Informal+Training+Support

Penn State

Focus for this approach to faculty development is on developing a community to support technology integration. Formats include FTF and online. They provide FTF training on campus specific applications and technology systems as well as common commercial applications. For the online options they focus on their e-learning technologies. They don't use it for common applications such as Office instead they subscribe to Lynda.com. (Efficient use of resources).

Website: @http://technologytraining.psu.edu/ Made sure that website was something that would entice frequent visits. They chose their tool (rather than the common preference for blogs because it had discussion forums and posts weren't buried due to the chronological nature of blogs.
 * Blog used as one-way communication
 * Discussion forums - two-way communication

Another goal of this approach is to provide informal learning and leverage existing resources.

Informal Learning (Jay Cross) (Yong's social network analysis I believe supports this notion of teacher learning).
 * communities of practice
 * blogs
 * wikis
 * Flickr
 * YouTube
 * Knowledge Bases

e-Learning
 * class recordings
 * review modules
 * courses
 * topic specific

Process
 * 1) Formed working group
 * 2) Benchmarked standards they wanted to follow
 * 3) Identified scope
 * 4) Audience (Penn State)
 * 5) Content (software tips & marketing announcements
 * 6) Contributors (Penn State trainers & users
 * 7) Functionality (posts, discussions, lings, Web 2.0 integration)
 * 8) Identified goal
 * 9) Selected tool
 * 10) Prepared community
 * 11) Set staff expectations
 * 12) Planned Marketing and Communications

When thinking about setting up a community -- looked as successful communities around campus. (Eg, ANGEL community)

Tools
 * Blogs (Moveable Type)
 * Confluence (wikis- actually wikispaces)
 * Drupal tool they selected . Open source content management (CMS).

Key: pre- populate with content. When you make that announcement message make sure the content is there. If people go and it is empty they won't return. They did preview the site at the end of FTF sessions. They also invited others outside of IT to contribute content. The focus is on the end-user experience.

Challenges: Communities can take 1yr or often more to establish and really get off the ground. At a certain point IT staff run out of content so it is very important to get others to contribute. In the forums they didn't delete incorrect messages because that would inhibit use. Instead they tried to talk through to the correct solutions.

Blog posts always got a response within 3 days.

Lessons Learned
 * Identify champion right away- someone who will continue to push this
 * gather user input
 * define benchmarks of success
 * reinforce importance

Recommendations
 * select diverse working group
 * clearly define goals and benchmarks
 * integrate into a unit strategic plan
 * identify project completion
 * develop a sound marking campaign
 * gather input.

Books: Digital Habitats (Wegner, White & Smith), Informal Learning (Jay Cross)

It took them 6 months to get this up.