Forum for the Future

I haven't written this week, because it was a very full week for me. The global training team at Latham put on a Technology Trainer's Summit where we learned, shared and planned training for the future at Latham. Our big topic this year was Office 2007 and Vista and our theme was
"Changes".

One of the sessions I helped to present was called Forum of the Future. In this session we talked about making training more accessable to the learner. If I can figure out how to link in a downloadable file, I'll share my presentation. Otherwise, I'll start copying in pages of it. We discussed blogs, wikis, rss feeds and other elearning 2.0 tools.

We are expecially interested in finding a different way to use our tip sheets. We have written over 500 nicely formatted tip sheets in Word format. They contain great information in a How To task approach and are great for using in instructor-led classes. Students take them back and store them in binders or in that pile we all have on the desk. We have them posted on our CDC, but they are searchable only by title and category. We are looking for other ways to host the content. We need them to be totally searchable, indexed by How to headlines and easy to access. However, we still need the nicely formatted tip sheets for class, so a wiki doesn't seem to be the best format for that. Our web development team is working with Work Product Libraries and new search tools to access documents in our document management system (interwoven) So we will be looking initially to using this feature.

We are looking at using wiki's (probably through Sharepoint) for our Technology Team bi-weekly meeting minutes. In fact we will be approaching our senior technology managers about putting all of the different technology meeting minutes in such a format. Now they are in Word documents that can be accessed from the appropriate team webpage, one at a time. If you want to find the date for a roll-out and you know it was discussed in one of last month's meetings, you have to search each one. I'll keep you informed on how this works.

Jennifer