23 Things program, follow up article published

The Electronic Library (TEL) has just published our follow up article on the 23 Things program at our library. It seems like it has been a long time coming. We submitted it in early 2009, but there were many other articles in the pipeline at TEL, so we had to wait.

Thanks to my co-author, Lyn Leslie, and all involved.

The full citation:
Julia Gross, Lyn Leslie, (2010) "Learning 2.0: a catalyst for library organisational change", Electronic Library, The, Vol. 28 Iss: 5, pp.657 - 668

Abstract:
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe “what happened” with round two of the implementation of Learning 2.0 with a large and diverse group of library staff at Edith Cowan University (ECU) Library during 2007/2008.

Design/methodology/approach – A previous paper reported on a study of the suitability of the 23 Things Learning 2.0 program for a small group of early adopters in the ECU Library. This follow-up paper reports challenges that library management faced when the remaining staff were given the 23 Things Learning 2.0 program. All remaining library staff members were encouraged to undertake the program, but take-up was not strong and only 25 per cent of staff completed the program. At the conclusion of round two of Learning 2.0, all staff were surveyed to find out reasons for completion or non-completion, what types of technologies they needed support with, and how they wished to learn about the emerging/Web 2.0 technologies.

Findings – From the observations and survey responses in this study it was found that while Learning 2.0 was a suitable program, some staff required extra time and a more hands-on approach to their workplace learning.

Originality/value – The paper is unique in that it follows up on previous research at the same institution, and reveals new findings.

DOI
10.1108/02640471011081942

The Electronic Library is one of the Emerald Insight journals: www.emeraldinsight.com

Top downloads for 23 Things article

We have just received stats on downloads from The Electronic Library (TEL) for the first quarter of 2009. Our article on Twenty three steps published in TEL has been downloaded the most times by Emerald customers (excluding search engine crawlers). It was downloaded 508 times during the first quarter of 2009, compared to 379 for the second highest article.

So there's still a lot of interest among librarians and others in Learning 2.0 and how to implement some type of training in Web 2.0.

The bibliographic details are DOI:10.1108/02640470810921583
Julia Gross, Lyn Leslie. The Electronic Library Twenty-three steps to learning Web 2.0 technologies in an academic library. 2008 vol 26 no.6 pp.790 - 802

TEL is published by Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Organisational change, herding cats

At the Teaching and Learning Forum, at Curtin University last week, January 29-30, 2009, Barbara Holland gave the first keynote address. Her point about organisational change and the difficulties in getting staff involved in change, related quite well to our efforts with the
Web 2.0 training. We were trying to get staff to complete the Learning 2.0 program and thought 50% completion would be ideal. Barbara felt 20% buy in was quite good, so maybe we were aiming too high.

Holland also showed this hilarious video about organisational change: "Herding cats"....

Getting published --- full citation

Silly me! In my rush to announce the news, I forgot to give the citation details of our article in TEL

Full citation details are:

Gross, Julia & Leslie, Lyn (2008)
Twenty-three steps to learning Web 2.0 technologies in an academic library.
The Electronic Library 26 (6), 790-802.

Getting published

It's been a long time coming, but Lyn and I have finally had our article about the Learning 2.0 Program published in the latest issue of The Electronic Library, known as TEL. We sent the article off about a year ago as I reported in my blog post at the time. But then we needed to respond to reviewers’ comments before it finally went forward in April 2008.

The reviewing process can be challenging, but it did help sharpen up the research.

TEL rates highly in terms of being a high impact journal, if you are interested in that sort of thing. TEL is available in print form or via a subscription to Emerald Group Publishing Limited. It’s online also through a subscription to the Emerald Insight database. They publish a good selection of business and library journals, but the library journals are not indexed in LISA, just in Emerald.

Emerald have now introduced something called EarlyCite to alleviate the long wait to publication. This is an

“online, pre-publication service that enables customers to access journal articles prior to official publication. Papers will be made available at least three months and, in some cases, as much as one year before they appear in the hard copy and final online journal issue. A phenomenon of academic journal publishing is that articles can often be held in a queue, awaiting publication for many months until an issue becomes available.”

Having a journal article published stands as a permanent record of research which has been through a peer-review process. But in a technology area, to find very current information you would be better served accessing a really high quality blog.

Library 2.0 Revisited at ECU in July

Following up on the staff survey outlined in my previous post, on what sort of library 2.0 training staff wanted, we are running two ECU Library 2.0 training days this July 2008.

We have planned the two half days through our wiki: "Library 2.0 Revisited". The two days will provide a chance for Library 2.0 newbies to get some exposure to the new technologies.

Most of the staff running the session completed the 23 things Training in 2007. That training was run through the ECU Learning 2.0 blog

What sort of Web 2.0 training do library staff want?

In 2007 ECU Library offered the Learning 2.0 training to all library staff who wished to take it up. We did this by setting up 23 Things on our ECU Library Learning 2.0 blog and putting a small pilot group through the program in April/May 07. Then in the 2nd half of the year we offered the Learning 2.0 to all staff. By the end of the year over 20 of the 80 staff had completed the 23 Things. Another 20 had started their own blog, but had not completed the program.

We wanted to know why staff did not complete and what other ways we could provide training. We have now surveyed all staff to see what type of training they would prefer and what are the key technologies they were comfortable with. We've had a excellent response to our survey, so staff are interesting in this sort of training. One of the key impediments is, of course, finding time in our busy work lives to complete the training program.

The method of learning most favoured was a hands-on session or workshop, followed closely by a presentation or training day.

The Web 2.0 technology staff were most comfortable with was blogging. Staff were least comforable with wikis.

We hope to publish full details of our research later in 2008, in The Electronic Library.