🚀 go-pugleaf

------------------ Message forwarded by NETTRAIN moderator ------------------

Date: Wed, 24 Feb 93 14:09:21 PST
From: alipow@library.Berkeley.EDU (Anne Lipow)

One can't really quarrel with another trainer.  In training, there's more
than one way to get the results you want.  And why what works for one might
not work for another could have to do with lots of things like different
environments, clienteles, and such.  So this is just a sort-of quibble, a
very quick one, maybe a quarter of a quibble (a quarble?) with Lee Jaffe's
"quibble" over whether or not to schedule separate sessions for Internet
sub-topics.

First, 3 hrs. for each part?!  Lee, can you really get enough people to come
to make it worth your while?  Are others of you successful at that?  If
yes, hats off to you!  The only people I know who come to several sessions
like that over time are students enrolled in a class for which they get a
grade, or library staff who are required by their supervisors to attend.
 They, of course, are getting the sort of instruction that will ensure their
comfortable use of the gamut of services.  But such a program probably
cuts out the majority we're trying to reach, who can't spend that kind of
time learning something that isn't central to their lives.

2nd, I know the problem Lee raises of people being bored while you're
covering something they're not interested in (e.g., people really there for
FTP having to twiddle their thumbs while you go through Mail, which they
already know.  One way to handle that--and it seems to work quite well--is to
give them a choice of exercises that address different levels of skill
(beginner and advanced).  I don't know of anyone who can't learn more about
any service they already know.  (I don't think I've ever given a training
session of any kind, no matter how many times I've repeated it, that I
myself don't learn someting.)

Which brings me to the real benefit of teaching multiple pieces about the
Internet in one sitting: you as trainer have the opportunity to stretch
participants to learn more than they expected to learn, more than they knew
there was to learn.  That's harder to do in topic-specific sessions.

Quarble complete.

--Anne Lipow