Cohesive Units

I have been thinking about how working with groups of people who are familiar with each other seem to learn better. So far the sessions I have been running have consisted of groups of staff who know each other well. I suspect that the relationships that they have with each other helped to create a space where they felt they could assist each other.

Wednesday 20th April

Sessions today had a smaller group of people (6 - 8), it went well.  Giving people permission to explore and be creative is quite powerful. I set the scene by saying I was here to assist them finding the answers themselves.  They seemed receptive. The session with the general staff was amazing they clearly had never been given permission to explore in that way and where honestly blown away by what they could find with just a few search terms. They loved it. The academic where less open to the approach and wanted me to tell them exactly what to do. It was later in the afternoon when I saw them and they did seem tried.

Digital Literacy Approach in Action - My reflections on my work

In my workplace up until recently, development of staff and organisational ICT capability has been piecemeal and lacked a planned approach. Much of the support has focused on developing specific ICT skills rather than digital literacy competence. I suspect while people I work with are able to effectively perform some technical tasks they find it difficult to apply what they currently know to other applications or technical problems i.e. skills are treated as technically specific rather than transferable knowledge.

I am about to run a workshop, nothing really unusual about that. It is a very ordinary topic word processing and long documents. The interesting thing is I am trying a different approach. I want to focus less on the skills ... which buttons to click on... and more on the principles. I am a bit nervous most people I suspect will just want to know how to rather than why what for. I hope they can see that the principle of 'teach a person to fish' applies here in this space of digital literacy.
...

The word processing workshop went really well. I did not expected that staff would be so receptive to the style of workshop (22 people).  I expected them to want me to show them which buttons to push. We talked about concepts, they participated in the conversation and seemed engaged. I observed a room full of people engaged, learning and having fun. They had minimal direction, they got minimal instruction and I encouraged them to investigate for themselves and work together. It worked. I felt good and I looked at a room full of people who also seemed to feel good. They lost track of time, our 60 minute session run over by 30 minutes - not something that should happen but they didn't want to stop. Several people went away with clear plans to make changes to their practice and took the time to stop and tell me what they had planned.