Web Tastings

The purpose of this post is to share with you three lessons we wish someone had told us a year ago. But then again, what’s the point of teaching if you don’t learn something for yourself?

Last summer, some colleagues at IFPRI and I decided to begin offering a series of weekly trainings aimed at teaching researchers about new web-based tools and services. During the first several months, this is exactly what we showed- tool, service, tool, and so on. Staff who participated in these early trainings would later report that they had hardly heard of, let alone used, many of the tools and services we were showcasing- wikis, del.icio.us, iGoogle, etc. They also would reveal that few continued using them in the months that followed their first taste of the new tools and technologies.

So we did what people normally do when they get really busy for awhile- we continued teaching the same lessons in the same style until we had some time to calm down and reflect a little. Finally, we began to ask why more staff wasn’t using these tools on a regular basis. And why we weren’t able to attract more research staff to the trainings. We knew these were directly linked, and began to explore new approaches for reaching our target audience. Below is a summary of some of the more important lessons we’ve learned so far, along with the stories behind them.

1. Focus on the job, not the tool. The first couple of times we talked about social bookmarking services with researchers, we showed them del.icio.us. In fact, we showed them how to create an account, how to import their browser’s bookmarked pages, and briefly explained about tagging and how to share resources with friends and colleagues. At the end of the session, we basically just told the researchers to go to it. A handful of researchers later asked us for help setting up their accounts. Few, however, reported that they were still using the service months after the training.
   What went wrong? Well for starters, we were focusing on the tool rather than the application. Turns out, researchers wanted to see how this tool could be applied in their daily lives. Otherwise, their interest in the tool quickly passed. The leadup to a major international conference on “Taking Action for the World’s Poor and Hungry People” turned out to offer a perfect opportunity to showcase one strength of social bookmarking services- the ability to create collaborative lists in real time. In years past, organizers of such events spent months and months contacting leading researchers asking them to submit lists of important works related to the conference as well as publishers to request permissions to make these texts freely available to audiences in the developing world. Prior to this event, targeted individuals received an email invitation to submit their lists electronically and were given three options for doing so- emailing in their entries, filling out an online form from a website or using their own del.icio.us account and a tagging their recommended papers with a common keyword (food4all). Though the majority of submissions were collected via email or online form, our del.icio.us page became the central repository for these resources and was used to publish the bibliographic list onto the conference website. When we showed this application to researchers in subsequent trainings, it provided a concrete example of what the service could be used for in supporting their own work. And, not surprisingly, more researchers got on board and have begun using social bookmarking in their daily lives since then.
2. Researchers like hearing from other researchers, not us. Our first couple of sessions about blogging were well attended by research staff, but few expressed interest in setting up their own blogs. Once again, this had us scratching our heads as we tried to figure out why blogging wasn’t catching on among staff. Our approach was to present blogs as a website-in-a-box that anyone could set up in a matter of minutes and showed how many millions of blogs were started by “regular people” every month. So it seemed to be another case of focusing too much on the tool rather than on how it can be used.
   Yet in subsequent presentations, we began showcasing organizational blogs from IFPRI and other research organizations and still few seemed interested. Fortunately for us, though, we were able to capture the attention of a couple of younger researchers during these early trainings who would later take blogging at IFPRI to new lengths. Eva Schiffer, a post-doc who developed a social networking analysis tool, thought a blog would be ideal for sharing ideas and applications for her tool with the wider research community as well as on-the-ground development workers. Soon, the number of entries and amount of traffic from Eva’s Net-Map Toolbox blog had surpassed that of IFPRI’s other blogs, and we invited Eva to present her experiences with her colleagues at IFPRI. During her presentation, Eva explained how the blog connected her to new audiences of readers and that her research actually benefited from the online exchanges with these readers, many of whom included other researchers and development workers engaged in similar issues. Truth is, Eva’s story wasn’t all that different from our own adapted sales pitch- that researchers were using blogs to reach new audiences that didn’t visit our organizational website and that these new audiences often were looking to actively engage in creating knowledge rather than passively receiving information- but the fact that the message was passing from one researcher’s lips into the ears of her peers seemed to make the difference. Several staff approached us following the presentation requesting that we help set up their own research blogs. Go figure.
3. Don’t assume you know what researchers need- go out and ask them! I saved this one for last because, truth be told, we’re only now just starting to move in this direction. Or rather, we’ve been asking them what they want to learn for some time now and we typically hear them recite back to us the list of tools we’re already presenting. For a while, we took this as a sign that we were doing everything right, but then we started to wonder whether or not we were asking the right question. Or, put another way, were they saying they wanted to know more about blogs and wikis mainly because they knew that’s what we could teach them or because they suspected that these tools would help them in their work? Based on how few were actually starting their own blogs and wikis, we had to assume that the former was true.
   We began asking ourselves how we could find out what researchers needed in a different fashion. So we decided to rephrase the question – What are some common communication bottlenecks you face in your work? Many complained of email overload. Others expressed the need for collaborative work spaces for posting data, figures and working versions of research papers for sharing among colleagues and project teams. All this has led us to the point where we are now testing out several content management systems that support the type of functionality researchers have requested. And it seems unlikely that we would have arrived here so quickly had the researchers not shared with us information on what they needed.

All told, we’ve learned quite a bit from our experiences over the past year (and maybe even more than we’ve taught). And I’d like to be able to tell those of you interested in implementing similar trainings to simply follow the tips I’ve shared above and your organization will be Web 2.0 savy in no time. But with all change, these things take time. Having another year under our belts of not just training but also implementing these tools and services in our daily jobs as well as in our personal lives probably has just barely laid the foundation really getting our hands dirty and supporting researchers eager to swallow up knowledge and information on working with new web tools and services (see Stephan’s last post on project management 2.0). In the meantime, keep us posted if you have any tips or “best practices” for teaching 2.0 in your organization and we’ll do the same as new ones pop up.