Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Lesson Learned

September 7th, 2010 - by Angela

success-or-failureNow that I follow some training folks on Twitter, I have found some pretty witty and relevant quotes, sayings, etc. One of the most recent ones was by @Quinnovator: “learned that I have no problem living up to my mission: “no situation so bad that a bad joke can’t make it worse”. 

I know that the statement is not a complete sentence.  For those of you who are not on Twitter, all tweets (status posts) can only be 140 characters long.  So, many times, we have to do some creative shortening to get the number of characters reduced. From a training point of view, I can VERY much relate to that quote. Many times I have had a successful joke in my head that did not end up that way once it left my mouth.

One time in particular, I was training a group of people that had strained working relationships because of some tensions on the job.  I did not know this at the time. We had a late start because I was doing the training after the group got out of another meeting.  Since they were running late, I decided to shorten my time at the beginning of class and just cut to the chase and start.  BAD, BAD decision!

We were having a good class with some great discussion and good rapport.  One student had a bit of trouble and I joked that the computer must not have liked her that day. With a completely straight face, she said that no one there liked her.  Right after she said that, there was complete silence.  For the rest of the class, the rapport and fun discussion that we had worked so hard to develop earlier had vanished.

I definitely learned my lesson that day.  I realized that nothing can replace the few minutes of talking to the students and getting to know everyone a little bit.  I realize now how precious those few minutes are.  I am a pretty good reader of verbal and non-verbal behavior during that time and can usually sense the group dynamics.  Since I decided to skip that beginning introduction, I had a miserable class for most of the day.

After talking to my husband about that quote, he reminded me that it is almost always worth the time to talk for a few minutes with someone.  How easy it is to encourage someone or just get a sense of how someone is doing.  In business, we have lost the “discussion around the water cooler” time because we are all so busy on our phones or computers.  I’m definitely not going to be skipping the beginning of my class anymore, even if we are running a bit late.  Hope you will take a little time today to talk with someone and brighten their day with a bit of encouragement!

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Social Media and Web 2.0: My Vocabulary Lesson

September 9th, 2009 - by Angela

In today’s society, it seems that everyone is joining different social media sites like Blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.  I am amazed at how a person or corporation’s reputation can be changed (for better or worse) in a single moment.  If people like or dislike your service or product, they can post to their blog or Facebook/Twitter status for millions of others to read in an instant.  It’s like the new version of the old party phone lines, where multiple houses shared the same phone line.  Each house had a different ring to distinguish who should answer.  However, people could listen in on different conversations.  In that same way, reputations could be damaged when someone overheard another’s conversation and passed that information along. 
 
I thought about how hard I work to maintain a good reputation and keep my clients happy.  In the training industry (as in most industries), it is critical to do so.  My next thought was that I needed to understand the new social media and it’s corresponding language/vocabulary even better than I currently did.  I decided to do some research and found that I was going to need to learn a completely new language. 
 
From the perspective of a business, my research on social media led me to the term “Web 2.0″.  When I performed a web search on Web 2.0, I had hundreds of thousands of articles to choose from…yikes!  From what I read, Web 2.0 is the way websites are designed to help consumers connect, including sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, wikis, etc.  Many of the terms that were mentioned I had heard of before and had already incorporated into my vocabulary.  However, a few of the words were completely new to me.  Here are a couple of terms I found that were brand new to me.  I am using the definitions from Wikipedia.  It seemed appropriate to use that site since it is part of Web 2.0.
 
Mashup - a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service.  An example is a real estate website that uses a mapping software.
 
Folksonomy - a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.  An example is tagging someone in a photo on Facebook.
 
Also in my research, I found a soon to be published book about building your reputation on your website and how to adapt it to a Web 2.0 standard.  It is called “Building Web Reputation Systems,” published by O’Reilly.    It looks like many other people are thinking about their internet presence and reputation, too.  From my perspective, that is a good thing!
 
I had better get busy remembering all these new terms and continue learning more about the web frontier.  I was thinking about trying to learn Spanish but I think I’ll need to focus on updating my internet language skills first!

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Training the Next Generation

August 10th, 2009 - by Angela

I recently spent a week of vacation with family, including my four teenage cousins.  Looking back on that week I realize two things: 1) I am getting old; and, 2).  I need to adjust how I do training with the younger generation.

Two examples stand out during my vacation.  The first was when my 15-year old cousin, Alison, managed to hold a conversation with my aunt and myself while texting back and forth with her mom and a friend.  She never missed a beat of our conversation and managed to text pretty inconspicuously, too.  She balanced everything very well.

The second example was when I was working on a PowerPoint presentation for an upcoming training class and my 14-year old cousin, Marcus, stopped by to watch me work on it.  He said that he knew PowerPoint so I decided to use this as a learning opportunity, for myself and for him.  I showed him a few advanced tasks in PowerPoint and asked if he knew how to do them.  He didn’t know how to do them, but picked them up immediately as I showed them to him.  He then took what I had shown him and tried a few other tasks, just to see how far PowerPoint could go in animation.  He was fearless in his trials and didn’t get frustrated when something didn’t work right.  He just kept going until he figured how to do the task or until he found PowerPoint’s limits.

I learned that I am going to have to really test and push the limits of the software that I teach to the younger generation that is entering the workforce right now!

While thinking about those two examples, I remembered a workshop I attended a couple of years ago.  It was entitled “Digital Natives versus Digital Immigrants”, which basically refers to younger people who have grown up with computers (natives), and those of us that were around in a pre-Facebook and  Twitter world (immigrants) .
Marcus’ characteristic of fearless experimentation and Alison’s ability to juggle technology without hitting information overload are two traits that seem to be innate in digital natives.  All four of my cousin fall into the category of digital natives.  They have grown up using computers, the Internet, cell phones, etc.

The other group are the digital immigrants. (I happen to fall into the transitional generation between digital natives and digital immigrants.  I have characteristics from both groups since I grew up with computers but did not have Internet and cell phones until college.)   Digital immigrants knew what life was like before the computer, Internet, cell phones, etc. Digital immigrants may assimilate and use/enjoy all of the available technology tools but still have some habits from their prior life.  I think about how I sometimes print an email to read it on paper instead of on the screen.  Also, some of my older colleagues still compose their writings on paper before entering them into their computers. 

As I look at all of this in the context of training, I see many ways that I will be adjusting my classes and workshops as I encounter more digital natives in the classroom.

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