the most cursory of online interactions via social media tools such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ Communities, Scoop.it, and Storify. And as the name implies, personal learning networks are deeply and inevitably personal (both in the sense of being something that is centered on each of us, individually, and in the sense of being centered on persons)—and they change as our learning changes need, but also have a sense of continuity that reflects the continuities in our own learning interests and endeavors. There seems to be no definitive answer as to how small or large a PLN should be. The work of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggests that there is a point (Dunbar’s number) beyond which members of any social group lose their ability to function effectively in social relationships, and I suspect that an overly large PLN eventually becomes ineffective in that valuable resources become overlooked because they are lost in the PLN crowd. The diversity of members and the variety of interests represented by those members, on the other hand, suggests that a PLN benefits from not being overly small or exclusive. And the resources from which we draw members seems to be limited only by our own imaginations: A cursory glance at my own PLN shows that it includes people with whom I’ve learned in formal academic settings, onsite workshops, and professional associations (e.g., the New Media Consortium, the American Library Association, and the Association for Talent Development); from people I’ve met in tweet chats (e.g., through #lrnchat); and from learning facilitators and learners in connectivist massive open online courses (MOOCs)—including one (#xplrpln—"Exploring Personal Learning Networks") focused on the creation and nurturing of PLNs. My PLN has also grown significantly by adding people whose published work—including work they publish on their blogs—provides learning opportunities for me. I’ve even realized that drawing upon an anthology such as Information Services Today can contribute to the development of a PLN; reading chapters written by and interacting with other contributors to the book has made me consciously include Michael Stephens and Kristin Fontichiaro, along with Jan Holmquist, in my own PLN. If this inspires you to expand your personal learning network by adding Stephens, Fontichiaro, Holmquist, or other writers, and to expand your own ideas about where you can find additional members to strengthen your own PLN, then you’ve taken another step in recognizing how global and open our personal learning networks have become. N.B.: This is the fifth in a series of reflections inspired by Information Services Today: An Introduction, which includes Paul’s chapter on "Infinite [Lifelong] Learning."

I’ve hung out before, and I’m sure I’ll hang out again, but I can’t imagine a more intensely innovative and emotionally-rewarding approach to incorporating Google Hangouts into training-teaching-learning than the one collaboratively created as part of the 2015 Northeast Kansas Library System (NEKLS) Innovation Day program yesterday. What we’re continuing to explore with Hangouts is highly-engaging, low-/no-cost web-conferencing, a rudimentary and surprisingly effective form of telepresence, and  notably strong levels of interaction in training-teaching-learning made possible through the use of an easy-to-learn social media tool—something that fell into place nicely in two consecutive sessions during Innovation Day. It has taken a fair amount of experimentation and practice to reach the point we reached yesterday: an onsite event that seamlessly expanded to include two offsite presenters (Harford County Public Library Technical Trainer Maurice Coleman and me) so we not only could interact directly with onsite participates but with each other as if we were all in the same room—and the room expanded further via connections simultaneously made with Twitter. My own experience in training-teaching-learning through web conferencing and rudimentary telepresence dates back to a successful experiment to bring an offsite presenter (from Ohio) into an onsite event attended by more than 200 people here in San Francisco in 2007 in a way that encouraged some limited, direct interactions between the online presenter and members of the onsite audience. I expanded the exercise a bit a few years later by incorporating Skype, Twitter, and onsite colleagues into one of these blended learning events at a Sacramento ASTD (American Society for Training & Development meeting, then carried it a bit further with my New Media Consortium colleague Samantha Adams Becker when we switched over to Google Hangouts for onsite-online blended sessions with ASTD Mount Diablo and Golden Gate chapter colleagues. What many of us were realizing at that point was that with proper preparation (which included abundant amounts of rehearsal time) and the right equipment (most of which was already available to us in each of the venues we used), we could erase geographic barriers in ways that caused onsite participants to forget that the online participants weren’t physically in the room. An expansion of the experimentation included adding an onsite Twitter facilitator (colleague Larry Straining, who ad-libbed from a basic script to tweet out what Samantha and I were doing via Google Hangouts for ASTD—now ATD, the Association for Talent Development) at a conference in the Washington, D.C. area in late 2014. Adding Twitter to the mix in this focused, pre-planned way helped make the point that the "rooms" in which each of these events was physically taking place was actually expanding to include a global audience comprised of participants working synchronously and others who could participate later in an asynchronous fashion by seeing and responding to the tweets in an ongoing conversation. Carrying this another step further by drawing "left-behind" colleagues (including Maurice) into the 2015 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting (held in Chicago) provided yet another example of how Hangouts could produce live as well as archived learning opportunities —and further laid the groundwork for what we accomplished yesterday during the annual NEKLS Innovation Day conference: live interactions between the two of us who were offsite, interactions between the two of us and those who were physically present at the conference; and interactions with non-conference attendees who saw the tweets and shared content through retweeting. All that was missing yesterday was synchronous two-way interactions between those non-conference attendees and those of us who were participating onsite or via the Hangout)—but we had a hint of it as my own Innovation Day tweets were picked up and retweeted by several unfamiliar tweeters here in the United States and elsewhere. NEKLS Continuing Education Consultant Patti Poe initiated the process as part of her overall Innovation Day planning by inviting me to use Google Hangouts as the vehicle for a presentation/discussion on using online collaboration tools. When she mentioned that Maurice would be doing a separate (closing keynote address) session via Hangouts, I asked if it would be possible to also include Maurice in the session I was facilitating and schedule that session in the time slot immediately preceding his keynote address. The experiences Maurice and I had with the ALA Midwinter Meeting experiment primed us to attempt something that was both structured—with specific learning goals and objectives—and improvisational so that onsite conference attendees would very much be involved in learning while also shaping the nature of the session. Rehearsal for Innovation Day Hangout (Photo by Robin Hastings) As Patti noted shortly after the day ended, it exceeded everyone’s expectations and once again demonstrated that it’s possible to have this technology as the vehicle for—not the central feature of—learning opportunities and to have all of us interacting almost exactly as we would have if we hadn’t been spread over a 2,800-mile distance—in essence, creating a 2,800-mile-wide room. Maurice and I had a PowerPoint slide deck (with extensive speaker notes) and a supplemental resource sheet that I prepared and that served as our roadmap even though we actually didn’t display either during the live session (we wanted onsite attendees seeing us rather than slides as part of our effort to create the sense that we were  in the room in a very real sense); the slide deck and resource sheet were posted online later as additional learning objects and as a way to give the synchronous session an extended asynchronous life. We also allowed for plenty of interactions via question-and-answer periods throughout the entire hour-long "Using Online Collaboration Tools" session just as we do when we’re physically present in training-teaching-learning sessions. And when that initial hour came to an end, we took the same sort of between-session break we would have taken if we had physically been onsite, then returned with Maurice assuming the lead and with me maintaining an onsite-onscreen presence through a small window at the bottom of the screen as I watched his onsite-online presentation. All of us had set out to create the sense of presence (i.e., close physical proximity) that we believe—and continually prove—is possible in well-planned, well-executed onsite-online learning environments capable of transforming learners. All of us confirmed with those onsite that we had achieved that goal. But several hours passed before I realized that in my playful role of the trickster who creates the illusion of physical proximity, I had unintentionally even tricked myself, for as I sat in the comfort of my own home here in San Francisco last night—never physically having left that home—I unexpectedly felt the same sense of melancholy I sometimes experience after intensively engaging in learning with colleagues at onsite conferences and then being physically separated from them as we return to our own homes and workplaces across the country. And I have the same sense of longing to be back with them again sooner than later to continue the connected-learning process that brings all of us such deeply rewarding experiences and relationships.

Trainer-teacher-learners, as I noted while facetiously promoting a game called Speed PowerPointing a few years ago, have a magnificent ability to transform challenges into learning innovations. That ability was on display again yesterday when new and returning members of the #lrnchat community engaged in our weekly (Thursdays, 8:30 pm ET/5:30 pm PT) tweet chat and, in the process, seemed to create a new format we might call "Macho Tweet Chatting." #lrnchat participants, as the community blog explains, "are people interested in the topic of learning from one another and who want to discuss how to help other people learn in formal, informal, social and mobile ways." The weekly chats (originally 90 minutes, now 60 minutes) have a well-established format: begin with brief introductions; warm up by responding to a question about what we learned that day (or that week if we somehow went all day without learning something); respond to six inter-related questions on a pre-announced theme; and conclude by posting wrap-up tweets during which we re-introduce ourselves and are encouraged to engage in shameless acts of self-promotion (which usually help us learn what our colleagues are currently doing/promoting/producing). When the virtual smoke clears from those hour-long sessions, we find that we’ve taken approximately eight or nine minutes to respond to and build upon colleagues’ comments about each of those six questions. But that wasn’t what we encountered when we joined a session on the topic of Persistence in Learning yesterday. The community organizers, with little explanation until we were well into the session, had decided to create lightning rounds by tossing 10 rather than six questions (in addition to the usual introductions, wrap-up, and what-did-you-learn questions) into the mix. It was only when someone asked why the chat seemed to be moving much more quickly than usual  that we learned what was behind the innovation: those preparing the questions about persistence had difficulty in winnowing down the number of proposed questions, so they changed the format rather than eliminate thought-provoking content that would foster our learning process yesterday. The usual format fosters numerous initial responses, some retweeting of those responses so that others not engaged in the live session have a glimpse of what our discussions produce, and a variety of playful offshoots as individual community members engage one-on-one before another question from the community moderators more or less draws us all back together into a somewhat cohesive online conversation. The increased number of questions within an unexpanded period of time simply upped the ante: we had to respond much more quickly than usual; we struggled to engage in the retweeting that is such a fundamental element of expanding the community into the larger communities in which each of us individually interacts; and the playful one-on-one side-conversations were even more frenetic than usual. It was clear that this was the sort of learning opportunity that would require some after-class effort to fully appreciate what we experienced—and learned—via the lightning-round format. Immediately creating an initial stand-alone transcript via Storify rather than waiting for community moderators to post it on the blog later this week made it obvious to me that many of the tweets were shorter than usual. (I suspect that the 140-character ceiling on tweets was higher than many of us could reach given the time limits we faced in composing each tweet.) Skimming that transcript so soon after the session ended also made me realize how much more content I had missed than I normally do—and made me appreciate how helpful it was to have created a useful learning object in the form of a Storify document—rereading content provided plenty of valuable opportunities to continue benefiting from the wisdom of this particular crowd by luxuriating over some of the observations; laughing at some of the funnier exchanges; and relishing the sense of support upon which a community like #lrnchat is built and sustained. A post-session reading also produced some insights that may not have been intended by those posting comments. When we see someone post "eyes glazing over" in response to a question about when it is better to surrender rather than persevere, for example, we can also retroactively read the comment as a reflection of the idea that some of us may have felt our eyes glazing over because of the fire-hose flood of information coming our way. When we see even one of our most agile, literate, and pithy colleagues acknowledge that "it’s hard to catch up on this fast-moving #lrnchat," we’re reminded that in connected learning environments and connectivist massive open online courses (MOOCs), the best lesson learned is that it’s not actually necessary to "keep up"—learning is often about what we can and choose to absorb rather than being about what someone else wants us to absorb. And if we’re empathetic enough to carry our own frustration over not keeping up into an appreciation for the frustration overwhelmed learners feel, we’ve absorbed an important lesson through the experiential learning #lrnchat so frequently fosters. And when we re-read my own tongue-in-cheek suggestion that #lrnchat may need to adopt The Flash and Quicksilver as our mascots, we might also take the suggestion as a reminder that training-teaching-learning at times seems to require superpower-level skills. What remains most encouraging and most important is that, at the end of the day (and the Macho Tweet Chat), those who stayed with it acknowledged how invigorating and—in the most positive of senses—challenging the session was. We came. We chatted. We laughed. We learned. And, in the best of all worlds, we experienced an exercise (and form of exercise) we may be able to share with some of our most advanced learners so all of us continue learning together.

Clark Quinn, a colleague through #lrnchat and ATD (the Association for Talent Development), is certainly not the first to say that he is mad as hell and to urge us to not take it anymore. Nor is he the first to suggest that the nomenclature we use to describe what we do in what is generically called "training" is far from adequate, or that our event-based approach to learning is often a frustratingly ineffective approach to making a different in a learner’s life, or that it is time for a new manifesto to set things right. But Quinn, in his well-researched, highly- and finely-nuanced book Revolutionize Learning & Development: Performance and Innovation Strategy for the Information Age, does far more than recycle old rants. He effectively draws upon the experience he and his colleagues bring to our workplace training-teaching-learning efforts. He builds upon research-based evidence to show where we continue to go wrong in workplace learning and performance (staff training) efforts and how we might change our course(s) to the benefit of those we serve. And he adds to the dynamic literature of training-teaching-learning-doing in a way that encourages reflection as well as action. "I am on a mission," he tells us on the first page of the preface to the book. "The stuff I had railed against a decade ago was still in place. I was, quite frankly, pissed off. I decided that I simply had to make a stab at trying to address the problem….I am not temperate in this [first] section, I confess; on the contrary, I may be tarring with too broad a brush. I am not apologetic, believing it better to be too harsh and raise hackles than to have no impact. Reader beware." The issues he tackles are numerous—not the least of them being the inadequacy of the jargon we use. As Lori Reed and I noted in our own book (Workplace Learning & Leadership; ALA Editions, 2011), there are numerous terms used to describe the training-teaching-learning field and those playing in that field; each term, furthermore, overtly as well as subliminally affects the way we approach and engage in our work—which, of course, is why it’s important that we eventually find the right vocabulary: terms that not only accurately and concisely describe what we do, but also guide us toward successful efforts supporting our workplace colleagues and those they ultimately serve. One of the most visible and well-orchestrated recent attempts to update our vocabulary came a year ago when the American Society for Training & Development rebranded itself as the Association for Talent Development for many reasons—not the least of which was a desire to emphasize the result (developing the workplace "talent" of employees) rather than the process (i.e., training/learning). Quinn, whose book was co-published by Wiley and ASTD one month before the ASTD-to-ATD transformation was announced, suggests that we move from our industry jargon of "learning and development (L&D)" to "performance and development (P&D)" for the same reason: to place a focus on the results of our efforts (employee performance in the workplace) rather than the process leading to those results. Neither approach strikes me as completely satisfactory, for "talent development" as an industry descriptor then suggests the less-than-perfect and far-from-inspiring term "talent developer" (instead of "trainer" or "learning facilitator" or any other equally-inadequate term we might also incorporate into our lexicon to guide us in our work). I continue, in my own work, to use the less-than-perfect hyphenate "trainer-teacher-learner" to capture what I believe is a trinity of terms summarizing important facets of our work—but I quickly acknowledge that it misses one of the key attributes Quinn calls to our attention: a focus on what learners do with what they are learning. If workplace learning and performance is—as so many of us believe—a transformative process that should lead to positive action, then the words we use to describe it should also reflect and acknowledge the inherent goals driving the process. When we move beyond the nomenclature and into the real focus of the first section of the book ("Status Quo"), we find that the author has taken a playful yet devastating approach to describing the state of our industry. The subheadings to Chapter 3 ("Our Industry") seem to be the result of an effective game of free-association—one that helps make the case for joining the revolution: "inadequate"; "event-ful" (in the negative sense that learning opportunities are treated as isolated events rather than part of a larger learning process that produces positive results for learners, their organizations, and the customers/clients/patrons they ultimately serve); "disengaging"; "antisocial" (in the sense that they underutilize the social media tools that are so important a part of our workplace efforts); "rigid"; "mismeasured" (in the sense that evaluations don’t measure meaningful results from training-teaching-learning efforts); and "no credibility," among others. If that isn’t enough to make us grab our pitchforks and burning brooms so we can storm and burn the antiquated castles of training/L&D/P&D, perhaps we need to check to see if any of us still has a pulse. The book (and Quinn), of course, offer us far more than a pessimistic document that would leave us wanting to slit our training-teaching-learning wrists. His second section explores research-based evidence on how our brains react to and absorb learning opportunities—in contrast to what many of our current efforts actually provide—and reminds us that informal learning opportunities, the use of communities of learning, the use of existing resources rather than always seeking to design new workshops and courses, and recognition of the benefits of mobile learning as part of our learning landscape stand to produce far better results than we currently produce. His section on aligning learning with workplace needs provides a great example of what he is attempting to foster: by incorporating case studies and reflections by several of his colleagues (including Jane Bozarth, Allison Rossett, and Marc Rosenberg—people familiar to us through our involvement with ATD, #lrnchat, the eLearning Guild, and other first-rate learning communities), he reminds us that even a book like Revolutionize Learning & Development can serve as a gathering place for colleagues to meet, talk, learn, reflect, and develop effective plans of action. The final section (focusing on a "path forward") works well with a short set of appendices to help us reflect on core competencies and practices that better position us to be part of a process of change within our workplace training-teaching-learning (and doing) efforts. "This book is not a final answer," Quinn says up front (p. xxiv). "There are answers in many of the component areas, but the integration is new, and a book is a limited endeavor." He leaves us with an open invitation to join the discussion through RevolutionizeLnD.com; the "Serious eLearning Manifesto" that he, Michael Allen, Julie Dirksen, and Will Thalheimer have posted; and his ongoing series of posts in his "Learnlets" blog. And there are, of course, the continuing opportunities to be part of the conversation and action through participation in #lrnchat (Thursdays, 8:30 pm ET/5:30 pm PT), T is for Training, ATD, and our numerous other communities of learning and action.

We can cut off its head, fill its mouth with garlic, and drive a stake through its body, but we apparently can’t kill a well-designed, engaging, dynamic learning experience and the community of learning it spawns. Nor would we want to. Graphic by Alan Levine At least that’s what a cherished colleague, Alan Levine, suggests in "The cMOOC That Would Not Die," a newly-posted article (with accompanying graphics that puckishly draw upon horror-film imagery) that captures the spirit and reach of #etmooc—the Educational Technology & Media massive open online course he helped shape and facilitate as a course "conspirator" in early 2013. Inspired by the #etmooc community’s latest learning endeavor—a tweet chat that drew community members together for a lively hour-long discussion about integrating Twitter into learning earlier this week—Levine combines his usual wicked sense of humor and insightful perspective into a set of reflections that should inspire any trainer-teacher-learner. I’ve been among those writing extensively about the unexpected longevity of #etmooc as a learning experience/community; a model for lifelong learning communities; and an example of how connectivist MOOCs (cMOOCs) are beginning to serve as a new form of (collaboratively-produced) textbook; in fact, I’ve probably produced enough to kill a small forest of virtual trees, and am far from finished with the topic. But none of that stops me from eagerly reading and learning from Levine’s "cMOOC That Would Not Die" and recognizing it as a manifestation of the very thing it is exploring. The playfulness with which he tackles his topic reflects the playfulness that was at the heart of the learning process in #etmooc (and, for that matter, almost every significant learning experience I can remember having). That same playfulness is certainly one of the elements that binds members of the #etmooc community together, as anyone reading the slightly-edited transcript of the integrating-Twitter-into-learning session can’t help but notice. The sense of camaraderie is palpable, and when I talk with friends and colleagues about the value of engagement in training-teaching-learning, I often wonder aloud why so many people seem to be reticent about fostering a sense of community in the learning process. Levine’s obvious passion for #etmoocers’ continuing levels of engagement—the community had produced tens of thousands of tweets and 4,746 posts from 513 blogs before he wrote his article; his latest contribution pushed it to 4,747 posts—reflects the same passion that continues to draw #etmooc community members together through tweet chats, Google Hangouts, and other online platforms. And, he notes, it’s not about massive numbers of participants; it’s about the quality and openness of the engagement: "I will cherish and take this kind of experience any day over some massive MOOC of tens of thousands of enrollees, 2% or so who stick around, and [whose] corpus remains stockpiled behind a login." His reflections further serve as a manifestation how he and other #etmooc community members learn via extended cross-platform asynchronous exchanges that inspire additional collaborations: he blogs; we read; we respond via the sort of linked response I’m producing here; and we extend the conversation via comments on his own blog site as well as via tweets that call attention to his blogged reflections—a process that is continuing to unfold even as I write these words. As I often note in learning sessions I facilitate, this is a wonderfully messy and engaging approach to learning—one that offers numerous rewards while also inspiring us to learn how to learn through entirely different approaches to learning than we ever expected to encounter. It’s what many of us learned, from Dave Cormier, to refer to and think of as rhizomatic learning—learning that expands as rapidly and expansively as rhizomes do. But when all is said and done, it all comes down to something Levine facetiously asserts at the beginning of his article: "Someone never told the folks who participated in the 2013 Educational Technology and Media MOOC that it was over. They are still at it." And the perfect riposte comes in a form of a tweet posted by Thomas Okon (@thomasjokon) in March 2013 as the last of the formal #etmooc modules had been completed and people were talking about how sorry they were that the course was "over": "Over?  Was it over when the Germans… Its not over till we say it is. Im keeping my column in Tweet deck!" Okon was—and remains—right. We continue to learn together in a variety of settings. To work together (several of us went on to design and facilitate another connectivist MOOC). To write about it individually and as co-writers. And to engage in teaching-training-learning-doing so that the community continues to grow by acquiring new members and inspiring others to produce their own versions of our successes.

Conversations aren’t what they used to be. They are so much more—at least among the members of the various extended and extensive communities of learning to which I belong. Having documented a conversation-by-blog that started earlier this afternoon, I find myself continuing to reflect on a second, entirely different, but no less dynamic conversation that began unfolding at roughly the same time within the T is for Training community that Harford County (MD) Public Library Technical Trainer Maurice Coleman so lovingly and effectively nurtures through his biweekly podcasts. The platform for T is for Training conversations is Talkshoe.com, a free service that allows talented facilitators to recreate the feel of a dynamic radio talk show via the Internet. A host such as Maurice creates a community of interest—in this case, colleagues connected by their interest and involvement in library training-teaching-learning opportunities; facilitates the conversations; and, most importantly, creates the sense of an open community that draws in new members and temporary participants in a variety of creative ways. There are sessions where only one or two people are involved; the session today, at one point, had nine obvious on-the-call participants. But what strikes me in retrospect is that there was a tenth person—Heather Plett—who actively contributed to the conversation without even knowing it was underway. Because her recently-published blog article "What It Means to ‘Hold Space’ for People, Plus Eight Tips on How to Do It Well" and its companion piece "How to Hold Space for Yourself First" inspired our conversation, there really never was a moment when Heather’s presence in the conversation wasn’t palpable. The first article begins with her recollections of how a "gifted palliative care nurse" helped Plett and other members of Plett’s family cope with her mother’s impending death by "holding space" for them. Holding space, she explains, "means that we are willing to walk alongside another person in whatever journey they’re on without judging them, making them feel inadequate, trying to fix them, or trying to impact the outcome. When we hold space for other people, we open our hearts, offer unconditional support, and let go of judgment and control." As a teacher, facilitator, and coach, Plett saw and documented the parallels between holding space in the situation she was facing and holding space in learning situations. Her lessons learned are worth repeating: "Give people permission to trust their own intuition and wisdom." "Give people only as much information as they can handle." "Don’t take their power away." "Keep your own ego out of it." "Make them feel safe enough to fail." "Give guidance and help with humility and thoughtfulness." "Create a container for complex emotions, fear, trauma, etc." "Allow them to make different decisions and to have different experiences than you would." And because Plett shared those lessons learned with all of us who read that piece, we were drawn into a conversation that started with her voice (as captured in the article), extended into our own hour-long extension, continues with further asynchronous but clearly interconnected interactions including the writing and posting of the article you are reading now, and will continue at least for a while in a rhizomatically-expanding way through any comments posted in response to this posting, any blog posts colleagues write and link back to this one, any tweets or Facebook comments we create to share and further extend the conversation, and other face-to-face or online interactions that build upon and circle back to what Plett started and the T is for Training discussion continued. What is most fascinating about all of this is the way in which Plett’s initial conversation-inspiring offering has spread so quickly and uncontrollably. In "How to Hold Space for Yourself First," she tells us that the initial article "has been spreading like wildfire. Suddenly, tens of thousands of people were visiting my website, thousands were signing on to my newsletter and sharing it on social media, and hundreds were commenting and sending emails. In the end, the post received so much attention that my website was taken down by the hosting company and wasn’t revived for 24 hours (when I finally switched to another host)." The fact that, as I write this, there are already 252 responses posted on the page that holds her original article demonstrates the nature of this conversation: it’s on her blog; it spread today to the T is for Training community; it clearly is inspiring contributions via other bloggers’ postings; and is, no doubt, inspiring plenty of other face-to-face and online extensions—thereby creating a conversation so large and expansive that no single contributor can possibly be aware of every other contributor’s additions. It’s as if Plett lured several thousand people into a huge room, gave all of us enough to get us started, and then stepped back to watch and let her baby grow. It is clear that many of us, through those responses posted on her blog, are directly engaged in the conversation with her. It’s also obvious that some of us are engaged even though she isn’t yet aware that we are diving into this deeply rich and rewarding learning pool with her. Most importantly, it’s obvious that our approach to "conversations"—regardless of geographic barriers and because of our willingness to engage in conversational "moments" that will extend over a very long period of time—is changing the nature of those conversations in wonderfully dynamic ways—a lesson well worth sharing with those whose learning efforts we facilitate in our roles  as trainer-teacher-learners willing to engage in holding space. N.B.: Join the T is for Training community every other Friday at 2 pm ET/11 am PT via Talkshoe at http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=24719&cmd=tc  

When a few hundred of your favorite educational-technology colleagues from all over the world gather to explore trends and developments in teaching-training-learning, you certainly don’t want to miss a single minute of it. So you arrive a day or two before formal activities start. Spend inordinate amounts of time engaged in face-to-face conversations in the various hotel lounges and lobbies. Skim the conference Twitter feed (#nmc15 for this one). Pore over the conference program book and website trying to decide how to be in five places at the same time. Reach out via social media to colleagues who couldn’t be onsite so they won’t be left out of the conversations. Grab every available opportunity to join colleagues for breakfast, coffee, lunch, coffee, dessert, coffee, dinner, coffee, dessert and coffee. And just when you believe you’ve covered all your physical and virtual bases, you unexpectedly find delightful additional ways to be so plugged into and help plug others into the overall conference conversation that it feels as if it will never end. What we’re talking about here is a magnificent part of the connected learning-lifelong learning process at conferences that becomes exponentially more rewarding with every new effort we make to be part of the conversations that contribute to the growth and innovation fueling first-rate teaching-training-learning efforts, as we’re seeing again this week during the New Media Consortium (NMC) 2015 Summer Conference here in the Washington, D.C. area. Formal conference keynote presentations, breakout sessions within a variety of pathways, and other activities start tomorrow; half-day preconference workshops took place today. Onsite conversations were already underway two days ago as a few of us arrived Sunday evening. And pre-preconference online conversations have been taking place for at least a few weeks. All of which raises an interesting question: given all the resources we have to interact face-to-face as well as virtually and synchronously as well as asynchronously, when can we actually say an intensive onsite-online learning experience begins and ends, and what (if any) geographic boundaries define a conference site? Twitter has been an essential part of my conference experience for the past few years. By skimming the feed from a conference hashtag a few times a day (and understanding that it’s far from necessary to read every tweet if I want to gain a sense of what is occurring), I’m able to asynchronously join conversations and "attend" sessions I otherwise would not have time to sample. By live-tweeting sessions and monitoring the feed from those sessions, I’m able to share content with offsite colleagues, occasionally draw them into what is happening onsite, and interact with others in particularly large meeting rooms. And, by commenting on colleagues’ tweets during and after sessions, I’ve found Twitter serving as yet another portal to meeting colleagues I might otherwise not have met—even though we were (or are) in the same room during a conference session. And that’s where conversations can both meander and circle back upon themselves in the most unexpected ways and at the most unexpected times. I’ve met colleagues face-to-face for the first time by responding to their tweets during a session, and then seeking them out before any of us have a chance to leave a room at the end of a session—which, of course, leads to extensions of the conversations fostered by those facilitating the conference sessions we were attending. I’ve also had the wonderful opportunity to serendipitously pick up the threads of a conversation hours later when small groups of colleagues gather in those aforementioned hotel lounges and lobbies. Conversations occasionally extend over Twitter for several days after a conference formally ends, and can also continue as those of us who blog read and comment upon each other’s posted reflections on those blogs. Coffee in a local shop But today brought a wonderfully new and unexpected variation on the theme. Needing some time away from all those preconference conversations and preconference workshops, I decided to go offsite for the first half of the day to have brunch and visit one of Washington’s magnificent museums. As I was finishing brunch, I couldn’t resist the temptation to engage in what was going to be first of three check-ins to the conference Twitter feed throughout the day. And there it was: a colleague’s wonderful summary of high points from a three-hour workshop—which I was able to skim in less than 10 minutes, with a few additional minutes set aside to retweet a few comments I thought off-site colleagues might appreciate reading. After a couple of hours in the museum and a little more reading time in a local coffee shop, I made the quick cross-town trip back toward the conference hotel via Washington’s subway system, and planned to catch the shuttle that completes a circle between the hotel, the closest subway station, and the airport (which is only a very short distance from the hotel where we are staying) every 30 minutes. The shuttle arrived as expected. What I hadn’t in any way anticipated was the discovery that the presenter from that morning preconference workshop was sitting across the aisle from me on the shuttle. So as he was heading back to the airport and I was planning on staying on the shuttle to return to the hotel, we had a few minutes to ride that circular route together while discussing his presentation, laugh over the idea that we didn’t have to send follow-up tweets (at least for the moment) to continue our conversation, and that his part of the circle that was taking him to the airport so wonderfully overlapped with part of my own circle back to the onsite conference conversation. It may be months before we see each other face-to-face again. But already, as I capture this set of reflections late at night, I see the conversation extending further—along with the reach of the "conference site" via a follow-up email message he sent. And if he and I (and others here at the NMC 2015 Summer Conference) carry these extended-learning lessons back to our own learners, who can say when the conference will really end?

Kudos, once again, to our colleagues in the American Library Association (ALA). Where many professional associations that offer onsite conferences focus their attention almost exclusively on the paying members who are physically attending, ALA’s commitment to use social media tools to include those who would otherwise be left behind is again on display this week. The efforts Association staff makes are well worth citing and quoting as an example to other associations or organizations—particularly any that are seeing membership numbers plummet for lack of engagement. ALA Marketing Director Mary Mackay reached out to all Association members a few days ago via email and a LinkedIn posting (which you can read here if you’re on LinkedIn and have joined the ALA LinkedIn group) to explicitly offer a variety of free opportunities to engage virtually with the 19,000 onsite attendees expected to be at the ALA 2015 Annual Conference, which formally opens here in San Francisco tomorrow. Here is part of what Mary offered: "You can get insights into library transformation, future thinking, the hot book and author news, and more from hundreds of programs, conversations, events, and the 900+ exhibitors by following American Libraries coverage at http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/tag/alaac15/ and the show daily, Cognotes, at http://alaac15.ala.org/cognotes/." Mary notes other ways to keep up: Twitter @alaannual and #alaac15 Facebook Event http://bit.ly/alaac15fb Pinterest  Google + https://plus.google.com/+americanlibraryassocaition/posts Tumblr http://americanlibraryassoc.tumblr.com/ Instagram https://instagram.com/americanlibraryassociation/ #alaac15 This is clearly an association that is interested in long-term relationships with all its members even if not all of them can support the Association through payment of conference registration fees; expenditures for food, travel, and lodgings; time spent preparing for and participating in conference activities including countless hours of work on committees; and other volunteer efforts that contribute to the strength of the Association and its work. It’s tremendously encouraging to see the various levels at which conference attendees and Association staff members work to support their offsite as well as their onsite colleagues. Dozens of onsite participants set aside at least two or three hours to volunteer as Ambassadors in the Annual Conference program I manage for ALA Membership Development. Available side-by-side with ALA staff members in the ALA Lounge onsite as well as in a variety of conference areas as "Roaming Ambassadors," they work enthusiastically to answer logistical questions (e.g., where events are taking place, where conference shuttle buses arrive and depart, where coat check and first aid stations are) as well as deeper questions about the Association’s numerous divisions, round tables, sections, and other opportunities for involvement in sustaining the Association and preparing it for its future. A few also contribute resources available to first-time as well as experienced conference attendees. Live #alaac15 Twitter feed on display But it’s not just the organized efforts that make this work. Hundreds of onsite participants will reach each other and their offsite colleagues through tweets ranging from whimsical observations to solid 140-character reports summarizing content from many of the more than 2,400 sessions that will be offered while the conference is underway—in essence drawing offsite colleagues into the room and encouraging offsite colleagues to participate through responses as well as questions that occasionally are passed on to presenters so the size of the room extends well beyond what we see here in Moscone Center. And there are always signs of new innovations: large electronic boards displaying the latest tweets from the conference Twitter feed were, for the first time, spread throughout the conference halls today as if to remind us that part of the conference is happening in rooms housing individual sessions, part of the conference is happening though interactions via Twitter among onsite participants, and part of the conference is happening via the interactions between onsite and offsite colleagues. There seems to be something for everyone, and those of us lucky enough to live here in the city that is hosting the conference are the luckiest of all in that we have already been reaping the benefits of having much-cherished additional time with friends and colleagues who arrived a few days early. Our conversations are magnificent opportunities to share information and to catch up with friends and colleagues we see all too rarely. Our conversations are also the individual moments that, like the bricks in an enormous and attractive structure, serve as the raw materials shaping the vitality of the entire Association itself. I’m looking forward to contributing—via tweets, blog postings, and other online offerings—to the continuing strength and growth of this professional family, and hope onsite and offsite colleagues will do the same so no one will be left behind. N.B. - This is the first in a series of reflections inspired by the American Library Association 2015 Annual Conference in San Francisco.

Anyone who still sees libraries primarily as places to borrow books certainly wasn’t onsite for the opening general session of the American Library Association (ALA) 2015 Annual Conference here in San Francisco last Friday afternoon. It was an event that set the tone for the entire conference for many of us. It reminded us how interwoven libraries and library staff members are with the communities they serve. And it was a perfect way to celebrate the larger events unfolding around us. Those of us arriving onsite early in the day for a variety of preconference activities and informal conversations with friends and colleagues were primed for certain levels of excitement. We were about to see more than 22,000 members of our community from all over the United States and other parts of the world. We knew there would be plenty of festivities centered on SF Pride activities (including the Pride Parade) all weekend. And we knew that ALA staff was doing its usual first-rate job of creating a conference guaranteed to inspire onsite as well as offsite Association members by offering more than 2,400 learning opportunities over a five-day period. We could not, however, have anticipated that we would be together here in San Francisco on the morning that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality would be announced and the afternoon that Roberta Kaplan, a key player in the efforts to achieve marriage equality, would be serving as a keynote speaker onsite. News about the ruling quickly spread around the conference site—Moscone Center—that morning, priming us for a major celebration at the opening session—and Kaplan didn’t let us down with her from-the-heart description of her personal and professional investments in promoting marriage equality. Drawing heavily from the opening pages of her upcoming (October 2015) book (with Lisa Dickey), Then Comes Marriage: United States v. Windsor and the Defeat of DOMA [the Defense of Marriage Act], she recalled the far-from-encouraging moment when she abruptly and unexpectedly came out to her parents. Visiting her in New York City (in 1991) during the weekend of the annual Gay Pride Parade, they were in her apartment as her mother became increasingly, openly critical of the parade and those who supported it. After Kaplan repeatedly, unsuccessfully told her mother to stop offering those unwelcome comments, Kaplan ended up coming out to her parents by responding to her mother’s question, "What’s the matter? Are you gay or something?" with a blunt "Yes," and then walked out of her own apartment as her mother continued literally beating her own head against one of the walls. The overall story she briefly told us (and which remains available, in part, on the American Libraries website), of how she went from being a closeted lesbian to being the litigator who successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Windsor, unfolds nicely and in much more detail in Then Comes Marriage, as many of us who received advance uncorrected proofs of the book at the ALA Annual Conference are learning now that we have time to read it. And the ample causes for celebration that afternoon—and now—included Kaplan’s comment that the entire struggle for marriage equality has left us with something significant to celebrate: our ability to grow and change just as—she noted—her mother has grown and changed in coming to accept Kaplan as a lesbian and, again, a cherished daughter. It would have been difficult to predict that there could have been anything to rival the power and inspiration of Kaplan’s presentation on that particular day, in this particular city. Our ALA staff colleagues, however, managed to find it by concluding the opening general session with the first-ever People First Award, sponsored by Tech Logic and given to the Pennsylvania Avenue Branch of Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and ALA 2014-2015 President Courtney Young were onsite to deliver the award to Melanie Townsend-Diggs (whose extraordinary commitment to the library and her community earned the award) and to Carla Hayden, Chief Executive Officer of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Receiving the People First Award (photo from @PrattLibrary Twitter feed) Tech Logic’s press release captures the thought behind the award: Staff demonstrated "exemplary leadership during several days of riots, which were concentrated at the intersection of North and Pennsylvania Avenues. On April 27, violence ensued after the funeral of Freddie Gray, an African American man who died in police custody earlier that month. As tensions increased and buildings surrounding the library burned, Enoch Pratt Library remained open, providing a safe haven for patrons inside. "‘I did not feel threatened, but wanted people to know this was serious,’ recalls Branch Manager Melanie Townsend-Diggs, who ultimately made the decision to stay open. ‘It’s in my instinctive nature to keep people safe and calm,’ she says. ‘It’s my responsibility to make sure that everybody stayed safe. I try not to be too proud, but I am definitely grateful.’" There’s plenty more to say about the conference and the people who contributed to its success, and I was still thinking about that opening general session a few days later after repeatedly running into and talking with a wonderful colleague with whom I usually have all too little time to sit and chat. As our third extended conversation in one day was drawing to a close, I told him how much I had enjoyed the exchanges we had had, and he immediately responded by suggesting "a 20-second hug"—a concept new to me and that quite literally is nothing more than an embrace that, in lasting for at least 20 seconds, seems to magically slow us down, deliver a sense of comfort and trust, and reminds us that some things—like enjoying the company of those we love—just cannot be rushed. As we reluctantly disengaged from the initial 20-second hug—and then, for good measure, immediately fell into another—I couldn’t help but think about how the interweaving of community, pride, and hugs combined to create a sort of tapestry of what ALA 2015 meant to me and to so many colleagues with whom I have spoken during the past several days. It was also yet another reminder that libraries always have been and always will be about far more than books and other elements of the collections. ALA members and guests came together, worked to be sure we included those who would otherwise have been left behind, and left that conference with an even stronger sense of community and pride than any of us could have imagined having—which is, of course, one of the greatest gifts an association can give its members as those members contribute to the making of the gift itself. N.B. - This is the second in a series of reflections inspired by the American Library Association 2015 Annual Conference in San Francisco.

With the roll-out of a new four-week ALA Editions online "Rethinking Digital Literacy" course a few days ago, I’m once again happily immersed in an ever-expanding, extremely intriguing moment of training-teaching-learning-exploring with a fantastic group of colleagues. At the heart of the course is a newly-forming community of learning (comprised of 45 library staff members and administrators from the United States and several other countries) creatively tackling the challenge of attempting to define digital literacy in ways that help community members more effectively design, develop, and deliver learning opportunities to foster greater digital literacy among those they serve. And there’s the rub: it turns out that even defining the term, as we’re seeing from Doug Belshaw’s Ed.D thesis (What is ‘digital literacy’?), is one of those enticingly wicked problems—something that is "difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements"—that can keep us up late into the night…for many nights. I have gladly and very rewardingly spent quite a bit of time exploring digital literacy as a result of participating in discussions that began among those of us enrolled in the Educational Technology & Media MOOC—#etmooc—in early 2013. Some of those explorations led me to what I believe to be an essential digital literacy skill: an ability to work within much different time frames than we normally envision—time frames in which a "moment" (particularly in online learning, as described by Pekka Ihanainen and John Moravec in 2011) extends forward over periods of weeks, months, and even years while also extending backward as we come across, and respond to, threads of conversations we hadn’t previously seen. Think of all these exchanges as one magnificent synchronously asynchronous moment, and you begin to see what some of us are already viscerally experiencing. Let’s be explicit here before we drown in jargon and fanciful proposals. Exploring digital literacy within the flexible structure of #etmooc started as a shared two-week journey with colleagues worldwide. By interacting with each other synchronously as well as asynchronously, supported by first-rate learning facilitators—including Alec Couros and Belshaw himself—we learned plenty. At the end of those two weeks, we walked away with more questions than answers, as is often the case when we are drawn into the exhilarating challenge of attempting to address a wicked problem. The result is that some of us continued to explore the theme; found and responded to tweets, blog posts, and online articles; and became part of an ongoing conversation with no easy-to-define beginning or ending point. Even more rewarding for those of us who continue to explore ways to better serve our learners was the realization that the #etmooc connectivist approach provided plenty of inspiration as to how we can interact with and engage learners—an invaluable tool in a world where adult learning—particularly workplace learning—is often mistakenly viewed as something that detracts from "real work" rather than being seen as an integral element of successful work. Building upon what I had already been doing to engage online learners (e.g., facilitating online office hours through Facebook, tweet chats, Google Hangouts, and other social media platforms), my colleagues and I continually look for ways to foster the creation and growth of communities of learning that support results-driven learning—we’re looking for positive, results-driven, meaningful change among learners here, not just blasting through a one-time session that produces nothing more than a learning badge or certificate of completion that fades almost as quickly as memories of the learning session do. Perhaps one of the key lessons learned in that connectivist massive open online course (MOOC) was that rewarding, connected, significant learning is going to expand beyond the time constraints we initially expect to face when diving into a course with specific start and end dates—the #etmooc community, for example, continues to thrive long after the course formally ended. We need to keep that in mind; plan for it; and, when appropriate, support it so that our—and our learners’—learning goals are met. This more or less brings us full circle to the current Rethinking Digital Literacy course. Inspired by those #etmooc discussions and creatively flexible pedagogical approaches, I developed a course that begins within a formal learning management system (Moodle); offers opportunities for the learners to carry the discussions and the learning beyond the boundaries of that course (e.g., into blog postings, tweets, shared videos); and encourages the learners to explore and use any digital tools they want to use in their exploration of digital literacy. Much to my delight, the discussions among the learners are already well underway just days after the course formally opened to them. The spirit of exploring digital literacy via their digital literacy tools is stunningly and encouragingly on display within the course discussion boards. One learner, quickly understanding that the challenge of defining digital literacy is going to be an iterative process, posted an initial definition that was followed by two refinements within the first few days all of us began working together. A few others are already reaching out to each other to establish a formal hashtag that they can use to extend their conversations into Twitter—one way of retaining access to their discussions long after their access to the learning management system ends. Another, with a strong background in IT, is already extending our definitions by suggesting that one aspect of digital literacy involves "an ability to translate the functionality of one [digital] application or format to another"—in essence suggesting that digital literacy implies an ability to help others learn how to use digital tools and resources. What is striking about all of this is the breadth of experience, the depth of thought, and the levels of engagement these adult learners are already bringing to the course in its earliest stages—and how many apparently disparate learning moments are combining into a shared/collaborative moment that is continuing to grow as I write these words. Ultimately, I suspect that our collaborations will lead us to acknowledge this defining moment as one in which, by attempting to define digital literacy/literacies and expand our view of the synchronous and asynchronous moments we share in our online training-teaching-learning endeavors, we gain a deeper understanding of what digital literacy might be, how it works, and what it means to us and to those we serve in a rapidly evolving learning and work environment. N.B.: This is the first in a series of reflections inspired by our ALA Editions "Rethinking Digital Literacy" course.

When your business has grown from an easy to manage startup to a classified small business, it becomes clear that you'll need to approach the dreaded HR issue. ClearBooks, a startup itself in 2008, wanted to make online accounting simple and user friendly.

Now I was supposed to write a second post on evaluating e-learning libraries and I promise that will be my very next post after this one! This post is about improving performance but considering it from a perspective of competencies. Training interventions have long been linked to improving performance at the organisational, group and individual levels. It's a given that the vast majority of training an employee will undertake is based on training needs identified somewhere in order to improve their performance and meet their assigned objectives or more effectively complete their work (the improvement of such set as an objective).

To celebrate World Statistics day earlier this week, we’ve decided to put together a list of statistics we feel best demonstrate the importance of e-learning.   Below is a ranking of the most influential e-learning statistics that express the benefits of online training for individuals and within the workplace. Tweet us your favourite statistic @FilteredCourses and we’ll be happy to retweet. 10) The US and Europe account for over 70% of the global e-learning industry. 9) In a survey of HR managers, 12% listed "not enough training" as the top reason for employees leaving. 8) E-Learning is generally shorter than classroom training on the same subject by between 25-60%. 7) Enterprise Survey Results state that over 41% percent of Fortune 500 companies now use some form of e-learning to instruct employees. 6) Self-study e-learning (asynchronous) is on the rise now accounting for 15% of all training delivered. 5) E-Learning is also eco-friendly. Studies conducted by Britain’s Open University have found that e-learning consumes 90% less energy than traditional courses. The amount of CO2 emissions is also reduced by 85%. 4) E-Learning is proven to increase knowledge retention by 25% to 60%. 3) E-Learning students have more control over their learning process and can better understand the material, leading to a 60% faster learning curve, compared to instructor-led training. 2) Companies who use e-learning tools and strategies have the potential to boost productivity by 50%. 1) Companies who offer best practice e-learning and on-the-job training generate around 26% more revenue per employee.  

​

These days it seems like you could find an online course to teach you just about anything you could ever want or need to know. Having vast amounts of knowledge at your fingertips for a fraction of the price of face-to-face learning seems like a no-brainer right? The answer to that question depends on one very important factor: Will you stay engaged in the training?

I am probably late to the party on this one, but I recently watched an animation taken from a speech by Sir Ken Robinson entitled Changing Paradigms that focuses on the need for change in education and how we can make it last.