Welcome to Online Editor where, each month, I’ll be encouraging you to reach for your mouse and click on the TJ Online website at www.trainingjournal.com.

This month I’d like to show you one way to make your visit to the website more interactive.

We cover all aspects of L&D in our news section, but how useful do you find each story, do you want more or less of a certain type of news, is there enough information, or not enough? We value what you have to say and we want to know what you think of the news we cover.

To encourage feedback, we’ve added a star rating system that allows you to give each story a rating of between one and five stars.

Before you can get interactive, you’ll need to log in, using the login box at the top right of the home page. If you can’t remember your details, you’ll see the login box contains
a handy link so that you can ask for them to be sent to you.

Once you’ve logged in, open any news item by clicking on the ‘View more’ link underneath the introductory paragraph to read the whole item and, when you’ve finished reading it, add your star rating by clicking the radio buttons to rate from ‘poor’ to ‘best’, then click the ‘Rate’ box to register your vote. Your vote will be added to everyone else’s to create an average star rating.

While you’re on the news page you can use the links to email the item to a friend, or print out and keep the whole thing.

While I’d be very happy if you all started rating news items, it would be even better to get a discussion going around the items of news as they go up on the site. What do you think of new government initiatives? Is funding being spent wisely? Are award-winners truly deserving? If enough of you take part we can get a really useful discussion going. At the foot of each item you’ll see a link where you can add your comment.

TJ Online is a moderated site, so you can be sure you are taking part in a safe and respectful environment. However, it does mean that your comment won’t appear immediately. Everything is read by me before it is uploaded, but I’ll do my best to make sure your comment is added within 24 hours.

If you’ve emailed an item of news to a friend, ask them to comment on it too. If they’re not already a TJ member they can take out a free one month trial of the magazine and website by clicking the link on the home page.

If you’d like to explore any news item, or anything at all to do with L&D in more depth, then why not send your message to the TJ Online Daily Discussion Digest. Email us at discussion@trainingjournal.com

This month’s Digest

The theme of this month’s Online Editorial is feedback, and it’s something that comes up frequently on the Digest. Dorothy Nesbit wrote on behalf of a colleague, pointing out how important feedback is to allow someone to grow and develop, how little real feedback people get, and how it affects their ability to adapt and change.

As well as information, links to reports and excerpts from papers on statistics, all of which you’ll find on the archive, readers offered practical advice on this.

Meg Burton suggested using the Johari Window to eliminate the blindspots we have about ourselves. She added that all feedback should be received with an open mind – you can choose what to do with it afterwards.

Resli Costabell had an innovative way of convincing people that feedback is important, and of letting them see for themselves what happens if someone doesn’t get it.

She said: “It may be a more powerful convincer if your colleague lets the group see for themselves what happens if someone doesn’t get feedback. One way to do this: Your colleague runs through a two-minute PowerPoint presentation about feedback, with the screen (deliberately) blanked or something blocking the projector.

"Throw in lots of ‘as you can see from the graph’, etc. If anyone says they can’t see anything, she must be quick to insist they ‘hold all feedback until the end’. To further heighten the group’s awareness of just how awful it can get if we don’t have feedback, your colleague could appear with spinach in her teeth or her skirt tucked into her knickers.

“For me, that’d be a lot more powerful than statistics about the importance of feedback.”

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Related News

• We are the champions
• Facing the devil in the detail
• Why honesty is the best policy

Related Discussion Topics

• Feedback
• Delivering Difficult Messages
• Delivering difficult messages

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