My Lakehead University colleague Janice Mutz and I reprised the session I did at OLA two years ago this morning for an active and engaged crowd of about 50 librarians -- a great crowd for the very first session of the conference since a lot of people are still trickling in after arriving and registering.
This time around, we really put the emphasis on engagement and conversation, running the session like a combination Information Literacy and unconference session. Overall, we were really pleased with how it went and enjoyed the input from so many great librarians. Of the 20 or so "provocative question" slides we prepared, we only got through the first five or so, which was more or less what we expected. We'd budgeted about 30 minutes for that section and six minutes of discussion per slide seems right. We had a bunch more prepared just in case. The little "active learning" exercise we did also went very well.
In any case, here are the slides.
At the end of the session a number of people asked about us getting the slides up as a kind of anchor for conversation about the session, so here they are. Session attendee Bruce has already beaten me to the punch, commenting on an older post here.
The slides are also in our Institutional Repository here.
Finally, I'd like to thank Sarah Forbes for doing such a great job convening the session, especially for going with the flow in a slightly unusual session format.
Information Science
Education
Comments
Thanks for the slides. I should have gone to your session! You articulate many of the tensions I've been feeling for some time. Lunch with you was fun too!
Posted by: Jennifer D | February 28, 2010 3:57 PM
I was just sitting and thinking about what to say tomorrow to my new director, about my vision of a library future. And I put into google some relevant words, and found your site Confession of a science librarian. There I watched slides. Some thoughts were as cold shower – I like to be a librarian (I work in a third largest by size research library in my country), but I also feel the challenge for an institution of a library. Our head ministry discusses the change of research libraries, and the case study is required. Your “way forward” is just in time for us.
Posted by: Far away | March 1, 2010 7:10 AM
Thanks, Jennifer. Lunch definitely was fun! Sorry if the rest of us talked a little too much York shop, though...
Posted by: John Dupuis
| March 1, 2010 8:51 AM
Thanks, Far Away, and good luck with your case study.
Posted by: John Dupuis
| March 1, 2010 8:52 AM