May 2008 Archives

Last week my twitter friends, @Robin2go and @bpanulla, and I had a conversation about deja vu and I (@NikkiMK06, follow me, if you want) alluded that perhaps it was the Matrix resetting itself.  Reading my RSS feeds, I stumble upon on of those "Matrix moments" courtesy of Bob Sutton and Penelope Trunk:

• Bob Sutton's post is a reaction to a New York Times piece about an experiment where doctors apologized for mistakes and actually found that claims in lawsuits dropped.  Bob Sutton has often talked about the virtues of admitting mistakes.  People needs to be free to admit they made them so they can take risks, analyze where they went wrong, and improve.
• Penelope Trunk's post was about the importance of self-knowledge. To do any real self assessment, Trunk argues that taking action is more important than taking correct action because overly-cautious people fail to act and bad decisions are good learning experiences.

This week two of us from I-Tech met with former coworkers of mine to exchange some ideas.  Each of us had something the other wanted.

• Kitt Camplese had experience with Camtasia.  Andrew Calvin and I want to create more mulitmedia tutorials with Captivate and Camtasia.
• Natalie Harp had experience with ANGEL CSS. Kitt was interested in learning more about how ANGEL courses could be customized.
• I fell in love with Firebug after Eric Steele's session on it at last year's Web Conference.  Kitt and Natalie could benefit from using it to work with CSS.
• Andrew Calvin wanted to use screen capturing of Camtasia for usability studies.

Have you ever played Paper, Scissors, Rock?  You know the game where scissors beats paper, and rock beats scissors, but paper covers rock.

In my last post, I looked at survey data from our Meeting Maker to Oracle Calendar Migration and drew some conclusions about how people learn.  Today I'd like to talk about the methods people use to get their information.  Well, it's time to play a little paper, scissors, rock...

One-on-One Training

What can I say about one-on-one training?  We all love to have the opportunity to have a person on hand all to ourselves for our individualized training needs. 

It's a great way to keep training individualized and interactive, but one-on-one does not scale as well as...

In February, Penn State University Libraries migrated to Oracle Calendar after a coordinated planning effort with members from Libraries and ITS.  This effort included various training and communication efforts as well as a post-assessment in March.

The Survey

Take a look at the survey data.  In this survey (one month after training and migration), staff members were asked to describe how well they knew Oracle. Additionally, they were asked what training methods they opted to use to prepare for the migration.  These methods included:

• Technology Updates - monthly live presentations/Webcasts over MediaSite (similar to a session over Breeze/Adobe Connect for those of you outsiders) we do on various technology initiatives in the Libraries.

• Tech Tips Blog - a blog with a variety weekly posted tips; we tried to mix in Oracle every few weeks.

• Interview Newsletter - a weekly Libraries' newsletter in PDF form, distributed to Libraries' staff via email and Web

• Email - Susan Walker, one of our key migration project members, sent periodic email reminders about the migration which increased in frequency as we entered "countdown" mode.

• Training - We offered several face-to-face opportunities at in the Paterno Library for Libraries' staff at University Park, Eastern and Western face-to-face training sessions, and a session over Media Site.

As usual my stories follow paths similar to James Burke's interpretations of history.

Historical Event #1

Sometime in 2006, Brad Kozlek introduced Twitter to us at what we call the Beta Brown Bag.  A techie lunch non-meeting where a bunch of us got together to share cool things we found.

At this time I signed up for my Twitter account.  It went nowhere.  This is probably because of the following reasons:

1. I don't text. (If you're a loyal reader, you've read this at least twice before.)
2. While I saw potential classroom-related uses, I hadn't found a true work-related use for it yet.  It was really just a "bright and shiny" new toy to me.
   
3. I really didn't have a third party application to keep the tweets persistent. (So without #2 and #3, I had no reason to go visit or refresh the page/tab I had open.)

Here's something interesting I observed both as a teenager and later when I taught teenagers:  Teenagers who communicated with their parents had parents who allowed them more freedom.

On the other end of the spectrum, there were some parent-teen relationships that worked more like this:

• Teen is withdrawn.
• Parent tightens control because he/she is out of the loop and concerned for withdrawn teen.
• Withdrawn teen is wary of opening up to controlling parent and becomes more withdrawn.

I used to say that working with kids in their teen years was like working with adults who had the volume turned up a bit.  They were just acting out more melodramatic versions of the adults they saw or would soon be.

Or is the reverse the truth?  Maybe adults are just teens--with the same gut reactions to authority--who toned things down just enough to be grown-ups.  That said, we can learn a lot from how teens behave and apply it to the adult world.

Currently, I'm in the fortunate position of working in one of those departments where we are trusted, afforded opportunities for leadership, and able to work without continuous oversight.  I mean, how many other places would have let and encouraged a relatively new hire present to a unit-wide audience dressed up in character as "Doctor Nikki"? (Thanks, Dace!) 

The result is that our lines of communications are open.  We feel comfortable sharing our work and our concerns with our department head or our assistant dean, and we know their communication with us is out of sincere interest.  The result is a self-sustaining relationship of trust.

What happens in places where the opposite is true?  Where top-down control structures force people to be suspicious even of a leader's sincerest interest in a project?  Where leaders who sense information being withheld ramp up their involvement, only to find that deepens the distrust?

I'm relatively new to where I work now, so I'm not sure exactly how they built the positive environment they have now, but I can offer the lessons I have learned from working with teens:

1. If you would like to be afforded more freedom, you need to start communicating. No one will know how capable you are of managing your projects until you start stalking about your work and what you have been doing.

2. If you are in charge of someone who's not communicating, be wary of deepening the mistrust.  Show sincere interest.  Try to build the communication and the working relationship before resorting to tighter controls or adding extra "forced communications" to the routine.

3. Building trust takes time; don't expect change overnight.  You may have to be the first person to act, and you may need to prove yourself several times before the other person trusts you enough to do his/her part.