losing ground

[Diane Nahl]

A study I did of novices learning to search a fulltext database showed the
same result that reference librarians and staff trainers observe
routinely: training is never enough. In the study, after a 2.5 hour
training session done by a prominent online educator, our 7 novices still
had over 1,100 questions about how to do things on the system over the
next 4-5 online sessions--routine things, things they had been taught.
(FYI JASIS April 1996)

Two factors are inherent in the online environment:  

1. People need redundancy in training and training support in the first
5-10 hours of actual use of a new system (this may be less for staff
familiar with online systems in general, but how much less isn't known).

2. technological change is so rapid that even experts will remain novices
in most new systems they adopt. 

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_/  Dr. Diane Nahl, Assistant Professor                  _/   From now  _/
_/  School of Library and Information Studies            _/   on we     _/
_/  University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96822             _/   are all   _/
_/  http://www2.hawaii.edu/slis/nahl/nahl.html           _/   lifelong  _/
_/  voicemail: 808-956-5809   FAX: 808-956-5835          _/   novices.  _/
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