Karen Hartman, Information Resource Officer, and Susana Wang, Information Technology Coordinator, with the U.S. Department of State talk about 23 Things for an International Audience.
With the new administration, embassies are increasingly using social media to engage audiences and IRC staff needs to be on cutting edge. Training is a major component of the job, but people learn better by doing rather than being lectured to. State Department wants to promote a culture of innovation and lifelong learning and to narrow the digital literacy divide. They picked 23 things because it’s a successful self-paced learning program that’s been implemented all over the world. It integrates video and social media.
They put their 23 Things on the State Department intranet under a Creative Commons license and customized it to their needs. They integrated real research tools into their Things and added Things for Sharepoint, webchats, website usage statistics, search engine optimization, and SMS. Diplopedia is the State Department wiki and participants had to add an entry to it.
The program is open to all staff, but the moderated portion is for library staff only. Anybody in State can use the course materials and there’s been a lot of interest. The program is organized so that each week’s work wouldn’t take much more than 1 to 2 hours, but some people took more time. None of the Things require software downloads because not all embassies allow downloading. It required a lot of time to monitor the 125 participants.
They plan to lengthen the session to 16 weeks and limit to 50 participants, divide it into one part for beginners and one for advanced, and, possibly, make the program available off the intranet.
