Although I talk mostly about designing workshops here in this blog, the reality is that lots of us also have to do our "sage on the stage" bit every once in awhile.

Lucky for us, Garr Reynold's in his Presentation Zen blog just posted the "Ten Commandments" for TED speakers. He also included a fantastic list of presenter best practices accompanied by TEDTalks illustrating those.

A choice quote:
"But what the good presentations have in common is that they were created carefully and thoughtfully with the audience in mind and were delivered with passion, clarity, brevity, and always with "the story" of it (whatever it is) in mind."

Check it out - Making presentations in the TED style

And p.s. If you're not a TED fan already, check out (these four of the best talks).

Posted by Jerilyn Veldof at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I stumbled on this great piece from the Bottom-Line Performance blog that I think is worth sharing (and it's certainly something I focus on a lot in my training librarian workshops):

"The challenge for instructional designers is no longer finding some relevant information on an obscure topic. Wikipedia does that for us. The challenge becomes identifying the most important content, the facts and information that will best support the performance the organization needs to drive business results. Ruth Clark tells us that people learn more from a short description of how something works than from a longer description of how something works. Learning professionals can weed through the nice to haves and create a program that best meets the needs of the business and the learner."

The irony here is that we've been talking about this for a long time in libraries (that our worth in libraries going forward will be more on what we exclude, what we filter out, than what we include).* Here it is again, but in the context of instructional design. I'm definitely in that camp - that to remain relevant we need to make this paradigmatic leap - both as librarians and as instructors/instructional designers. Less IS best!

* I was first exposed to this idea in John Sealy Brown and Paul Duguid's book. Well worth a look:

Posted by Jerilyn Veldof at 9:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just got off the phone with a librarian from major state university who is bringing me in for a half-day workshop. Given what she called a "catastrophic" economic situation in her state and university it became clear to me that I could not do a business-as-usual approach to teaching instructional design to librarians.

I talked her through 3 different approaches that focus on quick, effective approaches to designing library workshops. The intent is not to freak out the participants with a design process that would bog them down and cause them even more stress and demands on their time.

Here are three approaches that I recommended. Perhaps they will be useful to others thinking about how to get the most bang for the buck in these difficult financial times where everybody is stretched to the n-th degree.

Approach 1:

Focus on meeting discipline-agnostic instructional needs that span the library. For example:

- novices finding 3 scholarly articles using Academic Search Premier,
- grads finding a known item from a citations,
- undergraduates assessing whether or not an article is considered scholarly or not

Assign small teams one need each. They are expected to go through the full instructional design process, including developing the lesson plan, visuals/handouts, and exercises. Each need should translate to one – or two – discrete modules (10-20 minutes). Make these available with the expectation that all the librarians will be able to plug these modules into their classes with minimal adaption. This leaves each librarian with only a segment of their class that they will have to design on their own.

Approach 2:

Focus on individual mastery over a few, key steps in the instructional design process. Fill in the rest of the process using your current design approach. The areas I think have the most impact and are most worth focusing on are:

- Step 1 – Needs Assessment
- Step 4 – Filtering Content
- Step 6 – Task Analysis (although greatly abbreviate)
- Step 12 – Teaching Methods (also abbreviated)

Approach 3:

Facilitate/encourage/nurture a change in mindset in how we often approach teaching in libraries; give library instructors some concrete tools they can immediately implement to make their classes more effective.

The focus would be on these kinds of questions:

- What is information overload?
- How do we contribute to it?
- What are ways to structure our classes so that students learn what we want them to learn and avoid being overloaded and frustrated?

This is a more light-weight approach that mostly just focuses on step 12. Combining this with Step 1- needs assessment - would be a good combination.

Posted by Jerilyn Veldof at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just learned from CLENExchange another teaching technique that sounds like a great one to combine with the jigsaw technique. It's called Pecha Kucha, a 20x20 presentation where students develop 20 slides and each slide gets 20 seconds of presentation time for a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

I could see a variation of this working with a jigsaw exercise where each group of learners is asked to review something (such as an article, database or website) and then is given a certain amount of slides and minutes to teach the rest of the class what they learned. I could see asking a couple students to keep time and using a cow bell or some fun beeper to pull people off the 'stage.'

Give it a try!

Posted by Jerilyn Veldof at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is a question that has been asked and studied about for ages. Claudia Stanny from the University of West Florida provided a citation today in a "POD" listserv post to a meta-analysis of 40 years of research comparing online and face-to-face instruction.

But first, her summary:

"The bottom line is that the quality of pedagogy used trumps the medium. Engaging pedagogies produce superior learning outcomes to passive learning pedagogies. If the online class has the more engaging pedagogy, online learning is better. If these strategies characterize the face-to-face class, face-to-face instruction looks better."

Maki, R. H., & Maki, W. S. (2007). Online courses. In F. T. Durson (Ed.), Handbook of applied cognition (2nd ed.). Chichester: Wiley. (pp. 527-552)

Posted by Jerilyn Veldof at 8:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As you know, as teachers and instructional designers we're a big part of the education field and sometimes less part of the library "industry.", yet we tend to read our own blogs, publications and go to our own conferences. So yes, I know - you already have enough to read, enough to do - but for those looking to better align yourself with the field of education, check out this recent listserv post:

Hake, R.R. 2008. "Thirty-two Education Blogs," AERA-L post of 7 Nov 2008 16:38:18-080; online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at <http://tinyurl.com/6leyj6>.

Posted by Jerilyn Veldof at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's an interesting blurb that appeared on an Educause Learning Initiative site exploring the future of education:

"When Chris Dede, the Timothy E. Wirth professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard University, sat down with students in a Philadelphia private school to talk about their personal learning preferences, no one delivered the same answer. One student liked research papers, preferring a clear template and an assignment with a defined start and finish. Another loved multimedia projects, relishing the opportunity to think about something in many different ways. Another said their mind worked like the video games they liked to play.

Now imagine, Dede said in an interview at EDUCAUSE 2007 in Seattle, if those three students walked into your classroom. And they came with a group of peers whose learning preferences weren’t even on that same menu.

“If I were designing a learning environment for those students], it would really have to be like an ecology,� Dede said. “It would have to have a lot of different niches in it because from one day to the next, any one particular student may want a different kind of niche. And different types of students might want different kinds of niches…"

Posted by Jerilyn Veldof at 2:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of my favorite blogs has a great entry about weeding through content and figuring out what are your need-to- knows.

The entry is geared towards instructional designers creating e-learning, but applicable to in-person delivery as well.

Check it out: Build Better E-Learning Courses By Getting Rid of Some of the Content

Posted by Jerilyn Veldof at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bob Pike and Ken Blanchard had a teleseminar recently (download here) in which they talked about trainers as change agents. This powerful blurb is from that discussion:

Training is about creating… CHANGE.

CHANGE… in the way people do things.

CHANGE… in what people know.

CHANGE… in the results people get.

Posted by Jerilyn Veldof at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As I've said before in this blog (and over and over the workshops I give), the needs assessment step in the design process is absolutely critical. One of the most challenging parts of this step is uncovering what the real need is under the request. Those of you who work at the reference desk know what I'm talking about. How many times have you had patrons come up to the desk and ask for something that they didn't really mean to ask for? After a deft reference interview you uncover the actual question and the patron leaves satisfied. Same thing with the initial request that we sometimes get for a workshop.

One way to conduct an effective "instructional interview" (similar to a reference interview) is to use a technique called IWWMW that I'm borrowing from the business industry.

IWWMW stands for "In what ways might we" which is the core of the technique.

The process uses these 3 questions or statements:

Question - Why do we want to ….?
Answer – So that….
Redefinition – In what ways might we ….?

You would run through these 3 questions until you were satisfied that you had identified the crux of the problem that you will be addressing.

So, let's say you're talking to your client (the person who wants you to do a workshop). In this case they're a professor. What they ask you is to teach their students a particular database - let's say Pubmed.

Your job is to ask "Why do you want your students to learn Pubmed?"
Perhaps they respond, "So that my students learn to use peer-reviewed articles in their research."
Next you ask yourself if that answer really satisfies you (and them)? Is that the real problem that you will be "solving" in your workshop: "In what ways might students learn to use peer-reviewed articles in their research?"
Or do you want to go deeper?

Try another round:
"Why do you want your students to use peer-reviewed articles in their research?"
They respond, "So that...."
Does that satisfy you? If not, try for another round.

What might happen is that during this process both you and your client realize that you need to overhaul the whole assignment, or maybe even the syllabus. Maybe you need to have a pre or post-workshop assignment to address your bigger "problem." In other words, this discussion could open up enormous opportunities for you and your client to truly tackle some big stuff. And in the least, it can help you really focus on what's essential in the workshop.

Give it a try the next time you conduct a needs assessment!

Continue process until you’re satisfied you’ve identified the real problem.

Posted by Jerilyn Veldof at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just came from a writing class whose professor allowed us to come in to evaluate a series of e-learning pilots we're developing in the Libraries. It was quick and easy and similar to the process we've used for our face-to-face workshop pilots. I encourage you to give this a try! Here's what we do:

We offer our pilot workshop to library supervisors who want their student workers and new staff to learn the content we teach in the workshop. They require that their workers attend. We teach the workshop as it is designed, but at the end we turn the group into a focus group. We review each section of the workshop, stop, and facilitate a discussion:
What are some things you did not know about until you took this part of the workshop?
What did you like about this part of the workshop?
Did anything about this part of the workshop bother you?
How could this part be improved?
Other comments?

Amazing the kind of useful, thoughtful feedback we have gotten.

We've also done this with "real" workshops and "real" users where we've asked participants in a workshop to stay afterwards (and we pay them!) and conduct the same kind of focus group discussion then.

It's pretty easy to throw this kind of evaluation together but yet you'll get tons of value out of it. Give it a try!

Posted by Jerilyn Veldof at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After a bit of a hiatus (in other words, having a baby), I gave a half-day workshop at Cornell University Library on Friday. Here is a list of individuals' workshop take-aways that many of them gave me at the end of the session:

Needs Assessment
- Take 1-2 stakeholders to lunch to get feedback on course
- Have a conversation with faculty
- Find the right questions
- Ask why the students want to attend the workshop
- What is desired outcome? This is workshop title or description
- Frame as deliverables
- Engage client
- Refine the interview, process with faculty
- Ask “Why? What’s the point?�
- Get from the client what/how does success look like.
- Concept of “delivering� on x, y, z outcomes - you’re giving the client something

Brainstorming Content
- Group brings ideas and their points of view
- Make this a group activity
- Great way to cover everything. I missed a lot on my own
- Not to analyze, just say it
- I like brainstorming in a circle (taking turns). Seems to prompt responses
- Work with co-workers to discuss. Can this be done with faculty? [Answer: Yes, if they know the content fairly well.]
- Be open to all ideas! Facilitate process.

Filtering Content
- Don’t overpack the session with information
- Look at what I plan to present and divide by need-to-know and nice-to-know
- Importance of limiting/focusing on goal -what I can deliver.
- Focus on need-to-know because nice-to-know will probably fall by the wayside
- Get to what’s important
- Be strict. More B’s (nice-to-knows) than A’s (need-to-knows)
- Breaking topics into different categories
- Focus on need-to-know, not nice-to-know
- Be ruthless with A’s and B’s
- Classify and eliminate
- Space facilitated discussion (from the brainstorming) to avoid anger over Boolean cut (as an example)

Task Analysis
- Delineating steps focuses us to ask whether the students have the necessary background knowledge
- Look at my existing exercises and break down tasks more; have a student do them beforehand to test
- It’s hard to figure out what your actual goal is
- Painful process to figure out what the learner has to do to be successful
- Change level of task based on what learner already knows
- Have realistic expectations, actions, and steps
- Try to imagine 3 modules per 50 minute class

Others
- Emphasis on moving from lecture to users teaching each other
- Design content for pre-class and post-class handouts/worksheets/web pages
- Content presentation can be done by students
- Give handouts with gaps. Reveal answers later (mystery!).
- Learners can present content
- Renewed enthusiasm for integrating information competency into curriculum
- Awareness of the need to discuss this more within the system as a whole and the need to advocate for a change in the model system-wide

Obviously there are many steps we didn't cover in a half-day session. I focused on some of the most difficult steps which often can have the biggest impact on the final library workshop design.

Posted by Jerilyn Veldof at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Educators' Spotlight Digest (ESD), the
free online publication of S.O.S. for Information Literacy, has just come out and has a great article called "Librarian Challenge: Reaching College Freshmen." Particularly take a look at the interview segment with librarian, Michael Pasqualoni.

Here's a summary snippet taken from the article:

Freshman Teaching Tips
Here are a few excellent tips garnered from Pasqualoni and Galloway:

* Chunk lessons into a beginning, middle and ending
* Use mixed media and approaches to keep interest (e.g., instructor lecture, video clips & student interaction)
* Experiment and try new techniques (e.g., "Radical Syllabus" exercise )
* Ask students "what interests you?"
* Distribute helpful handouts
* Be "Presentation-Proofed" by carrying material in several formats
* Plan a “Library Lock-In� event and create excitement

Posted by Jerilyn Veldof at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last entry in the "do's and don'ts" for good design I mentioned a "do" that said, "Take responsibility for your learners meeting your objectives." It seems to me that this one, in particular, merits more discussion. As teachers we all are faced with a decision - how much of our content are we going to take responsibility for our learners to actually learn it, and how much will we depend on the learner to take responsibility for learning on their own?

To answer this question, ask yourself who you are being in a certain situation. Are you a teacher, are you a lecturer, or are you an orientation leader?

The last two roles – lecturer and orientation leader – probably give the learner more responsibility to handle the content on their own. But the first role – teacher – places you with a greater responsibility to ensure that learning is taking place.

When I give my train the library teacher workshops to other librarians, this topic usually comes up after the design teams have brainstormed pages and pages of content and are now attempting to figure out what content is really crucial and what is less so. Inevitably, someone in the groups will say, "Well, we're just going to mention that item, we're not really going to teach it."

Now remember – we’re not designing orientations and we’re not designing lectures – we’re designing workshops. So, I have a pretty strong reaction to this. What I remind folks is that “mentioning� content comes at a cost to the learner. Learners only have so much cognitive ability to absorb and make sense of your content. In fact, when it comes to short term memory, the rule of thumb is that a person can only take in about 5 to 9 pieces of information before their capacity to take in information is reached. At that point the learner has to do something with that knowledge – apply it, synthesize it, process it – in order for it move into long term memory. So every time you mention something (“Oh, and you can order this through Interlibrary Loan. That’s a service where you… blah blah blah�) you’re tipping the learner towards or over the 5 to 9 mark. The problem is that when you do get to something that you actually want them to learn, you’ve used up your ration, and have to move directly into the “doing something� part of your lesson plan instead of covering more content/teaching points. But chances are, you wouldn't have designed this fast detour into "doing something" and so your handouts and exercises wouldn't work. If you're not fast on your feet, guess what - it probably means you’ve just messed up your essential need-to-know content with a bunch of "nice to know," yet less essential information. Yikes!

There’s a fabulous book out there called Telling Ain’t Training. This should be essential reading for all of us librarian enamored with our content and information. The single most important thing we can probably do is to lose our infatuation with sharing EVERYTHING that should be known and focus solely on the most essential items that must be known.

Posted by Jerilyn Veldof at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A library school student recently interviewed me over email about the instructional design process. One of the things she wanted was a short do's and don't list.

Thought I'd share this with you all:

Do's
> Identify a client with enough clout to strongly recommend or assign learners to your workshop
> Keep in communication with that client throughout the design process
> Conduct a thorough needs assessment
> Take responsibility for your learners meeting your objectives
> Keep content to a minimum and focus on application and feedback

Don'ts
> Drown your learners in content
> Blow off the needs assessment
> Think if you say something that your learners have learned something. (Saying does not equal teaching.)
> Design an entire workshop by yourself - stretch yourself by collaborating with others.
> Assume just because you designed the workshop that you have to teach it. There may be others who might be better suited to deliver your workshop.
> Assume just because you're good in front of the classroom that you're a good instructional designer. Sometimes being a good performer can get in the way of a good workshop design!

Hope this list helps!

Posted by Jerilyn Veldof at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)