I miss seeing my libraryland friends face to face, I miss seeing other places that I don’t otherwise visit, and I miss the dedicated time to think about libraries without actually working in one right that second. But what I haven’t lost is the networking, discussion, and general information sharing that keep me up to date with the world of libraries. That’s all still going on every day in my computer, thanks to the Library Society of the World and its FriendFeed room.

I hope sometime soon I can get the full conference experience again, and I kind of hope that the next conference I attend will be an LSW unconference (hint hint, people!), but I’m really glad to have stumbled in with this crew of top notch people.

I'm flying! At a conference!

Tomorrow and the next day, I’m attending a conference.

A virtual conference.

A virtual conference in a Second Life environment.

I’ve heard of having newbie orientation to large conferences (ALA and ACRL do this, for example), but I’ve never attended those. I did, however, attend the newbie orientation session for this conference and learned such useful things as how to talk to people, how to sit, how to jump (“in case you get stuck behind a bench or something”), and how to wear clothes.

During this orientation session, the people around me would randomly dress and undress, grow or shrink, or suddenly start flying. During this orientation session, the most confusing thing for everyone was how to talk to everyone else either publicly, within the group, or privately.

This should be interesting.

As far as I can tell, it died for three reasons: some people weren’t comfortable writing posts for it, people who rely on RSS to read blogs couldn’t deal with a blog that was locked down and therefore had no RSS option (one of those people was me me… no matter how useful, the site was dead to me without RSS), and everyone found they couldn’t get in the habit of clicking that bookmark and logging in to see if anything new had been posted recently.

Meanwhile, each of us continued to keep up with our own corners of the profession, some through email lists, some through professional journals, some through online social networks and blogs, and most through some combination of the three. But we all missed out on the richness that can come from hearing about things that affect our own worlds but originate in another person’s, and we all went back to been less and less aware of what interests and inspires our colleagues.

So this year we’re learning from the mistakes of our past effort and trying again, this time with more flexibility. I’ve set up a portal (still very much in progress) for those of us that really want a “home base” to check. There’s also a bookmarklet that will let people send annotated screenshots of web pages directly to my email account (using ToRead) for people who like that method of marking what they find, a Delicious tag for people who already use Delicious, and a general invitation to email me or pop in and tell me about interesting things that have come up.

So hopefully the collection piece will give people enough options that they don’t have to either conform or not participate. Hopefully there’s at least one option that will fit into each person’s existing habits, and people who are interested in experimenting with new-to-them options can do so without feeling locked into those options for all time.

Meanwhile, I’ll take whatever comes up and write a periodic blog post that glosses the things we’ve found (and behind the scenes, I’m going to see about getting password protected web-pub space on the college network so that I can link from the wide open blog to locked down documents that we aren’t comfortable sharing beyond ourselves). People can either subscribe to this newsletter via RSS or email, depending on their newsletter-reading preferences and workflow. It’ll also get fed into the portal for the “home base” folks. Just to round out our options, we’ll have low-key, face-to-face, brown bag lunch sessions once or twice a term for people who really prefer to discuss rather than read.

So hopefully the dissemination piece will also have enough options that people can work this seamlessly into their existing information-gathering processes.

The biggest challenge, then, will be striking the right balance between having a broad range of topics in each post/newsletter without overwhelming people with too many things that aren’t applicable to them. The idea is to have this be fun and interesting, not irrelevant and overwhelming. Wish me luck!

The Two-Fold Inspiration

Many of us in the MnObe libraries have been to Immersion, but not all of us, so we thought it might be nice to spread the benefits a little bit. Think of it as a really intensive conference report where the audience has to recreate the conference for themselves.

Then last year, the instruction librarians at my library got together and shared teaching modules and strategies with each other, and ended up surprising ourselves at the wealth of experiences, approaches, and practicalities that we had to share with each other. Those days still stand out as my favorite days of the entire summer last year even though we’d all gone into it wondering just what the point was, exactly, since we thought we had a pretty good idea of what each of us did. Boy were we wrong! And the only thing better than the librarians of one liberal arts college library teaching each other how to teach? The librarians of five liberal arts colleges teaching each other how to teach, of course!

So the idea this year was to recreate a Good Parts Version of Immersion just for ourselves, emphasizing particularly the parts that are relevant for smallish private schools with similar missions and goals, squeezing it into one day, and acknowledging the wealth of expertise that’s housed among our colleagues, and spending some quality time teaching each other how to teach.

The Logistics

We picked a day (August 6^th) and a place (Gustavus Adolphus) and met from 9 to 4. (In retrospect, building in some breaks would have been a good idea, but we were all so gung-ho!) All the presentations ended up being about half and half, lecture and discussion, which worked out really well.

• 9am: Gather for coffee, conversation, and introductions
• 9:30-10:15: Presentation — Information Literacy in the Liberal Arts (Barbara Fister)
• 10:20-11:05: Presentation — Changing Paradigms: Shifting the emphasis from Teaching to Learning (Iris Jastram and Aaron Albertson)
• 11:10-11:55: Presentation — Best Practices in Effective Instruction (LeAnn Suchy and Ken Johnson)
• Noon-1pm: Lunch
• 1-3: Instruction Workshops (small groups of 4–6 people)
• 3-4: wrap-up discussion

Participants had two assignments:

1. Plan out a SHORT presentation for the afternoon workshop (5-7 minutes) .
   This should be a snippet from instruction that you do or are planning to do and could either be something that works particularly well or that hasn’t worked as well as you’d like it to work. This could also be a narrative about a portion of a class that you are planning. Remember, you’ll be surrounded by experts who can help you, so take advantage of the opportunity! I strongly encourage you to plan to do these presentations without props of any kind. There will be projection equipment there that you can use if needed, but this exercise works best if the emphasis is on you and your teaching rather than a screen.
2. Read the two articles below.
   Think of these readings not as prescriptive but as food for thought as you enter a full day of thinking about the kinds of instruction we do at our institutions. How do they work for you? How don’t they work? What aspects of your own instruction style and content do they make you think about (something that they show to be either a strength of yours or a potential weakness)?
   1. “Teaching the Library: Best Practices” by Laura Saunders, published in the Spring 2002 issue of Library Philosophy and Practice, available here: http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/saunders.html
      This is a short overview of best practices in library instruction. Many of these ideas we may have heard before or think about when we plan library instruction, but we want you to read this and think about your own instruction. How do you try to accommodate different learning styles? What supplemental materials do you provide for your class? Do you try to incorporate humor into your instruction? Bring examples of your own instruction, or ideas you come up with as you read this, to share with all of us on Immersion Day.
   2. “So, What’s a Learning Outcome Anyway?” by Mark Battersby, published in 1999 as an ERIC document, available here: http://tinyurl.com/nbkjby
      This article attempts a definition of Learning Outcomes that foregrounds this concept as an approach or set of attitudes rather than as a formula for classroom instruction. How well do concepts such as “generic abilities” fit with liberal arts education in general and library instruction in particular? How do we break down the big picture end result of multiple “generic abilities” to things to be taught in a library instruction session? And, how do we relate them to the library tools we feel students must learn about, like the library catalog?

The articles were chosen by the presenters of the morning sessions and gave us some concrete things to agree or disagree with early in the morning. And there was a lot of disagreeing, but in the most constructive way possible, of course.

The whole day cost $10 per participant to cover lunch, coffee, and snacks.

I should note that the entire day required a grand total of an hour and fifteen minutes of meetings on the part of the organizing committee, and all but about half an hour of that were 15–minute telephone conference calls. So really, this isn’t that hard to set up. The hardest part was finding people to step forward and present, so the steering committee ended up doing two of the three presentations ourselves.

I guess the point is this: it’s really not hard, and though it may look either too serious or too hokey or too whatever, you might enjoy it more than you think.

And now, I think I’ll take a nap.

My experience last week reinforced this for me. I had a great conference! But reading Kathryn’s post, I realized that what we all want is a different conference to attend. We want something that falls in between the two kinds of conferences that are out there already but that has national (and international) draw like the current options do. Personally, I want something that gives nearly equal time to carefully thought-out presentations and less structured discussion. I want to hear from library-types and non-library-types. I want the moon.

Does this exist? Shall we descend on some unsuspecting conference and make it so? Shall we invent it from scratch?

He sat on that stage, surrounded by drapery, potted trees, two giant screens, an ACRL logo-bedecked podium, and stage lights. He sat there in a hoodie behind a tangle of cords, a mixing board, two high-powered CD players, and a large microphone. And in the midst of all this, there in that stark contrast of the majestic and the mundane, he explained that facts and their presentation can either be surprising and joyful, or they can be confining and boring. Story telling depends on suspense and on the story-teller’s ability to couple facts with ideas. Plot isn’t enough to hold our interest. Plots become stories when the story-teller can zoom out, so to speak, and show the broader landscape that gives these factual details their context. Story is all about how facts — so local, so specific — apply to something larger, something more meaningful.

Most of the sessions I attended were chock-full of facts. Several had organized those facts into a cohesive plot. Only a couple, though, managed to make those facts interesting and broadly applicable. Only a couple managed to zoom out and perform that first level of abstraction that would lodge in their listeners’ minds, prime them for that level of anticipation and surprise that makes learning enjoyable.

Even beyond explicating my own enjoyment and my own learning at this particular conference (or lack thereof), I hope I can work a healthy respect for surprise, suspense, joy — story – into my teaching. Research is the quintessential environment for coupling facts and ideas, and it can be presented in ways that either stifle interest or expand it, ways that either bore or surprise. If my students learn nothing more than that what they find can interest people, I will consider that they have learned something important (and that they should come back to me to learn how to actually go about mimicking the research habits of scholars in their fields).

Ira may have covered this in the 20 minutes after I had to leave to catch my flight home, but I think the musical pauses he works into his show (and which he worked into his performance at ACRL) are also key elements of story telling. If his structure is plot, plot, plot, plot, idea, plot, plot, idea, then I think the pauses exist to give people space to comprehend. It’s the serious version of comic timing, and it’s just as important to the overall effect. And if there’s one thing that I learned from watching both Ira and Sherman Alexie (another incredible speaker that I truly enjoyed listening to at this conference), it is that these pauses are carefully planned. There is nothing accidental about them, just as there’s nothing accidental about the ideas that these story-tellers present to give their plots meaning.

I am very bad at pausing.

Little by little I will become a better teacher and presenter. And in a strange way, both the successful presentations at this conference and the presentations that failed to deliver served to illustrate just where I want to concentrate my efforts this coming term.

I’m sitting here listening to announcements before the opening keynote and hoping that this conference will strike that tricky balance of being both fun and informative. My last ACRL (which was also my first) wasn’t such a great experience, so I’m on a mission to make this one different. Last time I think I chose my sessions poorly, and I had no idea how to meet up with people, so I ended up feeling like the most anonymous person in a sea of potential friends. This time I hope to choose better sessions to attend, and I’m hoping that I’ll manage to connect with some great people and re-connect with previous acquaintances. Part of this depends on you! If you’re here and see me (mostly recognizable by my olive green back-pack, which complements my jeans nicely) please introduce yourself! As a hint, I’ll probably be near a power outlet, and yes, I’m happy to share my extension cord with you.

So here goes. Keynote, then dinner, then hanging out, then back to the hotel (which is right across the street from the Seattle Public Library!). Here’s hoping for a useful, engaging, and fun conference. See you there!

Now I see that people may not, in fact, have a common understanding of the term “unconference.” The comments on Steve’s post point to at least three different interpretations: Unconferences are loosely structured conferences, Unconferences are grassroots gatherings, and Unconferences are a genre rather than a format. Here’s what I mean…

• Unconferences as loosely structured conferences
  If you think of a conference, you know that there are all kinds of logistics that go into pulling one of those things off, most of which depend to a large degree on how many people you want to attend. Everything from spaces to staffing to the number of speakers to the relative rock-start status of your speakers to the rigidity of the schedule has to be geared toward attracting and handling your target audience. If you plan for 100 people and only 40 show up, that’s a huge waste of capital. Bring this mindset to an unconference and you end up with less worry about rock-star speakers (though a few recent unconferences have had Big Names give keynote addresses), but most of the same issues remain your primary concern. The major thing that changes, then, is that the unconference organizers spend little to no time planning out sessions topics, leaving that up to the attendees.
• Unconferences as grassroots gatherings
  Other people, while still having to deal with logistics, consciously force those logistics into the background of the event. They still need space and people, obviously, but if they plan for 100 and 40 show up, those 40 might not even notice that you had enough room for more than twice their number. Those 40 would gather, decide what they want to learn and which of them can facilitate that learning, and then learn it, usually for free (with the space and other necessities paid for by donors or sponsors).
• Unconferences as a genre rather than a format
  Still others (myself included) think of unconferences as a genre of gathering which may or may not include a keynote address, may or may not charge a small fee, and may or may not have an over-arching theme. This genre places the emphasis on attendee-driven content, but other than that, it no more dictates the size or cost or logistical complexity than does the parent term “conference.” As Steve says, an unconference “can be whatever the attendees decide it is” (citation).

Luckily, the solution to all the muddled assumptions is transparency. So if I see an unconference coming up, and I see that it will charge me a small fee and what that fee will go towards, I can make my own decisions about the value of that unconference in my life. If I see that it will be of the loosely-structured-conference variety, and I’m ok with that, that’s great. If I see that it’ll be a completely unstructured day of serendipitous learning with other librarians, and I’m ok with that, that’s great too. After all, not all conferences are like ALA Annual, so why must all unconferences be as diametrically opposed to Annual as possible?

The theme that emerged most strongly for me at this conference was ethnography. Previous conferences have trumpeted tools, change, and stories, but this is the first time that I saw a collective desire to understand what it means to inhabit this online world.

Rather than lead us on tours of tools and services, more than one presenter echoed Cliff Landis’ statement that it’s not enough to have an account any more, you have to participate. Over and over we heard about presenting ourselves as humans online, not as institutions. Sometimes this means presenting yourself as a professional (Elizabeth Edwards’ session on an ethnography of Facebook made this point),* but even professionals have personality, and personality is as important online as off. danah boyd spoke compellingly about how an online profile is our digital body that we adorn as if we were getting dressed in the morning.** And both Greg and I spoke about online identity.

Not only are we finally taking a closer look at what it means to inhabit these online spaces, but the online spaces are becoming more integrated with our off-line spaces. As the two worlds come closer together, as the process of switching from one to the other becomes less and less of an action that requires thought and decision, and as computing becomes more and more ubiquitous, these issues of social norms and interpersonal interactions are bubbling to the surface and commanding our attention. How refreshing! This was the first conference in a long while that didn’t rely primarily on listing Tools You Should Know and instead concentrated on interacting with people online.

* A very similar presentation to the one we saw was blogged here.
**For excellent notes on this talk, see Jenica’s blog.

One explanation could be that we’ve managed to amass a group of cool librarians that are also good presenters. And while I think this is definitely true, I don’t think it’s the whole story. For one thing, if this were the whole story, I’d expect to see improvement in those of us who’ve spoken a lot, and I’d expect to see newer presenters from the group playing a bit of catch-up. I’m not really seeing that, though. It seems like the entire group, veteran and newbie speakers alike, churned out really high-quality work.

My theory is that the fact that we keep up with each other online, and the fact that we all know and respect each other, enticed everyone to step up and make sure that what they presented would be top notch. Put simply, everyone was proving to everyone else that they were cool enough to belong in the group. Even those who had never spoken at a national conference before had a reputation to maintain in front of a crowd of seriously talented, smart, and funny peers.

There’s a down-side to this network effect, too. We generally knew a lot of the facts presented already, since we’d already presented them to our peers online. Still, I heard several things expressed in person in ways that I hadn’t heard online. And the sheer mass of presentations and discussions juxtaposed against each other highlighted some trends that I would probably have missed otherwise.

The conference is over now, and we’re all scattering back to our respective homes. The conversation about librarianship will continue, though, as we keep up with each other online. I wonder what this means for the quality of next year’s conference. Only good things, I imagine.

Next up: actual information from sessions. I promise. I’m working on it.