Reskilling by bumping into people?

For managers' chapter.

"Add-on" is a pretty impressive condemnation of the usual style of library reskilling.

For the know-what and know-how distinction.

This article proposes bases for a workplace pedagogy. Planes of intentional guidance and sequenced access to workplace activities represent some key workplace pedagogic practices. Guidance by other...

plins and plans

A recent article in Slate (see here) suggests that practice may not lead to expertise, that the “10,000 hour rule” is wrong. The “10,000 hour rule” was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book O…

For the training chapter.

On August 11-12, I taught an Introduction to Programming Concepts via jQuery course at the DLF/Code4Lib unconference at the George Washington University. I was playing with several theories in deve…

John Gardner - Uncommon American

You don’t have some fixed IQ that can never change any more than I had a fixed ability to look for a lost dog. You can get better at thinking. You can train yourself to get, pardon the term, smarter. You can learn to find “x,” whether “x” is a number, an assumption, or a new way of doing something. You can learn the sort of quiet resolve you’ll need in that awful first moment when you face a complicated problem and have no immediate idea what to do about it. You can develop the skills to sort good information from bad, to ask the “second” question that clarifies the first, and to avoid going to pieces when things don’t go according to plan. You’ll even learn to keep going in the face of failure. That’s no small thing.

For mgmt chapter: gotta have slack if people are gonna reskill.

Introduction Earlier in August I had the pleasure of helping organize and run a tech-focused library unconference, Pi and Mash, at Senate House Library at the University of London. The other organi…

In my previous blog post, I asked why libraries are not actively encouraging those who are novice coders among library staff to further develop their coding skills.  I was surprised to see so many comments. I was even more surprised to see that the question was sometimes completely misunderstood.

A lot of good do's and don'ts for the teaching chapter.