News July 20, 2007 (mp3 file: 5 MB, 5:26 min.)
Random Acts of Continuing Education; Early Childhood Literacy and Libraries
At the top of the ‘cast today: Random Acts of Continuing Education. At SWILSA we often get questions in “clumps”—questions from several libraries that are around the same topic. Sometimes a workshop or meeting on the topic would be helpful, but if we go through our usual CE planning process to find a date and a location, then the need for the discussion has passed by the time the workshop actually happens. And many librarians may not be able to attend because of their schedules and distance to the workshop. (And how ‘bout those gas prices right now??) Sometimes the question or topic doesn’t really need a full day workshop at that point in time, and if you’re going to drive 2 or 3 hours, it hardly seems worth it for a couple of hours of workshop.
Hence: Random Acts of Continuing Education, or RACE, for short. (They aren’t really Random, more "spontaneous," so I suppose we could have called them SPACE, for Spontaneous Acts of CE, but I liked Random, so there we have it. ) RACE sessions will be periodically scheduled—at relatively short notice—one hour sessions on a current topic of interest to you; they’ll be held in the Wimba online classroom so you won’t have to invest time and money in travel.
We’ve been doing some classes—notably Computerside Chats—in the Wimba room but we’ve been using the room for technology-related classes, and we want to expand that. Our first topic is: Salary and Pay Equity for Librarians, and our guest presenter will be Sandy Dixon of the State Library of Iowa. (See our website—and an upcoming e-mail) for more information about it.) The Wimba classroom, available to us through the State Library’s Community Partnership with Web Junction, opens up a great many opportunities for us to “get together” online. One hour isn’t very long, but for some questions and topics that will be enough when it’s what we call “just in time” learning. Or, we may find out after that hour that we need more time to cover the topic and your questions and we can schedule a longer workshop, face-to-face, if need be.
At this point I’m speculating that there will be fairly short notice—just a “Meet in the Wimba room at such and such a time and we’ll talk about X topic” sort of thing. If we schedule them very far out then we lose the timeliness of the information. Not everyone will be able to make it, but not everyone can make the face to face workshops, either. So, let’s give it a try. Many of you have experienced the Wimba classroom, many of you have not. Our website page about RACE has information about the Wimba room, and my e-mail to you will include a link to the room, so you can run the setup wizard (which you do just one time) and enter the room ahead of time, to make sure you’re ready. Because this will be a new experience for many of you, we have a little more lead time for this first RACE: the salary RACE will be August 9 at 9 a.m. You can attend on any computer with a broadband connection to the Internet—you can attend at home in your jammies, if you like!
All the sessions will be in the CE catalog, so register if you can. I will not, however, turn you away if you find you are able to just drop in at the time of the class! If you’re a little uncertain about attending something online, or getting your computer set up to use the room, just let me know and we’ll do a practice run together. (And don’t stress about it—it’s not that difficult to set up, and even easier to use!)
We’re very excited about all the things we can provide with the Wimba room. (A couple of you have already experienced computer troubleshooting via the room’s interface.) It doesn’t mean we’re going to stop doing in-person workshops and meetings, it just means that we can provide more opportunities to discuss and learn, in a convenient way. I hope you’ll join us. --Karen
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