The ILTA conference is next week.  I hope to see many of you there.  The User Support Peer Group track is on Monday, with sessions for trainers, help desk, and user support staff.  Good stuff.

Conference sessions are structured into a few mini-themes this year, including Office 2007.  I’ll be hosting a hands-on session on building Elearning for an Office rollout on Tuesday afternoon.  Attendees will get to play with Adobe Captivate, and it should be a lot of fun.

Several SLLP members are also presenting at conference. Great information from some of the best in the industry.

Of course, it’s a great week for networking with colleagues and vendors.  It’s the highlight of my year.  Please introduce yourself if you see me.

Tony Hartsfield

Social Networking on the Web is big in business circles, and the legal market has started to notice. I’ve read sources that suggesting as many as 50% of lawyers in US firms have online profiles on a variety of networking sites. The percentage will likely increase as new lawyers raised on Facebook and MySpace enter the market.

Should legal learning professionals care? Should we be proactive in facilitating the phenomenon? Should we have involvement in a subject that is not really IT?

I’m pretty sure the answer is yes.

We need to be aware of what Web 2.0 tools our lawyers are using to improve their professional standing with clients and colleagues. More than that, we should provide guidance on how to improve their online identity. Which means that, yes, we should have a well-managed online presence, too.

I’ve been noodling with social websites for a few years. You can find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, and most recently, Plurk. I also participate in a few discussion forums. Some are targeted to learning: SLLP, ILTA, eLearning Guild, Learning Town, Content Wrangler. Others are related to hobbies and personal interests. I do it primarily because I enjoy the interaction, but I also see the professional benefits of having a Web 2.0 identity.

Where can you be found on the web? How do you represent yourself personally and professionally there? What lessons have you learned that could be shared with lawyers in your firm?

I’m interested in your thoughts on the subject, especially from those of you that are skeptical about social networking on the web, or who come from firms that frown on its use.

And if you’re on any of the above sites, feel free to connect with me.

Elliott Masie, Godfather of e-learning, has a great new post on setting the tone during training.  He says that you define the learner’s expectations in the first three minutes in the classroom.

After teaching for 30 years, I feel that a large number of learners make a thumbs up or thumbs down rating in those sweet 180 seconds.

You have even less time if it’s online content.  First impressions matter.  Even if your performance improves after a faulty start, your opportunity may be blown.

Go read Elliott’s post: The First 3 Minutes of Learning - Oh, So Important

This is probably not new to legal learning professionals, but training cannot be an afterthought to an effective rollout project.  It does not matter if the rollout is a technical success; if the user community does not “get” it, and responds negatively, then the project has largely failed.

Well planned, well executed training is the difference.

Computer World has an article that highlights the biggest mistakes made in training for rollouts.  I particularly like the comments on contextual instruction and standardization of materials.

Again, you probably already know most of this stuff, but it’s nice to have the reinforcement.  You could also show it to your project managers for their reference.

IT’s Top Five Training Mistakes

Note: I posted this story about a year ago on the forum.  I had a similar experience with scaling our learning content to a specific audience yesterday, but felt like the original post said it about as well.

This morning I had the opportunity to train someone from our housekeeping department.  He is a high-functioning mentally challenged person.  The request was for me to sit with him one-on-one and go over phones & voicemail, logging in, checking email, and accessing our intranet page for a couple of tasks.

I had a new hire binder ready for him, which contains about 50 quick reference cards on the core enterprise apps of the firm.  I opened it to the phone section to go over basics.  I highlighted the tasks that we performed.

As I looked at the cards, I realized that he wasn’t going to create ad hoc conference calls from two inbound calls.  He was going answer and sometimes transfer a call.  We practiced transfer over and over again until he felt comfortable doing it.  When we covered voicemail, I again highlighted just the 2 or 3 things he needed to do.

Email?  Read, reply, forward, and write new mail.  No calendar. No contacts.  So we forwarded messages a lot until he got it.  We compared it to his Hotmail account at home.

Intranet?  He’s already been here a few months and knew how to do his 2 daily tasks.  He showed me with no complications.

I took 4 cards out of the new hire binder and placed them in a new folder for him.

Why am I sharing this anecdote with you?  Today I was reminded about the extensibility of our new hire training materials.  Because we have structured them into task-based QR cards, I was able to select just what was needed to customize training to his needs.

We don’t teach software.  We teach core skills for what the role requires.

And I was reminded why I love to teach.  I have the best job in the world.

Is your training program modular?  Can you select from it what is needed for each type of employee in your firm?  When a firm application is new to your people, can you find a way to help them apply prior learning to the firm environment?

We got to see a demonstration of Adobe Acrobat 9 yesterday. Adobe is doing some amazing things with Acrobat these days, and many of them are suitable for the legal industry.

Building on the Package feature in version 8, Acrobat 9 Pro and Pro Extended can now compile Portfolios, containing documents, folders, images, presentations (with animation), even Flash videos, in their original format. Portfolios could be used for case filings, depositions, closing books, and other legal-friendly purposes.

PDF has now become a wrapper for delivering all kinds of file types. Navigating in a Portfolio is a breeze, and the look is very cool. We see some very interesting possibilities for creating smart, sexy learning products with Portfolios.

Forms creation and management is easier, either from an Acrobat document, or importing a Word or Excel file.

Acrobat 9 can Compare documents and images (it could end the “what’s the difference between these pictures?” game). And it can manage PDF metadata, a hot issue for law firms.

We also saw the new Acrobat.com, where you can store 5 gigs of files, create PDFs, create documents in Buzzword (newly-acquired, feature-rich word processor), share and collaborate, even host a web meeting. It’s all online and basic accounts are free. I set mine up as soon as I got back to the office.

Mark E. Middleton is the Legal Account Specialist for Adobe, and his primary focus is to show law firms of all sizes the benefits of their products. Rick Borstein is a Business Development Manager for Adobe in the legal market. Rick has a terrific blog that is targeted to law firms: blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw. And he’s geeky enough to appeal to legal learning professionals like us.

We’re big fans of Adobe products, and were very impressed by the demonstration of Acrobat 9. Whether you consider deploying it to all desktops, or to targeted users in your firm, the functionality is just too good to ignore.

Law.com has an interesting article by Adam Anderson which suggests the benefits of lawyers having a Gmail account.

Really.

Anderson, a lawyer himself, shares two scenarios for its use.

No… really.

Read it yourself: Tech Whiz Delivers the Advantages of Gmail

I’ll bet he has uses for Google Docs and Google Calendar as well. I wonder how many law firms have established policies regarding web tools like these?

Let me confess up front that I usually do not enjoy these events. They’re out of my comfort zone. They’re out of my way. They’re often “themed” in a manner that annoys me (I hate theme parties). The weather will always be contrary that day – rain or heat or whatever.

And yet, I’ve come to the conclusion that I should make the effort to attend. Why should I go?

Networking. The firm picnic, like the firm holiday party, is an opportunity to see the people you work with in a non-work setting. And they get to see you. Social connections tend to make for better working relationships, because they show that there’s more to your life than the cube. They see your kids. They see your awful taste in casual wear. They see you drink a beer, and get mustard on your shirt.

When I share an experience like this with a partner, I look at them differently than in the confines of the office. I usually like them more. We now have something to talk about the next time we’re in the elevator together.  And that kind of interaction can pay off the next time we work on business matters.

Social Grooming. This is similar to networking, but from a different angle. I learn things about myself at the firm picnic. I learn how to find the fun in situations. Even if I’m not familiar (or comfortable) with the themed event, I can still enjoy my family and co-workers. We’ll share a meal together, play a few games, and in the end, usually have a good time. And after saying, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad after all” a few times, I’m learning to not be so negative about the idea.

Of course, the next day it’s back to work. But with a little sunburn and a few stories to exchange with co-workers, work is more fun, too.

How ‘bout you? Do you go to your firm picnic?

We’ve created assessments for a couple of years now. They’re required for our secretaries, but not associated with annual reviews. That may change in the near future, but that’s another tale for another time.

As I compare our first assessment modules to the one that will release later this summer, I’ve seen an evolution in my approach to making them. And while I’ve always been in favor of the concept, my reasons have expanded.

It’s good for the learner. My colleague on the team always says, “If it’s worth training, it’s worth assessing.” And he’s right. Your learning community needs the reinforcement that assessing provides, and it gives their directors a measure of the competency of their people.

But if you think that assessments benefit only the assessed, think again.

It’s good for the learning professional. Along the same lines as “nothing helps you learn something better than having to teach it”, nothing helps you to craft learning content better than having to create assessments from it. We find gaps in our documentation, inconsistencies in instruction for similar tasks, items that are in the wrong workflow, or stuff that just flat out doesn’t make sense. I’ve grown as an instructional designer because of the process.

So go forth an assess, legal learning professionals. It helps everyone involved.

I’m enjoying Jenn Steele’s new blog titled Leading Geeks.  She channels her IT experience in the legal market to write about managing technical teams.  And she does it with charm and wit.

Jenn Steele - Leading Geeks