IL04: “teaching weblogs”
Stephen (Kermit) Cohen started out by offering M&Ms for the first person to send him an instant message to him live on stage. He ended up getting one from Karen Schneider who isn’t even at the conference. The topic itself was interesting to me as I’m in the process of educating the APL staff on the issue. (Honestly I’m teaching them RSS more, but it all ties together.) Why teach your staff: Keeping current, part of today’s info literacy curriculum, they may be writing and posting themselves, learning curve is always present, blog the “right way” and to cover liabiliy issues. He then talked about how and what to train regarding blogs for the library administration, the blog authors, the IT staff and the users. (It was nice to learn that Stephen and I agree that links should be context neutral. i.e. Don’t use “click here”) His best suggestion: if you include an RSS button on your pages, include a “what is RSS” link.
Michael Stephens then took over and detailed exactly how he trained his library staff n the categories that Stephen had previously discussed. His key point, when your developing the training, be sure to have specific outcomes in mind and make the training hands-on.
