 Hello everyone and welcome. I'm Brenda Haug and I'm the facilitator for today's session. We have two very special guests with us today, Mick Jacobson and Toby Greenwald are from the Skokie Public Library in Illinois. They are going to be talking about staff technology skills and creating a culture of learning. As we begin, let me quickly tell you about the technology we are using today, ReadyTalk. You should be hearing audio now through your computer speakers or headphones, whichever one you are using. And if that is not working, if it is choppy or just the sound quality isn't good enough, there is a phone number you can call in to too. And we will put that in the chat so you can use that. But hopefully for most of you it is working well through your computer speakers or headphones. I'm going to put a, can you hear us now, message on there so we can help troubleshoot if there are some people who aren't actually able to hear us yet. Another thing about ReadyTalk is chat. Lots of you are using chat already which is great. That is how we will interact today with you and you can ask questions there, share your experiences. If you have a resource that you think would be relevant to everyone, please feel free to share it there. We have some time set aside at the end of Mick and Toby's presentation for questions but actually we would love to have you ask those questions throughout and we will answer them as they fit with the flow too. One thing that people often ask is is this session being recorded? And the answer is yes, it is being recorded. And later today we will send you a follow-up email and that will have a link to the recording. It will also have the PowerPoint slides. And then any websites that are mentioned today that are discussed will include those in the follow-up too. So no need to try to write those down or capture them. Anything that is shared, even the things that are shared by you the participants will be sure to include them in that follow-up message. Okay, well as we begin I will tell you about the groups bringing you to today's session. I work with TechSoup for Libraries which is part of TechSoup. And TechSoup if you are not familiar with it is an organization that helps nonprofits and libraries use technology to serve their communities. And TechSoup is one of the organizations that is part of a coalition called the EDGE Initiative. And that is what today's session is about. The EDGE Initiative and the website for the EDGE Initiative is being funded by the Gates Foundation and it is being led by the Urban Libraries Council. And the EDGE Coalition has been developing a toolkit with best practices and resources to help public libraries assess where they are at with public technology services and then also make plans for improving. A big part of this is benchmarks that have been developed. And there are 11 benchmarks in three categories. You can see the three categories here on this slide. And you can see as you look at that that it is not just things like the number of computers that you have available for the public or the amount of bandwidth that you have. Those things are in there, but these benchmarks are looking much more broadly than that. And these benchmarks are the basis of the EDGE Assessment Tool. And that is something that is going to be available nationwide in January 2014. But pilot libraries have been testing it including Skokie and Mick and Toby are here because they are one of those pilot libraries. Today's session is based on one of the benchmarks, Benchmark 8, which says this, that libraries have sufficient staff with technology expertise to help patrons achieve their goals. So this is Benchmark 8. And again, we will include resources. We will include a link to Benchmark 8. We will include a link to a kind of paper version of the assessment tool that you can look at now in order to think about or prepare for that January launch. Again, we will include that in that follow-up message later today. But with that, I want to go ahead and turn it over to our special guest, Mick and Toby. I will let you introduce yourselves and I will have you just take it from here. Welcome. Great. Oh, thank you so much. And thank you for the warm introduction. It's really great to be here. My name is Toby Greenwalt. So hopefully you can recognize the dulcet tones of my voice. I am presently the Virtual Services Coordinator at Skokie Public Library. And my name is Mick Jacobson. I guess I don't have dulcet tones. I am presently the Supervisor of Adult Computer Labs. All of that is changing though right now. We are in the middle of kind of a realignment kind of spurred around some of the assessments we have been doing about the library and some strategic planning stuff. So all of that is going to be thrown out the window very shortly. So we are trying to build, and a lot of the stuff we have done leading up to this has kind of helped contribute to that. And that is kind of what we really wanted to talk about today. But first, given that it is Halloween, we wanted to start with something kind of scary. So brace yourself up there it is. We tried to think of the scariest thing we could come up with. We couldn't come up with anything. We were kind of beating our heads in the wall. And then I came across this image on Tumblr, and the rest kind of speaks for itself. So I hope you guys aren't all so terrified that you don't sit down and continue to enjoy the rest of the presentation. But we just had to flip out out there. But on a related note, our efforts to find a scary image to trick things off is kind of similar to our circle to really say something concrete about staff training. We've worked really hard to make learning such a pervasive part of the staff culture here at the library that it's really, it's often difficult to really separate out what we actually did to get to this point. It reminds me of a joke that David Foster Wallace uses to start his commencement speech, This Is Water. In the joke there's these two younger fish that are talking, and an older fish swims by, and he asks, Hey guys, how's the water? And the two younger fish turn to one another and go, What the hell is water anyway? And that's kind of a reflection of where we are now. We've integrated training and just an approach to learning into just kind of everything we do here at the library. So we had to really think back and reflect on what makes the library, how we built a training model. How do we cultivate a learning culture? Exactly. And so hopefully we've identified some of those things for you. It's a little different from what libraries like Anythingc have done. This is of course kind of the flagship for the sort of participatory librarianship, creating something. It's a very comprehensive model for how public and staff interact with one another. They've rebuilt their entire organization more or less from the ground up, and different from that, we're a big standalone library with a lot of legacy services and staff, so it's really been kind of a big shift to turn around. So we're going to talk about how we've kind of integrated a lot of different methods, kind of using the staff we have and then the resources that are available to us. Both little things, whether it's just small questions that we're asking people, or big large formal training programs that we've done that have kind of helped to introduce new concepts to staff, and just drive home the fact that trying new stuff is that people are in a safe environment to try new things. From our perspective, we try to give people the tools to support one another, and once they get the understanding, they can go and run with it. Libraries after all are learning organizations, and knowing how to learn really plays a big part of that. And we want to reinforce throughout all of this just the variety of methods we've employed. There's no single magic bullet at work. You can't even get a 3D printer and print out a magic bullet, because there's a good chance it may not even print out right. Because you have to calibrate the magic bullet first. Rather, it's like this mix of big kind of formal efforts, and then there's smaller, sneakier methods of integrating an awareness of new technology, or a way to integrate the tools into current services that really makes things click. Maybe sometimes, where was I? Yeah, so we're here to provide kind of an overview of how those methods work. And just reflecting on the edge benchmarks, because the edge benchmarks aren't overly prescriptive in dictating how you fulfill them, it's up to you to determine the best approach for your organization to meet this goal. So when you say libraries will have sufficient staff training, maybe that means you need a formal training program where you need staff that need a lot of handholding, where you walk them through, first you do this, then you do this, and then voila, you've written a tweet. Or maybe you can do things in kind of a more ad hoc set of discussions where everybody comes in and we say, okay, show us what you're good at, and then let the other staff members learn from one another. Maybe all you need is like a technology petting zoo where people can come in and just really get some exposure to the gadgets at hand. So your mileage always varies depending on what you've got. So with all of this, you really have to kind of filter it through your own person. Don't do it just to fulfill the edge benchmarks. Really pursue staff training as a way to make your organization better. So we'll be going through these examples in a fairly rapid fire manner because again, every library has its own specificities. And we really want to get as many questions as possible. I don't know if it was mentioned that the Twitter hashtag is hashtag TechSoup, so we're going to be monitoring that as well as the chat course. And we're hoping to leave for at least 15 minutes at the end for Q&A because I know it gets into that very specific stuff quickly. So we want to be able to respond to as many things as we can. So please think of questions. Don't hesitate to leave them in chat now so you don't forget them because our friends hosting will make notice of them and we can bring them up later if we miss them. And likewise, if you see something in the chat and you have your own answer, please jump in. A healthy back channel really is the key to enjoying a good presentation beyond just hearing the delta tones of our voices. And even any presentation because we're not promising to be good. Right. So let's just start it. A big part of training staff on new technologies really requires making an honest assessment of what it is they need to know. Before you even start, it's like a question, what do we know? What don't we know yet? And what is it that our patrons want to understand that we're not fulfilling? And that's really the first real secret. You've got to talk to people. I know it's scary, but it's something you really have to get out of. And not just the people who come into your desk, what the 5% of the population you serve, you've got to get out there and really talk to people and more so listen to people. And you've got to ask questions to really kind of prompt a response. The way we do reference interviews to stuff out, what are the real details we need? Things like what does your staff feel nervous about? What is it that your patrons are actually using? There's lots of given the moves to people who are more bringing in their own devices. What are the devices you see? We've seen a definite transition from people bringing in my day-to-day book readers to tablets, tablets all the way around. And you can do this in formal fashions. You can create some kind of protocol where you have a specific question that you have your staff ask people, or you can design a survey. But I'm really actually a bigger fan of using just kind of informal gatherings. With regard to staff, the break room is just a fantastic place to really talk to people. Or the water cooler, or those hallway conversations that take place. And you can even do this kind of indirectly if you're not, because obviously you can't be there all the time because supposedly we all have other jobs to do. But you can set up like a graffiti wall. Just get like a thing of butcher paper and leave it on the table with a question. And use that to kind of drive some kind of asynchronous conversation when you're going through things. It doesn't have to be literal questions. It's like what technology you're most curious about? What gadgets are your kids using? You can take a more sideways method. I'm a big fan of Brian Enos and the musician and the record producer. A long time ago he developed this deck of cards called oblique strategies. And they're basically prompts that encourage creativity. It's like a way of introducing limitations into a creative environment so that your imagination can be sparked. Often when you have an unlimited palette you get frozen by indecision. And so that's what informs some of the other questions. It's like what skills do you wish you had? Name a technology that scares you. What's going to change about your position in five years? Sometimes taking a more indirect approach can really result in some more eliminating answers. As far as using this to build a learning culture, your ultimate goal is really to not just have a direct you talking to them all the time, but more getting your staff talking and sharing ideas back and forth. And with all of this there's a good chance you're going to end up being a victim of your own success. To be perfectly honest you're going to end up getting a bigger array of responses than you really know what to do with. And that's kind of the other secret. You don't have to do everything all at once. There's always pressure to, oh Pinterest is big. Let's put it on Pinterest. 3D printers are awesome. Let's buy a MakerBot. Part of making an effective plan for serving your public is choosing what needs to be given priority and what needs to not be given priority. But having these conversations can really go a long way toward helping you set those priorities. And of course keep in mind that just because you choose not to do something now doesn't mean you can't always get to it later. And if you choose not to do something doesn't mean you can't learn about it. You can't research it. I can't emphasize the act of researching a topic is the learning as well even if you don't end up buying 30 Chromebooks or whatever it is. Exactly. So with that in mind you can then work on developing a formal approach. I'm going to actually skip a slide and talk about I'm a really big fan of experiential learning. I find that people learn best when they actually take the time to do the project themselves. You can sit there and it's like give a man a fish and you teach him for a day. You teach him how to fish, et cetera, et cetera, if we all have swaps of fish. We were a big fan of the 23 Things program that was started in North Carolina. And we implemented one of our own back in 2007 called 10 Things because we just concentrated it down in the best 10 Things. And these of course were the things that were a big deal at the time. But in terms of getting all the staff involved it ended up creating this platform where everybody could try all of these things in a safe space, send one another question, and then also help one another out. Knowing that in week 3 we're talking about instant messaging, you could get groups of people who say, oh let's all get online at the same time and set up a chat. And you'll see in the next couple of slides a lot of 10 Things on here are going to be, we will revisit them with a specific project. I mean there's a fluidity toll of this. Some of these things like social bookmarking that's with delicious fading into obscurity and things like that with the attempts to pull RSS away from wider use. It's the kind of thing that strong assessment will help you determine which things to really focus on. This week from 2007, has it been updated since then? Or is that something you did at that time and now you've been trying other things since then? We've been trying other things in different ways since then. We're actually working on developing a new kind of staff training to represent the library's realignment. And we'll have, it'll be very different from what it looks like now. But the 10 Things was jumping off point. And you'll see from within that we got the baseline knowledge and then we grew the tree from that. Right. In library school I was in a program, a networking class where we built computer networks. And the instructor's style was he'd sit down and he'd lecture. We need to have a computer. We take it apart and end up with a big pile of circuit boards and ram chips and cables and etc. And they'd say, okay, so now you see all the parts, go put it back together and then he'd leave the room. And kind of giving people that sense of working without a net, really it kind of unlocks. It's an empowering move because people realize that they know more than they think they do. And they don't. They learn on the fly. Right. Because then they turn to one another. And I suppose the biggest takeaway is libraries are an organization that learning to learn is the most important thing. And the future of libraries is self-learners. Right. This is another learning program we did called Video Boot Camp. That one was what, blog.step-stokey-library.info-boot-camp. And that was really one built around creating and editing videos for the library. So imagine 10 things, but just about video production. Right. And we had staff on hand to walk people through. We broke it down into simple steps kind of like we did the 10 things. Whereas instead of one week you did wikis, and the next week you did podcasting, here it's like one week you write out a script. You learn how to create a concise message and focus it down. Next week you write a storyboard. So by breaking things down into smaller, more digestible chunks, you can help people learn much bigger things. And we actually converted this to a program that we did at the Illinois Library Association Conference for two years running where we had people running through this program in two days and creating their own. And we had staff at all levels coming to us. We ended up making probably a couple dozen videos altogether across those two years where people would come in and grab a camera and go. Yeah, we'd check out flip cameras to them and then they'd go and do it. So basically we learned all the people we needed to hire because they're the ones who came and asked for cameras and wanted to do experiential learning. And then we poached them and it was delightful. Moving on though, and that goes back to this idea of really building projects around learning. The other kind of more insidious motive behind having video boot camp was it enabled us to kind of create a pool of videos that helping people really build stuff. And we've looked to other programs. This came from a gallery exhibition we had of Caldecott art and we thought let's set up a photo booth where people could pose with their favorite Caldecott books and we can superimpose this up. And that was a learning exercise for people to learn how to create good photos, how to use the portable screen we have, and then how to pull all the parts together using Gimp or Photoshop. So the specific project was we had the Caldecott display of art and we invited a lot of people to come and view this beautiful artwork. And one of our librarians Brad Jones said, hey, when have we set up a green screen and took pictures of them and then we superimposed the background of their favorite piece of art and then give that to them. And we got like dozens and dozens of great photos. So you can look at our Flickr pool if you like. So the whole idea of building projects around learning is like projects are patron based. You're building stuff for patrons to like. This is a delightful thing for patrons to do. But within this project Brad and other people learned the basics of green screen lighting which is not easy. You know you do three lamps and stuff like that and you've got to set up a green screen and then you've got to take the picture and then you've got to edit it. And how many, a couple of people edited a dozen. Now we have a couple green screen experts and staff and we can build on that. Because it was their idea if they're self-learned, self-teachers, but other people saw this and said this is awesome and they want to do it and they want to learn it as well. And the nice thing about this is because often time when you're dealing with staff you're going to get people who say, oh well how is this going to be useful? What are patrons going to get out of this? This was a case where the service dictated the technology as opposed to the other way around. And he said, oh we've got this Taylor card to do it. Why don't we set something up that why don't we do something fun with it? And that's where we started to incorporate the green screen elements in the photography. So I want to be absolutely clear for all the people who are starting to roll their eyes. We do not build projects around the tech. We do involve the tech in the projects. And I'll go into augmentation a little bit later, augmentation with technology of projects. Let's start through a couple other examples of how we've done that. The project really provides the context for learning technology. This is something called Bookment. So readers' advisory surveys sort of thing like quite a few libraries have it. If you're familiar with very trots where you fill out a big extensive survey outlining your reading preferences, this is our adaptation of it. So I was on the reference list the other day and I was talking to one of our colleagues who her name is Sophie. She's a self-admiring, not a tech person. Now I was talking about how I was going to use this in this talk. And she says, and I was saying, well when you learn bookmatch, you learn how to edit Wiki. You learn how to convert things to PDFs. You learn the basics of WYSIWYG when you see what you get editing, which is what you need for blogging and everything else out like that. So you learn a lot of technology. So you look around surveys and skip logic. And just to be clear, the back end of the bookmatch is once I fill in the survey, we paste it into a Wiki and then staff work collaboratively to make a list of about 2 dozen recommendations for the patron based on their preference. Right. And she told me, sometimes I learn stuff and I don't even know what it's called. Because she learned how to edit a Wiki. That's not a small thing. That's web design in some ways. She learned what a hyperlink is. And she didn't even know what it was called. She just did it because she was suggesting books for somebody. So this is a perfect example I think of experiential learning and building technology in the project because we could just have a Microsoft Word document. It wouldn't work nearly as well, but everybody would know the technology but for me it was a better tool. Another project we are in the midst of is called Skokie Stories. This is an oral history project. A lot of people do oral history projects or some sort of archiving project. We decided to do ours through video and audio. And one of the main reasons was that so we get to keep people's voices. There's a lot of good reasons for video and audio of course. But one of the main reasons for me, so my staff, and I said my staff, when people, my colleagues, we would learn how to edit audio. We would buy MP3 recorders and we would learn how to use those. We would learn how to use a camera. We would learn how to use a little bit of, you know, how to upload a podcast, how to edit something in GarageBand or Audacity or whatever software it has. It doesn't matter. They're learning. And from here we've got, again, the video boot camp and everything else like that. So we were building to this all the time. This is just another example of a local history project. I imagine you have a local history project. If not, I imagine you're thinking about a local history project. How can you build in the tech training, not the tech training you do the project, the project, and then bring the tech training if you get my drift? This is another example just in how, reflecting on the video stuff, we did tours of the library and this was another chance to really encourage people to really work on focusing their message and then how to stand and talk, how to work on your elevator speech. How do you talk about the library? How do you talk about the areas that you're really responsible for and passionate about? And by putting them on camera and putting them, it really drove home just the idea of how people present themselves. I don't want to rehash some of the other stuff from video boot camp, but that was just another example of things we've done. Likewise, we've taken the same approach with our roving. We're starting to implement roving here at Skokie with people walking around with tablets to do service. Of course we have patrons, more and more patrons are bringing in their own devices and I call them campers. They'll come in, they'll plug in to the outlet, they'll spread out their books on a table, they'll lay out their at least one device, whether it's a laptop or a tablet or a phone or some combination of the three. And they're certainly not going to get up to come see us because they don't want to lose their stuff or more importantly, their spot, the outlet, the wonderful, wonderful outlet. And so that model of waiting for people to visit us at the reference desk just doesn't work anymore. So we've been trying to walk around and show people that we're available by having the tablet. It's helped me. I've been able to get people in study rooms. I've been able to do some research. I've been able to pull materials from the shelf. And you've seen this, other libraries have really gone into much bigger degrees. There's a library in Helsinki that talks with local actors to show them how to walk, how your body language is being available and open. And I thought that was kind of fascinating. But one of the ways we've kind of, because you definitely run into that, you'll walk around and if you're just buried in your tablet, you're kind of walking to do your walk fast. People aren't going to be as inclined to it. So you really have to work. So I've been encouraging people to really listen and try to find people who are doing interesting stuff. We're bringing this back to learning. We're making people walk around with tablets and they could get any sort of question about a tablet because you're an expert on a tablet. So they have to learn the iPad. And now everyone's coming in asking for iPad 101 classes. It's not just E-book 101 classes, it's iPad 1. Because every E-book 101 class on an iPad is an iPad 101 class. So we have an expertise of… Yeah, it's building organically. But with the listening, we identify people like Carolina here who is actually, that project is actually the background to a website she was building. Isn't that hilarious that she came back and said, It helps people to find really interesting things and just provides other context. We wouldn't see if had we stepped behind the desk the whole time. Another thing, and this is a way of showing technology, training, our learning culture, and just integrating it into our everyday workflow. So we have a statistics module. We built a statistics module using Firefox as a Firefox add-on. And what this taught people is that there's another web browser not called Internet Explorer, which is only good because Internet Explorer cannot always do what you need it to do from someone who has developed websites. I hate Internet Explorer. But what they're going to say, okay, there's no other one browser, which is a huge step for many staff members because if something doesn't work on a web browser, try a different web browser and it works magically. So now they're understanding that the web browsers, and then they can play different web browsers. And all that code stuff. And also they learn how to add add-ons to Firefox. So we've got people with their weather popping up and everything else. They've learned that your browser is not something that is given to you, it's something you can build. We built a staff statistics module for logging questions to the desk. Instead of using a Google Form, which we could have totally done sometimes as a Google Form, one of our people built an add-on and it's installed into your Firefox. And that way it's always available. And then there's other things where you don't always have the skills to learn from within. We're not talking about some of those resources. Right. Formal learning, we do a lot. We also do formal learning. It's not all holistic then learning. We have done formal learning. And some of the tools that we've used are online. Well, Lynda.com is one of the resources that we've used a lot. And something I use for almost all my own technology training. I'm not joking. I do almost all my training for Lynda.com for software. Obviously hardware you can't learn that well through a website. But I don't know how expensive this is for everybody, but it can be a bit pricey for libraries. But an individual account that you might want to get for yourself is not too much money, $25 a month or something like that. And it has software training for all kinds of topics. You can learn anything from Photoshop. It must be 50 hours of video on Photoshop to 8 hours on Microsoft Word 2013. And atomic learning is another solution very similar. I don't like it quite as much at Lynda.com because honestly it's not as thorough. It's a little not as well-flushed out. For me the speakers are wooden. They're a little bit wooden. They're reading no dulcet tones. No dulcet tones, exactly. Another tool I mentioned we use. What's that obscure one you use? Yeah, obscure free one. Oh, can someone help me with this? YouTube? Have you guys heard of YouTube? I think YouTube is another obscure technology training tool that we use all the time. You'd be amazed at how many very specific questions have these walkthroughs of people just recording the screen and letting you basically just follow along. My staff training, when I order something, we have something called a digital media lab share. It's a space for people to create digital media creation. So we have to support that to some level. And when we buy new software such as, say, Rocks Your Toast or I don't know, something like that, we have to have a baseline knowledge. And that's where Lynda.com and mostly Lynda.com or atomic learning have it. So this is one of our online formal training tools. Safari Books is another one. I forgot to mention that. Safari Books is online books and e-books, but not downloadable, more like streaming e-books. We also trained Office 2010 and we used a classroom. Sometimes you just have to use classrooms. I know for a lot of your libraries, a classroom is not going to work. You don't have a classroom. Or if you have a classroom, you can't spread the staff for one person teaching a bunch of other people to attend. But if you can do it, it can work. It's a little bit boring unless the instructor is good. So I recommend if you've got the instructor, go ahead and make it a little bit like, make it a learning together when you're up there. The words of wisdom that I've heard for a teacher is not what you teach that matters. It's what they learn. So if you're teaching Office 2010, what's the most important thing to learn? F1, right? Isn't that it? Or there's just one number. All Controls Z. Yes. Those are very important tools when you're Microsoft Word. How to download a resume template. So what is it what they really want to learn? All of this is meant to reflect it, like teaching is a process. Like Mick said, it's not what you teach, it's how they learn. And in some cases, you're the one doing the learning. We teach the number of classes we've taught has gone up, has skyrocketed in the last couple of years. And as a result, we're kind of learning that we're using patron demand to define what we're learning before we go into it, and tying it into existing library resources. This is a phone, a mobile phone class I did a couple of years ago. You can tell because the phone has among its features is a hinge. But one of the reasons we want to do this, we had a big demand. The class was full. We've offered it a few times. But it also enabled us to talk about what library services we offered for mobile devices. We built a mobile website. We started offering text messaging services. We had a new mobile catalog, and we wanted to show all of this stuff off. So it gives staff a chance for some real dedicated one-on-one time with the public who's receptive to those products that they've been working on. It's somebody who's interested in, like we had some people who got really interested in making a Pinterest page. So we had them teach a Pinterest class, and that enabled them to expand our audience. And we actually turned that around a little bit. One of my main tools of making people learn technology is that I make them teach that technology. For instance, we just hired somebody new. His name is Michael. He's a very enthusiastic guy. I'm making him teach audio production. He's never done audio production. I'm not making him teach advanced audio production. I'm making him teach the basic audio production. Or like Toby said, Pinterest. There's people who say show an interest in Pinterest, and then there's people who don't show much of an interest, and we say, you know what, I think you need to teach a class in Tumblr and elsewhere. And eventually they learn these sort of picking their own topics. And because there is, if a class goes nowhere, you've spent several hours, sometimes 8 to 10 hours researching the topic, learning the ins and outs, writing slides, writing a handout, and if two people come up, that makes it tough. So if you can really build it around things that can be replicated, whether through other classes, or if it's handouts that can be handed out, as a means of promoting the service that it's tied to. And along that, screen casting. Screen casting is a video of a computer screen. You're basically taking a video of a computer screen in order to teach somebody an asynchronous sort of information need. And having someone teach a screen cast on, for example, something like ReferenceUSA or another database, means they're going to really learn it really well. And it's good something, good thing to have new people come in who you're not quite sure they're going to learn that database or whatever. Right. Another thing we started doing is, well, we've been doing one-on-one classes for a long time. And we have staff teaching tons of one-on-one classes. I think we're going to probably break over 600 to 700 one-on-one classes this year. And these are all technology one-on-one classes. This doesn't include the reference and the reservoirs for one-on-one classes. So what I've started doing and what I'm kind of playing around with is we encourage staff, we have a slew of stuff we teach. We can teach everything from introduction of mouse to Photoshop advanced. So staff can choose what they can teach. I'll only teach iPad and Android, or I'll only teach Microsoft Word or something like that. Well, trying to get people to level up. I'm still playing around with this idea, but make it a gamification. I mean, just put some links into it. Again, building on that process, we started taking photos of giving people these certificates and then throwing them up on our Facebook page and the other spaces. And we always get this tremendous response where people go, oh, welcome to the Internet. This is, I believe, what, 92? This is actually a patron, not a staff member, but a culture of learning in the community. But it reflects the library's overall mission of helping to encourage people, being a platform for personal growth and community engagement. Absolutely. We're building a new website. A question that came in is just what percentage of your staff are able to, or do this one-to-one type of training? What percentage of the staff does it? That's a good question for adult services where most of this training takes place. I would say 75%. We have a fairly large staff, and I should reinforce that. We've had about, we have what, 156 total staff members, and we're a standalone location. But yeah, I mean, I'd say altogether it's probably what, like 30 people? And not to mention eight or nine volunteers. So we teach a lot of these classes. And it doesn't, you don't have to scale this out so big. Obviously, in particular in smaller libraries, it's hard to get time off that. If you can schedule a, if you make just like Tuesdays at 3 p.m. on every other week is the one-on-one appointment window, then you can actually start making some time. And you may not be able to meet every, to serve everyone, but it can at least give you a chance to get started. When you teach one-to-one classes, and when you ask staff and say staff, you're going to teach one-to-one classes, they will learn the topic before they teach the one-to-one class. Even if the program doesn't show up. I guess if I'm telling a staff member, you've got to learn Windows 8 because you're going to be teaching a class one-on-one on Windows 8 in three weeks, they're going to go down and teach it because you can't argue with Patreon services. You can argue with me about what's important and what not. But if a patron says, I want to learn Windows 8, we're teaching them Windows 8. And there's just no argument about it. There's a chicken and egg scenario there. What comes first, the knowledge or the teaching? In this sense, we're kind of doing both. We're putting staff out there in the egg enforcing the undergrowth beat. And we make it sound like the Christian people are saying, okay. One more follow-up question. And is it staff at all levels, all classifications or job titles, are all levels teaching classes during the sort of one-to-one training? Yes, all levels are teaching. Not circulation. Right now it's adult services, librarians, and the tech help. And the volunteers. But within adult services, that's mostly everybody. One of the things we're looking at with this realignment is helping to expand that. We don't see why circulation people couldn't be teaching these, or why tech services couldn't be teaching one hour every two weeks or something like that. We have a waiting list, and as I said, we're teaching almost 700. We can have a month-long waiting list for these classes because they're so popular. Right. And if they have the knowledge and the demand is there, I mean if we have patrons come in asking about Mark, how to edit a Mark record, we should find somebody to pull someone in. And that speaks to another one of our goals, which is to kind of get to let the library be sort of the conduit through which people can talk to one another. We've really worked with that with the staff model, and we're starting to move that into some of our other classes. There's kind of the appy hour, we're calling ours Come On, Get Appy, where people come in and bring their mobile devices and talk about what they like and what they have questions about. It gives them a real chance to share their perspective. Because tablets and phones, they've moved to a point where everybody has this very intimate and personal connection with their devices. So it's hard to teach these in a very general sense. It's like, have you ever used, have you ever grabbed your neighbor's phone or your spouse's phone and you're just like, none of my apps are in the right place. Everything's weird. The screen is too bright. So rather than try to teach in a very homogenous, generalized way, it's more just create the space and let people really talk about what they're passionate about. Because that same intimacy leads to people developing their own creative solutions. It's like, oh, if I create this folder for my apps, then I have something I can quickly, all the things I access most frequently, I have in one spot. So if you take advantage of this, it's that other case where patrons, the people who participate realize that they know a lot more than they think they do. That creates community as well. And we've done this as well with some things. We had a program called Tech Munchies for a while, which was kind of a lunch program where people would come in and talk about, and staff members would share whatever tool they wanted to talk about, but TED Talks. We haven't actually done that here, but I've heard and read about other libraries during lunch hour whenever having a TED Talk meeting where they listen to a TED Talk. If you don't know what a TED Talk is, do Google it and look up Sugata Nutra. It's one of my favorite TED Talks where they're talking about technology, education, and design, which are what you're doing. What TED Talks, and when you say, oh, I don't have time for that, I'm like, well, maybe stop going to so many webinars, everybody. But if you listen to one of these 15-minute talks, or 20-minute talks, you're going to be inspired to have a conversation about whatever it is, technology, education, and design, which is what we're doing in so many ways. And that brings us to kind of the next phase is like where we're going with all of this. Because we've worked really hard to get people more comfortable trying new things, and to kind of talk with one another as opposed to just one or two people on staff being the ones who handle stuff that has flashing lights and goes ding. You run into a point where what do you do when people start taking your training resources to heart? You're kind of becoming a victim of your own success in a good way. It's like once people learn that, hey, even if I don't know everything, I can look for support and tools, and I can go to YouTube and find a resource there, or I can get started. I can create my own solutions. You need to be able to find ways if you're a manager to support those endeavors. And sometimes you have to find ways to kind of cast a somewhat critical eye on what they're doing, to make sure that what they're doing fits into the organization's mission. Say like someone's gotten really into Tumblr. How do you determine that there's an audience for it? How do you make sure that the library can help support them in their efforts to speak to that audience? But beyond that, okay, let's say you create a Tumblr account, and not many people who aren't happen to be librarians are following you. What is the learning goal of Tumblr? Is it a question as a manager? I asked myself, I have a staff member who's really into Tumblr. What's the learning goal? What's he learning by doing Tumblr? Beyond making an animated gift. That's one thing. That's a class. We'll get into what a success is. Here's some examples of ways people have taken their skills and kind of run with it. This comes from our school services coordinator. She had been working really hard to cultivate an ongoing relationship with all of the teachers in the five school districts we have in Scotie because we're Illinois and we're a bureaucracy on top of another bureaucracy. And she needed to create a way to reach them more consistently to make sure that certain instructors didn't fall into the gaps. So first we created a blog called Library Links which is strictly devoted to library resources for educators and parents. And then we realized that a lot of the teachers, they didn't always come to the library to see this. So we put in a WordPress module that allows us to send it out as an email. By the time she updates it, people get this email newsletter with the latest blog posts and the latest information. We're now working to, we've always been teacher bags where a teacher comes in and says, hey I've got a unit on Ancient Egypt. Can you put together a package of books for me? Well we're getting more and more e-books. A lot of the youth e-books are kind of unlimited users. It can be viewable on screen by any number of people. So she's been taking that heart and building kind of digital book bags where if there's a unit on the Revolutionary War we can send them this list. And she's been working on this through, she's been using Pinterest actually to create those lists because it's a nice way of making it visually appealing and driving home a variety of different resources whether it's our stuff or whether it's stuff that's legitimate stuff found on the web. Once you start getting successful your staff members might want to augment themselves with cameras on their head. That's the real extreme librarianship. That's extreme librarianship which is what we're all about. It's really too bad you can't see the animated gif writing of this. If you go Google it or maybe we'll put out a link on Twitter. But all joking aside, like we've been saying, we're taking projects, we're augmenting them with technology. When you've done everything and you've been successful and people are really learning, they're going to start augmenting their own projects with technology such as Holly Jin, one of our who did a TechSoup. She did where some came YouTube and it's got what 30,000 views on it. It's like one of the go-to finger players. It's a definitive where a thumb can in the world which is amazing. And this is what we should be doing. So augmenting. So that's kind of how these things kind of feed into one another. There's a cycle to this process. Once you're comfortable with learning you can start building it into other existing library services or create new library services. That's extreme. That's right. So we'd like to kind of, we want to leave time for questions. So we'd like to kind of wrap up with some of the core concepts that bring, we've got to earn our keep as liberal arts majors like Mick and I do. So we want to bring it back to the concepts. Oh, someone on Twitter found the link. Nice. Thank you, Lisa. Good for you, Jay. First thing, it kind of leaps and look. We've been talking about a lot of these. Sometimes the only thing that's keeping people back is just the fact they haven't tried it. We've had these classes where people are learning how to do it. Sometimes the week before or even the day before, or in my case sometimes the hour before, I need to plan better. The more you get used to this stuff the quicker you realize how much it builds on itself. Today with mobile devices and things like that, there's an intuition that's built into a lot of these projects. Knowing that things like Control-Z, the undo button is more or less the universal command across every piece of software. Like I mentioned with screen casting, if you learn screen casting, you have audio production and video production. You've learned it. You just have. One of the other rapid-fire trends is who is your key person? Who are some of your key persons? I call them the Pollyanna, the people who are getting positive about change, about tech training. And if you can't name the person off the top of your head right now, then maybe you're that person which is great. But you've got to, and I'm not talking about department heads. I'm talking about people like I mentioned before, Sophie, people who make the cookies. People like that. Who are the connectors? Who do you need to get going on this? Who do you really need to work on? Identify them, work on them. Sometimes it's going to be the same person all the way through, and sometimes it's going to be someone who once you introduce the project they take to it, and they realize that it's something that they really like, that they really want to do. And you can build on that enthusiasm. Use that as a way of demonstrating, again, context for how this works. Your key people are not Toby and Mick. We are already on board. Get us on board, but we're already halfway there. We were there yesterday. Now, one thing that you've got to know about is failure. Failure begets improvement. You've got to be willing to essentially fail fast. If a project doesn't go wrong, if a project doesn't work, take the time to reflect on it and ask yourself, well, is there something here that we did learn from it that we can harvest? What can we change to make the next time we try something like this function well? And be willing to admit failure. Don't pin failure on people out loud, but don't try to learn from your failure. For example, there's a baseball team in the Chicago and in the Chicago Cubs. It does not generally improve from failure, but there's a baseball team. You might have heard of my favorite team, the Boston Red Star. And they would have for last to first. So there are people who can iterate and move along. And then finally, you have to treat this all like a process. Whenever you introduce a new thing, it's not like this is going to be the same all the way throughout. You're going to make a change. You might iterate it. You might phase it out all together and introduce a new learning module, the same way it's delicious-fated. But if you've learned delicious, you're tagging. You learned a whole bunch. There is no end point. Again, it's all about building a really strong positive attitude toward learning. And then once you have that, you can really tackle anything. So that's kind of our spiel. Thanks everybody. Yes, you can get in touch with our adorable children if you like, or go through our contact information there. But we wanted to leave some time to take your questions because I know there's lots of specific instances where smaller libraries or libraries with different organizational structures or certain people can raise certain questions. Okay, well that was great. And I do have a lot of questions from the audience, so let's just start going through some of them. One of them is just tech resistance. And you talked about staff doing teaching or requiring people to teach. Do you run into resistance there? And what's your advice for tech resistance and dealing with that? I've been thinking about this a lot. I'm talking about this a lot. But one of the things I've done is that you've got to imagine a bank account and you've got to put money in the bank account and then take deposits from the bank account. So when I'm helping somebody with a printer jam, when I'm helping people with these tech problems, I'm putting money in that bank account and they have to understand that I'm going to take money out of that bank account eventually and that we're going to ask them to learn something. And some people won't see this. And I hate to say, if you really have a toxic person on your staff and you have the ability to let them go, you've got to let them go. Yeah, I mean, exactly. Some people, they're going to get it. Some people are going to need some coaching and they're going to need to see what context, what's the bigger picture about learning about an e-reader? The fact that the way people are reading is changing. Why do we need to teach people how to use tablets? Because they're not coming to the desk anymore. If you can put it in that context that can help. But there are going to be people who they'll refuse to do anything. And there's a point where you have to kind of say, you need to do this. This is part of your job. And we're very lucky because the administration of our organization is very supportive of this. But we have worked at other organizations that were not quite as supportive. And sometimes you just got a kind of like Toby said, leap. And then what's it saying? Ask for forgiveness, not permission. Yeah, beg for forgiveness. Yeah, exactly. You get a beg for forgiveness and ask for permission. Have job descriptions actually been changed to make teaching or training part of the roles and responsibilities for staff? Welcome to my life, everybody. This is the realignment. We're realigning. We are realigning because we see learning and community and other access as vital and they need to be their own departments. They can no longer be dovetailed into children's, adults, or whatever. I'm sure we'll be doing a talk about this. Yeah, there will be a lot of crossover between where just the concept of learning, the spiders into adult services and youth services and the computer lab and circulation and all of those things. And it's not just us. It's like the anything library in Hyde Memorial Public Library. I'd look at them and talk to them about it. There's a lot of libraries. We're seeing that learning is going to be something that butters are bred so to speak forever to take a more flexible approach to all of this. So does that answer the question? Yeah, I think that it does. We knew that question would come. That's something that always comes up with this topic and that's a good response. I think your whole presentation has given a lot of good ideas. Mick, can I ask you to type the name of that TED Talk speaker into the chat? People were asking and I didn't catch it either. Yeah, the TED Talk, you said there was one that you really recommended. Did someone tweet that? Technology Learning, or did someone tweet it? Okay, another question is do you use volunteers for training and if so do they get training on how to be trainers? Yes, for the first part. What do you say about the second? Do they get training to be trainers? We have them sit in classes by experienced trainers. So yes, they do get training. If you're coming in and you're asking to be a technology trainer, generally we're pretty safe. And we interview them to make sure that they – we interview them and it's a serious interview, maybe 20-minute interview to see who they are and what they're going to be all about. And we have them sit in a couple of classes and if they keep coming back then we know they're going to be good. But a volunteer with a six month shelf life, I don't know why students are wonderful volunteers. If you're near any library school, now it's all online library schools. Hit up San Jose or the North Texas or recent college graduates from non-library departments. Right, if there's somebody with a graphic design department and there are people working, it's going to take them a while to find a job within their field and you can kind of set up some mutual exploitation where they can build their portfolio and do stuff while they're looking for – And teacher retirees have been very successful as well. People who were instructors at some point or teachers and they were retired now have come and they've worked out wonderfully. Yeah, absolutely. And they could teach me about teaching, so yeah. And that really goes a long way. What else do you have? This is something you mentioned early on, Toby was prioritizing and how you have to prioritize. And then it came up with technology training for example. How do you decide what classes you're going to teach or how do you decide what you're going to prioritize when there are just so many possibilities? Well, no matter how many libraries, no matter the size of your library, you're going to always want to do more than you're capable of doing. I'm a really big fan. There's an exercise from Web Design called Divide the Dollar. Basically you make a big list of everything you want to do and then you get all the stakeholders involved. So it could be the staff members who are doing training, or it could be your public. And you say, okay, you each have like three votes, or divided all you have ten votes. You have like ten cents a piece. And then you vote on which things you want. And very quickly it helps to identify where the actual demand is, so what it is that people want to know about. And it also helps you, in some cases it means the thing that wasn't the clear favorite. Oftentimes it's like everybody's second choice is overwhelmingly more popular than everyone's first choice. And that can also help you make a plan. I can only do classes on three different topics. I know what the first three are, very obviously are, but then I have an inclinus to what the next set might be. Let's see, we're getting a lot of questions and discussion about technology skills and competencies and finding those for job descriptions, finding those to use in assessment. And I'll throw that back out to the participants in today's session too, just what resources are you aware of for assessing competencies? And the EDGE initiative people have mentioned is one resource, but if you have anything to add to that, Toby and Mick, that would be great too, but that's lots of discussion around that. Jean says Web Junction, yeah, they've done a lot of work with pulling together competencies. Yeah, I mean for us we kind of started working on it. It hasn't quite coalesced because it keeps changing so quickly. And so asking, creating a job description where it says, you know Photoshop and InDesign and these things, that could change in two years, like the way Adobe created sweet change. So we're really more interested in finding people who have the open mind about doing stuff, and knowing that if I give them a task it might take them some time to figure it out, but they're definitely capable of filling it out. So we're always testing people and it's not like official tasks, but we're always testing people who say, hey, create a poster about these new drums that we're going to circulate. And I want to see what they're going to do, how long it's going to take them to get it back to me, what it's going to look like, their design skills, because I'm not a design expert, but I kind of know what I like, and leave it open-ended or you can ask me a bunch of questions if they're going to do it by themselves and just get me something real quick. And you really do learn quickly, like who are your learners? Who are they going to teach themselves? So when we advertise for a job, I don't know every state is different, but we advertise for a job when we have those bullet points that have audio knowledge. I don't, almost never do I have specific programs on there that I put down to my graphic design ability. Yeah, more and more general. Well, we have one more question. I do want to mention to those of you, this is the top of the hour. And if you need to leave, that's just fine. Remember we are sending you a follow-up message today with the recording and slides and any links that were shared. So we'll have that. The last question that I have, Toby and Mick, is just about outreach and marketing and what you've done to bring people into your technology programs. You have a little bit, not technology training related, but you've just mentioned so many great programs throughout the session. Any special things you've done with outreach and marketing? I mean, that's another one of those. This is water thing. We are very driven toward making sure our message is out in as many places as possible. We focus a lot on community partnerships. We have a lot of area organizations that most full-time staff have a working relationship with at least one group. And we really try to leverage that, just the personal networking to help identify other people who might be a good match for a particular program. But then beyond that we have our traditional marketing mix. We have a newsletter. We have a robot social media stuff. So that really varies. I mean, that's almost the whole other webinar to be honest. And we don't, like I said, there's no silver bullet for that either. We struggle getting the word out about our programs. Some of our programs we think are great ideas and five people sign up. And we're like, what? So there's no silver bullet on that. But more of the better, definitely. And we do talk to a lot of community groups like Toby said. I'd go talk to Kiwanis or Chamber or AcureVec. I know we're at the end of our session and we're getting rave reviews in the chat. So good job, Toby and Mick. This has been really useful, very interesting, very useful. And I thank you so much for sharing your time and experiences with everyone. Again, we do this every month. And next month we're going to be talking about assistive technology. So hope to see you again on November 20th. And we'll talk about that, which is Benchmark 11. We'll include info in the follow-up email on that too. We want to thank ReadyTalk for being our webinar sponsor today. There is an evaluation form that will pop up as we close out of the session. So please take some time and let us know what you liked and what you would like us to do in the future. Again, thanks so much, Toby. And thank you, Mick. This has been great. And thank you, everyone, for your questions and resources. And we'll call it a wrap. Thank you, guys, for being a great audience.