We’ve heard from many of you about the importance that training plays in terms of SND’s tangible worth to you.
We’ve made some important changes over the last two years to transform the kinds of training SND offers.
We put out a survey to ask you what kinds of training you were looking for.
We launched two-day, hands-on, computer lab courses to teach real skills that could be immediately put to work. Among the topics:
Editing video and audio
Using Photoshop and Illustrator tools like the pros
Writing, editing and designing alternative story forms
Constructing 3-D graphics in Lightwave
This year we added a Web Design Boot Camp to help print designers translate their skills through HTML and CSS. The second one is scheduled for July 11-12 in Las Vegas. It’s not too late to sign up!
We also created a $50 day-long Quick Course in Orlando on April 17 that featured some of the major innovations happening at news organizations today. We are planning another low-cost event at Michigan State University in East Lansing this October.
And we started the free meet-ups that took place in Washington, D.C., New York and Chicago — with several more to come this year, including one in San Francisco on July 18.
Now we have some more ideas, and we’d like to get your input.
Live chats: We are going to schedule several live chats on topics that are at the top of our collective agendas such as changing careers, building Web audience, using social media to extend brand and audience, the role of video on news Web sites, etc. If you have ideas for topics or featured guests on these chats, please comment below or send me an e-mail. We’d love to have your ideas.
BarCamp: BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants. These usually take place at bars and can feature a variety of topics, many relating to the digital landscape. We are interested in organizing or joining some of these events. Are you involved with this group? Do you have a topic you’d like to present or one you’d like to hear more about in this kind of setting? Let us know.
Ignite: Ignite is a style of presentation where participants are given five minutes to speak on a subject accompanied by 20 slides. Each slide is displayed for 15 seconds, and slides are automatically advanced. We are interested in organizing or joining some of these events. Are you involved with this group? Let us know.
Other organizations and events: We’re interested in partnering with other groups out there, either by adding some programming to one of their events, or by co-sponsoring an event. Who should we be talking to? What events should we be looking at?
Online tutorials: We would like to create a series of short skills-based videos for members using screencasting software. Is there a specific skill, effect, tool, script you want to know more about? Or something that you can share with our members? Please let me know if you’d like to participate.
Meet-ups: We want to encourage as many of these casual events as possible. A meet-up can be as simple as inviting a group of people to share drinks at a local pub or as ambitious as scheduling one or more speakers at an auditorium. The only requirements are that it should be free and open to anyone, reach out to a broad spectrum of people (Web developers, print and digital designers, artists, photographers, students, etc.) and help SND extend its message. All we ask is that you let us know when and where it will be so that we can help you promote it — we might even be able to supply limited free swag! If you need help getting something like this off the ground, send me an e-mail.
Thoughts? We want to hear from you. Please comment below this story or send your thoughts to the e-mail address below.
Thanks for your help and stay tuned!
Denise M. Reagan
Education & Training director
I’d love to see some online Quick Courses that I could do at home or in the office. The topics are almost always something I’d pay to learn, but it’s just too expensive to pay the SND fee *and* have to travel.
I will have to agree with Jen’s comment about online courses/topics. These days it’s too expensive to travel anywhere with salary cuts and mandatory furloughs.
Creative Techs in Seattle has started doing “free” live courses from their offices on different topics. It’s free if you can catch it at the time it’s offered or a small fee for later viewing.
SND should look into how they do it as it might be a viable option for our group.