Cstd | Dave's Whiteboard

Search Results : cstd

A calendar of learning events

Learning

Jun 202011

I know, I know, “learning events” is pretty vague. But I wanted a crisper title than “an idiosyncratic list of face-to-face professional-development opportunities for people in the training / learning / performance improvement field.”

I don’t get to many in-person learning events. This year I did go to the Innovations in eLearning Symposium (which was 40 miles from my house), and two years ago I made a presentation at a CSTD event in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The idea of presenting to your peers is a bracing stimulus, a strong incentive to reflect on what you do, what you’ve learned, and what you can share that’s useful to someone else. Not that I always have to present, but I think sharing what you’ve learned with your colleagues is an opportunity you’d do well to embrace.

I find it hard to keep track of what’s happening where (and especially when) in terms of conferences and similar events that I might like to attend. That’s why I’ve created a calendar of learning events. It’s a spreadsheet on Google Docs that lists these things in chronological order.

Screen shot: events listed by start date (click to enlarge)

In addition to providing a link to the event’s site, the list includes events that have already taken place; dates in the past appear in gray. The idea is to retain them for a year. I figure that will help me estimate when the event will take place next year, even if the organization’s plans aren’t yet available.

I did find a few similar lists, but none of them had a feature I really needed: events sorted by the due date for proposals:

Screen shot: events by due date for submitting a proposal (click to enlarge)

I might ask myself why ISPI needs an eight-month lead time for proposals, but at least this way I know that’s their lead time.

I thought a list like this might be useful to others, which is why I’ve put it on Google Docs and why I’m sharing a bit.ly link ( http://bit.ly/k0YOvw ) instead of Google’s 136-character URL.

The document actually has several sheets that you can view (not including a couple of other sheets where I hide the machinery that makes the lists work):

A welcome page with contents (links to the other sheets)
The list of events sorted by start date
The list of events sorted by due date for proposals
The (unsorted) master list that the other lists work from

If other people find these lists useful, or if they suggest events to include, I’ll be delighted. That’s part of the reason for the rambly “about this calendar” page: to say more than you’d want to read here about the kinds of event I think would fit and the kinds that wouldn’t.

Five good ways to stack the deck

Basic training, Learning

May 222009

This post is my slightly-belated contribution to the May 2009 Working/Learning blog carnival, hosted at Kevin Jones’s Engaged Learning blog.

The CSTD National Symposium in Halifax, Nova Scotia has just ended. The theme was All hands on deck–because organizations need to get the most out of all their employees, and because you can’t escape the sea in Nova Scotia any more than you can escape tartan.

I was eager to make a presentation at this session, and fortunately for me, CSTD liked what I proposed doing. I think that speaking to your professional peers–in the sense of “here’s something interesting I’ve been working on”–is a great opportunity.

On a ship, of course, a deck is a workplace–it’s where you are. As a learning professional, I want to make sure my personal deck has the equipment and room I need to be effective. Here are my thoughts on ways to do that:

Do what matters.

The obvious thing is to work on great projects. In my experience, you don’t always know which ones will turn out to be great. And in larger organizations, you sometimes have little choice. Inside nearly every project, though, there are things that matter–to you and to your organization. So, whatever the work you have to do, do it well. Go beyond the routine; avoid sticking to the same old paths.

Change your level.

I don’t mean “get promoted,” necessarily. I mean to zoom in to the details of what you do, and zoom out to see things in a larger perspective. If you’re developing training courses for customs workers, find out how the particular skills fit into the larger context of their jobs, and how their jobs fit into the context of their location and their agency.

The old story about turtles all the way down in one sense is true. It’s systems all the way down, and all the way up: inputs, processes, outputs. Changing your level means you’re better able to see how what looked like a standalone function aligns with other functions for some higher-level process.

Watch yourself.

Along with changing your level, I think it makes a lot of sense to change your distance from yourself. Ask, explicitly, what you’re doing. Where are you running into difficulty? What are you doing about that?

From another angle: what have you been doing that you get jazzed about? A couple of weeks back, I was bouncing in my chair (during a meeting with clients who have been too polite to comment on this) because of the many great ideas and possibilities that were emerging.

It’s this self-awareness, almost the idea that your job is a kind of science experiment, that I think holds great value.

Think of others.

If the reflective question was “What have I been doing?” then the collaborative question is “How’s my problem like problems that aren’t mine?”

What have you been doing that someone who’s doing something different could learn from? What have you figured out that I haven’t?

I saw a definition of “expert” as someone who knows something you don’t, that you’re glad to learn. If you pay attention to your work, if you change levels so you get a fuller picture, and if you watch what you do and what results, you’re going to be a hell of an expert on the specifics.

The next step is stripping the trivial out of those specifics so that another person can extrapolate to a different situation.

Be yourself.

I’m not an expert on using web 2.0 tools at work. I tried to make that clear in my presentation: I’ve learned how to work with some of these tools, and I can show you:

Stuff other people have done with them
Ways to try out the tools for yourself
A little bit about how they look under the hood

I didn’t pretend to know more than I do, nor (I hope) am I over-impressed by my own sagacity. I had fun creating my presentation, I tried to be clear about who might find it interesting, and I had lots of chances to practice saying, “I don’t know much about XXX; tell me more about what you’re doing.”

Few things will make you smarter about what you do than trying to explain what you do to others in a way that can benefit them.

CC-licensed turtle photo by wwarby.

Consulting at a distance, or, the real article

Connecting, Tech tinkering

Mar 202009

The Canadian Society for Training and Development’s 2009 Symposium will be in Halifax, Nova Scotia, May 20-22. I’ll be making a presentation on getting real work done with 2.0 tools.

CSTD invited me to write an article related to my presentation. It’s just been published in the Canadian Learning Journal’s spring 2009 edition. (You can download a pdf of my article.)

I decided the best way to write the article was to ask a group of training and learning professionals what tool worked for them. I haven’t met any of these people; in fact, I’ve only spoken with one of them by phone. I know them through virtual connections: blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and similar tools.

Within 48 hours, I had seven replies. So the article wrote itself, thanks largely to:

One of the points in my presentation will be how people and organizations solve workplace problems using web 2.0 tools (as opposed to, say, raving about how cool the tools are or how cute the fail whale is). Each of these seven people had a different angle. And a bonus for those who read the article is that they can go visit each person’s web site and find a lot more than could possible fit into 1500 words.

Thanks, guys.

Flakes and focus

Generic musing

Mar 022009

We had a quiet, at-home weekend, after a Friday night trip into D.C. for dinner and a performance by the Capitol Steps–not a staircase, but a group known for poking fun at politics:

Quiet was good for us–the ongoing remodeling is still going on, and on, and on, but the contractors (who have been staying with us since early January) took the weekend off.

The flakes in the post title are not Limbaugh and Coulter (honest!) but the unexpected March snowfall that extended the quiet a bit more. I’ve cleared out a lot of accumulated paperwork, and have had the chance to move a few projects forward.

I’m doing a presentation at the CSTD Symposium in Halfax next May (c’mon by), and have been using Dokuwiki to gather my material. (I’d already used MediaWiki, but that seems a bit elaborate for a personal system, so this is a kind of informational science project).

That dinner I mentioned? I had hanger steak (a great choice). When we got back home, I was trying to remember how this cut got its name. It was late, and my computer was off, so I got out my Webster’s Collegiate.

I realized that, although I used to love to meander through the dictionary, I hadn’t taken the book off the shelf in months. Possibly the only more-neglected reference in my office is the Yellow Pages. A new edition arrived a while back, and I realized as I tucked it away that its precessor hadn’t been opened since it arrived a year earlier.

All this is to say: hyperlinking has become second nature. I didn’t like the definition I found in the print dictionary for hanger steak; no explanation of why it has that name. (Apparently the muscle hangs from the diaphram of the steer.) Nothing to tell me that the French term is onglet. No easy way to get to a recipe.

And I’ve come to expect these things.

I’m guessing there are implications for people learning on the job, as well. Even if they’re not having hanger steak.

Using tools, or, the genuine article

Connecting

Feb 102009

The CSTD National Symposium in Halifax (May 20-22) will feature “tools, technologies, and strategies to maximize workplace learning effectiveness.” I thought it was a good excuse to go to Nova Scotia (not that I need much of one), and so I’m among the presenters.

About a month ago, CSTD asked if I might write something related to my presentation ( “Getting Real Work Done with 2.0 Tools” ) for possible publication prior to the symposium. The main request was that I not repeat my presentation’s content.

The best way to do that, I decided, was to start fresh–and to ask other people. So I drafted a note along these lines:

Hi…

I’m working on an article for training and development folks who don’t yet see value in 2.0 tools. My idea is to present examples of how others in the profession get value from them. Working title: “What’s in it for me?”

Do you have an example from your own experience that you might share?

I’m trying to stay away from “you oughta have a blog because it’s cool,” but I’m not too worried that’s what you’ll say.

Within 48 hours, I had replies from Cammy Bean, Jeff Cobb, Tom Gram, Harold Jarche, Karl Kapp, Richard Nantel, and Dean Shareski. (Yes, this is yet another way to thank them.)

I had no idea what I’d get, but I was pretty sure it’d be useful. That was an understatement. The replies varied greatly in length, in the type of tool, in the thinking behind it. In other words, my article pretty much wrote itself.

The thing is that I’ve only spoken to one of these people by phone, and haven’t met any of them in person. So without really intending to, I’ve got a DIY example of the practical value of the links I have with professionals whose interests overlap mine.