Pegasus Librarian

Moving! You May Have to Update Your RSS Feed.

2009-08-08T16:50:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm finally ready enough to make the leap. I'm moving this blog over to WordPress (thanks to LIShost!). I've had a great time figuring out the basics of WordPress tweaking. The new site isn't quite done (I need to figure out how to convert links to my own posts to point to the WP version, for example), but it's done enough that I'm impatient to start living over there rather than splitting my attention between two platforms.

Here are the relevant details:

The new site is located at http://pegasuslibrarian.com/
If you subscribe to my FeedBurner feed or the email notifications, you're set. If not, please update your feeds:
Posts: http://feeds.feedburner.com/PegasusLibrarian
Comments: http://feeds.feedburner.com/PegasusComments

I look forward to seeing you over in my new online living room!

What I Retained from Immersion 2006

2009-08-08T15:04:00.000-05:00

Three years ago, I attended ACRL's Information Literacy Immersion. The name is corny, but apt. It's intense. Not every hour of it is the Best Experience Ever, in a large part because many of the faculty weren't very good teachers (which is ironic, isn't it?). But the chance to have a full week to really sit back and think about pedagogy was a wonderful thing.

Since then, I've done a lot of teaching, my co-workers and I spent some time teaching each other our best modules and philosophies last year, a friend attended this year's Immersion, a few others and I organized "Mini-Immersion" for the instruction librarians of the 5 liberal arts colleges in the Oberlin Group (more about that later), and I've participated in some great LSW FriendFeed discussions (like this one) that forced me to really think about what I do, what I've learned, and what I still have to work on.

So what did I retain from Immersion '06? In my head, I think of it as both a lot and not much at all. It feels like a lot because a few things fundamentally changed the way I approach instruction, I hope for the better. At the same time, I know that there are a lot of specifics about learning theories, learning styles, and assessment techniques that I've forgotten, and I'm pretty sure there were other things that I don't even remember having learned in the first place. I remember being bored with several sessions (and my notes from those sessions are uselessly dominated with things like "so tired," "kill me now," and "death by handout"), but I don't remember what I was supposed to be learning during those sessions.

And yet, I would recommend the experience to anyone who does instruction because the three things that changed my instruction have been just that valuable to me. Your three things might be different, but hopefully they'll be even half as valuable. My three are:

Be your authentic self when you teach
First of all, I love Randy Hensley. He was our instructor for the sessions on instruction, and he is A-Maz-Ing. Baruch is lucky to be getting him. But that's not really a learning outcome, just my overwhelming impression from Immersion. Back to what I learned. Lots of what I had read about instruction included becoming a perfect teacher-person. This person was able to make students laugh, gain their trust, be wise, be organized, be spontaneous, be an authority figure... in other words, be one in a million. So I'd go into classes trying to impersonate this amazing teacher. And because I'm pretty good at impersonations, this stood me in good stead for a while, but it left me less willing to try things I was less comfortable with because I was already using up all my energy projecting Perfect Teacher onto everything. Learning to play up my strengths was so freeing. It meant that I could give myself permission to include mini-lectures if that's what the class called for (even though the literature is constantly telling me that it should be Active Learning or nothing), or feel free to start a class on citation with an "I'm such a dork that I actually LOVE citation" attitude, or not feel like a total failure because I'm kind of bad at leading discussions while my co-worker can draw students out like you wouldn't believe. It also gave me permission not to care about things that felt gimmicky to me, because if it felt gimmicky to me, there's no way I'd make it feel important and relevant to my students. Basically, it taught me that just like not all clothes look good on all people, so also all teaching "best practices" will fit into my classroom. And that's ok. What counts is that I interact authentically with my students.
As you're planning a session, get in the habit of switching from "I will teach" to "I want the students to learn."
If I want to be thorough, I build real learning goals using the formula "The students will" + [verb phrase] + "in order to" [goal]. So, for example, "Students will recognize key functions of a database interface in order to navigate unfamiliar databases by making educated guesses about functionality and options." Then I figure out everything students will have to know it order to do this (it could be quite a lot!). I don't always have time or energy for developing formal learning goals, but at the very least I always consciously switch from "I will teach" to "the students will learn," and suddenly my decisions become easier.
You can get to 2-4 learning goals in a 50-minute session. Seriously. And usually more like 2 or 3.
There's always so much to teach and so little time, but packing more in there really won't help anyone. Figuring out learning goals helps me to prioritize not on the level of "I'll emphasize x over y and give z the least time," but also by helping me decide what to leave out altogether. Which is always sad, but necessary. (I get around this by making subversive handouts for most of my classes.)

Since Immersion, I've added one more maxim to my list: Shifting the emphasis to active learning and constructivist pedagogy doesn't negate the need for some straight up, potentially boring, pedagogically outdated training. My students need to know the difference between a journal citation and a book chapter citation, and I want that piece to take 3 minutes rather than 15 so that we can get to some actually interesting active learning. But now, I use learning goals to help me make a choice about where this kind of training is important in a class rather than using that as my default.

So yeah, I've learned quite a bit in the last three years, but there's a long way to go. I'd really like to figure out how to draw students out more effectively in discussion. I'd like to think more about how to emphasize the transferable skills in everything they learn. I feel like my active learning components lack creativity. And I'd like to figure out how to work with professors even more closely to make sure that we each reinforce the others' work with the students so that my one-shot session doesn't just wither by itself on the syllabus. I really think library sessions can reinforce or even advance the content piece of the course, and I think the professors can work information literacy pretty innocuously into more than just the one day without sacrificing time or content (I've seen it happen over and over, and I'm hungry for more of that).

LSW Raising Money for the Louisville Free Public Library

2009-08-05T08:12:00.006-05:00

Yesterday, rain descended on Louisville in a big way, and one of the places hit especially hard was the main public library. I watched Twitter posts and pictures roll in from my friend and fellow LSW member Greg Schwartz and couldn't believe my eyes. They're estimating $1 million in damage right now (books, servers, computers, bookmobiles, everything).

So Steve Lawson has started a project in the name of the LSW. Our goal: $5000. Here's the official announcement from his blog (recreated here for your convenience and through the glories of his CC license):

I have set up the email LSW.LFPL@google.com and linked it to my PayPal account. I intend to collect money at that address until September 1, at which point I’ll send a check in the name of the Library Society of the World to the LFPL Foundation. You can just send money to that email address using PayPal, or use the button below:

[This button works much better on Steve's page.]

If you’d rather send a check, send it to the Library Society of the World Clubhouse, PO Box 7893, Colorado Springs CO 80933. Make the check payable to Steve Lawson.
Don’t worry about how much you can afford to donate. My own contribution will be small-ish, between $20 and $50.

But there are about 300 members of the LSW room on FriendFeed. There are close to 1,000 members of the LSW group on Linkedin. I would like to think we can raise at least $5,000 for LFPL by September 1. That’s only $17 per FriendFeed member, or $5 per Linkedin member.
For this to work, you have to trust me. I promise that every dime that comes through PayPal or check will go to LFPL. (PayPal takes a small cut if your donation is charged to your credit card (rather than your bank account) and if you don’t choose the option to pay those fees yourself, so it’s possible that I won’t get the full amount of your donation. I’ll only be able to donate the money I actually receive after PayPal fees.)

On September 1, I’ll total up what we have raised and send it to the library. If you would rather give money yourself instead of sending it to me, here is the address and phone number given in the Louisville Courier-Journal:

The Library Foundation
Attn: Flood
301 York St.
Louisville, KY 40203
(502) 574-1709
Five thousand dollars or more for Louisville Free Public Library by September 1. Think we can do it? I’ll keep you posted.

I think we can do this.

Firefox Search Bar Frustrations

2009-07-31T10:46:00.000-05:00

It's a tiny thing, but I use it about a million times a day. It's the FireFox Search Bar -- it's my supplier for all that Googly goodness I need in a pretty much constant stream throughout my day. I'll probably get some sort of repetitive stress injury from the specific action of hitting ctrl-k. In fact, I sometimes even use this search bar to open a new tab since hitting ctrl-k and then enter (I have the box set to open searches in a new tab) can be easier on the hands than hitting ctrl-t sometimes.

But my search bar isn't working, and hasn't been for about a week now. I can ctrl-k myself there, type in my search terms, and hit enter, but where I'd expect to see a Google result list, I see a pristine Google home page. No search terms. Nothing. What's more? I can change that Search Bar so that it says it's searching Amazon, or IMDB, or anything, and when I type in search terms and hit enter... I get a pristine Google home page.

For a completely unrelated problem, I ended up uninstalling Firefox and and installing the new beta version, but the search bar problem didn't go away when I did that. I poked at the internet for a couple of days trying to see if anyone had come up with a fix, but didn't find anything. I searched through the Firefox support forum and knowledge base and found people having similar (though not necessarily the same) problems, being told to follow the directions in the knowledge base. Then the thread would be closed as "solved" before anyone could say "but I tried that already."

Knowing a little bit about how these support forums work, I search hard before posting my own question. I know there's no patience for people posting questions that have already been answered a million times. But I finally did, and I included in the post that I'd already tried those other directions with no success, and I'd already uninstalled/reinstalled, etc. And now I can't find my forum post anywhere, so I'm turning to you. What do I try next? I'd really like this search bar to work. Really really really.

The Importance of Endings

2009-07-30T18:50:00.004-05:00

Things that never end are boring. It's not that you have to know when, specifically, something will end, but knowing that it will or can at some point changes our engagement with whatever-it-is.

I've always thought I wished my favorite books would never end, but that's not actually true. The prospect of an ending catches me in between the desire to swallow a good book in one sitting and the desire to ration my reading to stave off the inevitability of reaching that last period. I've also slogged through my share of books that felt like they'd never end. I'd keep a running tally in my head of chapters and pages left between me and the sweet release of that back cover. That back cover became the dominant experience of the book for me. Even the cycle of having books come in and out of print makes owning copies of precious books that much more special. And imagine how life would have been if The Never Ending Story actually never had ended? It hardly bears contemplating!

A few weeks ago, I thought I had nearly recovered from the mysterious health issues that have been my constant companions for well over a year and a half now. With an end finally in sight, I suddenly found myself willing to talk about this stuff for the first time with people outside my closest circle of friends. Maybe having an end point waiting in the wings made me less afraid of either boring people or of sounding whiny or pathetic. I don't know. All I know is that the ability to stick mostly to the past tense unlocked the topic, made it palatable. (Now, though, I think I'll relegate it back to "most boring topic I'm obsessed with" status and hope that an end point creeps back into view sometime soon.)

All this makes me wonder about times when ends or lacks of ends may have influenced the kinds of discussions we've had in librarianship, and the levels of enthusiasm we were able to feel for those discussions. I wonder if implying the end of the mostly un-named Library 1.0 reinvigorated interest and discussion in libraries in general no matter which side of the Library 2.0 debate you fell on. And I wonder if the liberating concept of "perpetual beta" has, after all, sapped some of the life out of discussions of new services and tools these days. I read a line in a zine* this week that implied that it's hard to write a story when you don't feel you know its ending, and if everything from interfaces to service points are constantly and rapidly evolving, it can be hard to think of stories to tell that feel more cohesive than a brief status update.

*Joe Biel. "In Sickness and in Health." The Perfect Mix Tape Segue. Number 5.

What's In a Term?

2009-07-28T20:46:00.003-05:00

One of the things I love about language is how inexact it is. I went through a phase of bemoaning that very quality ("Life would be so much simpler if language were more more exact," or even "Life would be so much simpler if all the rest of you people would use language more precisely"). When this seemed like it could become one of those fruitless grudges that I could harbor for the rest of my life, I decided to like it instead, and then discovered that I'd always liked it. I love learning what words mean to other people and comparing that to what they mean to me.

I apparently also like digressions.

On Sunday, Lori Reed asked the denizens of the LSW FriendFeed room whether they preferred the term Patron or Customer. People expressed preferences, some gave reasons for these preferences, and some proposed alternatives to both terms (with "user" being the most often mentioned).

Most of the time, I talk about "students" or "faculty," but every once in a while, I need a good collective term. When that happens, I prefer "patron." I appreciate the mutual respect that it implies, with my services being worthy of patronage and with patrons making the whole existence of the library possible. It may be a rather elderly term (the OED says it originated in the 12th century, after all), but the term "cottage" is even more hoary and hasn't lost its vigor yet.

I tend not to like "customer" and "user." When I worked in a bookstore, I sold things to customers, and I don't enjoy selling stuff. For me, it muddies the waters, and makes me worry that the people I'm working with wonder if I'd even care if they didn't have money. And while "user" is part of my library vocabulary ("user needs assessment" being a familiar and meaningful phrase for me), if I had to chose one term to the exclusion of all others, I'd stick with patron over user. Aside from sounding like "user" could mean "drug addict," I mostly prefer my environment to feel less one-sided. A user is one who uses the library's collections and services. I am one of the library's services. A user uses me. Two of my favorite things about the work that we do is that it's so collaborative with other members of our campus community and how much I get out of our interactions, and so I rarely think of our faculty and staff as using me.

For me, "patron" means mutual respect, and so every time I use it, I remind myself that I respect our faculty and students, and that they (ideally) respect me. If "patron" feels like disrespect to you, please don't use it, but please don't assume I mean disrespect when I use it.

Let the Adventures Begin

2009-07-27T21:04:00.006-05:00

So, I did a semi-impulsive thing: I registered a domain name and set up some server space. Now, when I say "I" I actually mean the amazing people at LIShost. I haven't actually lifted a finger yet because I'm a little intimidated by the whole thing. (By the way, Blake has already blown me away with his customer service and it's only been a day since I asked him to put things in motion for me. He's incredibly tolerant of stupid questions, too.) Also, when I say "semi-impulsive" I mean "been thinking about it for 2 years but was too scared until now."

Imagine my excitement this morning when I opened the email that announced the birth of my very own web space. So cute! So full of potential (and nothing else). So.... and then I actually read the email. It started off just fine. I reproduce all but the sensitive parts here:

Welcome aboard LISHost!
Here are the details for your new domain, [my domain, which I'll reveal when there's anything to reveal]:

You are on the server named [server name], with an IP address of [IP address]

Me: Oh yay! ... Hmmm... I wonder why it's important that I know that IP address. WHAT HAVE I DONE??? Ok, calm down. Keep reading.

Answers to many of your questions can be found at:
http://www.lishost.net/support/

Me: good, good, I'm sure I'll have questions. I sure hope those answers aren't written in Geek. Moving on...

When you are ready to go live with your domain on this server, make sure you have changed your DNS entry with your registrar to use our DNS servers:
[information about something called a Name Server...Hmmm]

Me: DNS? I'll have to look that up later. "Name Server" too. So things aren't live yet. Ok. That makes sense. I assume it'll be apparent when I arrive at this "go live" point. I'll worry about DNSs then. For now, just make it through this email...

Your domain will NOT go live until the DNS is updated. DNS takes time to update, so your domain may not be live for several hours Directions on how to test your domain before you go live can be found here: [URL]

Me: So much about this DNS thing. It must be important. [makes notes to look it up when I get home] And testing? Before going live? Makes sense. Also seems to indicate that things might not work. THINGS MIGHT NOT WORK? WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO??? Ok, breathe. You have friends to help you. Just keep reading for now.

**After you have made those changes to your DNS settings, BE SURE to let us know so we can add you to our DNS server.**

Me: ENOUGH WITH THE DNS THING ALREADY. SAYING IT MORE OFTEN WON'T HELP ME UNDERSTAND! Ok, Here's some username and temporary password information. Now that language I'm familiar with. [sighs at the relief of seeing words strung together that make sense] Then...

To change your password for your username, connect using SSH to either [server name], or your domain, or the IP address: [IP address]

Me: All of this makes sense except for the "connect using SSH" part. I've heard of SSH, and I'm pretty sure it's not animal, mineral, or vegetable, but that's about all I'm sure of. [gives up on taking notes of vocabulary to learn ... tears up previously taken notes, balls them up, and flings them despondently toward the recycling bin .. skims over the next few lines which list the directories I have ... wonders what "log files" are, and figures that "cgi-bin" has little to do with trash bins ... scrolls till the end]

Something to keep in mind, your domain name may not be live right now. The DNS system can make up to 48 hours to update. You can NOW login to the server, but your domain will most likely take a little while to be live.

Me: After all that, DNS has a surprisingly familiar ring to it. Comforting, even.

Again, welcome aboard, don't be afraid to ask any questions
-The LISHost team
LISHost.org

Me: Heheheheh... "don't be afraid to ask questions" ... they'll rue the day...

So yeah, I procrastinated for a while by making all my lunches for the week, and chatting with a couple of friends, and writing most of this blog post. And then I sat down to the task of changing my password (the least I should do before publishing a blog post saying that I probably have a password sitting there, all hack-enticing, in my email). An hour later, I've finally conquered the password-changing task and have given myself the rest of the night off. I think this warm glow of victory will be nicely complemented by chocolate ice cream.

I sincerely hope there's a more graphical way to navigate other basic tasks. I am not an SSH lover, and suddenly all those directory addresses that Blake told me about feel a lot less friendly than they did at first read. After all, what does a directory even LOOK like without windows and files and folders and things?? (On the other hand, maybe this is good for me. After all, I said I wanted to learn how this stuff works, right? RIGHT??)

The Ebb and Flow of My Online Communities

2009-07-22T12:41:00.000-05:00

Online communities, like those in the face-to-face world, are fascinating to watch. They coalesce, wrap in on themselves, fray around the edges, unwrap a little, shift, possibly acquire new members or even glom onto a new core group of members, coalesce, wrap in on themselves, fray around the edges... and on and on.

Take my own history as an example. I started this blog and started reading other people's blogs, and in the space of a few months found myself squarely in the middle of a vibrant community of librarian bloggers. A year or so later, Twitter and the LSW Meebo room started up. Conversations started in any of those places and bled over into our blogs, but there were also new people in the group -- people who didn't have blogs at all, or didn't blog about libraries. And slowly the LSW Meebo room group became my center. A year or so later, the librarian Twitterati started shifting to FriendFeed, so I followed them (kicking and screaming, I might add -- I had a bunch of problems with FriendFeed, some of which still bother me even though that's become my social network of choice now). FriendFeed is slightly different in that conversations can happen within or across several "rooms," and I've seen communities coalesce, wrap in on themselves, and then fray about the edges in several of these spaces within FriendFeed. Meanwhile, the blogging community had frayed about the edges (Meredith also just wrote about this).

Each time I've found myself in the midst of a new coalescing community I've met new people who inspire me, question me, encourage me, and generally be good friends to me. But each time it's meant that people who used to represent the core of my network have shifted to peripheral status. Not unimportant, just less present.

And now I find myself on the fraying edges again. Almost certainly, this means that I'm about to find a new home, or re-find an old home, but at the moment things feel a little foundationless for me. Luckily, I have a couple of really interesting projects I'm working on (which I'll probably write about soon-ish), so that should sustain me until my new center coalesces for me.

Citation Visualizations

2009-07-22T10:57:00.001-05:00

A couple of people here on campus asked if there were any tools out there that would allow them to visualize the relationships between citations that they gathered over time in the course of a research project. Turns out, the options are limited and not at all user friendly. Here they are (thanks to Christina!):

There is CiteSpace. The demo video that you get when you click "webstart" and then go to "help" and "demo video" makes the whole thing look rather intimidating. It seems to run off of the same exports that we'd use to get information out of databases and into EndNote. The trick is, it appears to only work if you import stuff from ISI. I don't see any way to manually enter a citation, though I'm certainly no expert on the software yet, so it may be there, just hidden. Here's the User Guide (you may have to click through some server security stuff to see it).
The other option is Sitkis. This involves downloading ISI citations (again) and importing them into MS Access. I'm on a Mac at work, so I'll have to see how this works when I get home to a PC with Access on it. Anyway, here's Christina's blog post about it.

Pretty limited options, eh? I sure hope there are more out there, but the People Who Should Know generally agree that there aren't, at least, not yet. You know what I'd really love? If Zotero would take this project on.

Midsummer

2009-07-21T13:31:00.000-05:00

I know it's not technically midsummer. We passed that a while back. But here at work, it's the middle of our institution's summer. Whole weeks can pass with only one or two meetings scheduled. Whole days can pass without any student asking me anything (we don't have summer sessions for our students, though we do have summer programs for other people's students). Whole hours can pass while I concentrate on one project without interruption. Everything feels different.

One thing I've enjoyed about this summer at the library is that the various research assistants on campus seem to have decided to congregate every day and work side-by-side in the main computer area of the reference room. Each student works on his or her assigned projects, chatting occasionally with whomever is sitting at the next computer, and generally keeping each other company through the long hours of research. This may have happened in previous years, but I don't remember it, and it warms my heart every time I see the group hard at work together.

People always ask me what I do all summer without students, and I rarely have a good answer. In fact, I usually just pick whichever project I'm working on at the moment and say, "well, right now I'm working on [whatever it is]" and hope they don't say "but that won't take all summer, will it?" Because it won't. There are a million other projects to do, but very little that can be synthesized down to "in the summer I work on this kind of thing and that kind of thing" conversation snippet. For some reason, it's rarely seems to be enough to say, like those students can say, that my colleagues and I gather every day to work in proximity on the various projects that can't happen during the school year's crush of interruptions, classes, consultations, and meetings.

So what am I working on during this week in the middle of our summer? Well, I need to get acquainted with our (brand new to us) instance of LibGuides (which we've been wanting for years and finally have). I'm putting together my piece of a presentation on learning-centric library instruction for a professional development day that's coming up in a couple of weeks at Gustavus Adolphus. I'm figuring out what needs to change in EndNote to bring the MLA style up to date now that we have our 7th edition copies in hand (and I need to figure out how to handle their pesky restrictions surrounding the online version). I'm also trying to re-start the effort to make Metalib work the way we need it to work. And I'm drafting a proposal to assess our Research/IT service point.

Sometime soon (once I've figured out LibGuides) I need to embark on my summer schedule of updating all my departmental research guides. (This is when being the librarian for 10 departments becomes time consuming in the summer.) Then there are a couple of complicated course-specific guides I should start working on. I have some Moodle/eReserves documentation to overhaul, some instructional material to create and some projects to assess in my capacity as a member of the campus' copyright committee, and some planning to do for a new project in which I will coordinate a continual environmental scan for our library.

At least, those are the bigger projects that I hope I'll get to before the most active prepare-for-fall-term portion of summer arrives. I hope my brain and work life cooperate to make that possible.

Clinical Reader Train Wreck Just Keeps Going

2009-07-20T10:05:00.005-05:00

Some day I'll get bored of watching this train wreck in progress. But not yet. If you are, you can skip right over this post and rest in the knowledge that you're more mature than I am.

Remember last week when Clinical Reader had only threatened a blogger, been exposed as having made up endorsements, started making up bogus Retweets, deleted incriminating tweets from their account, fired the pesky Canadians, and generally convinced thousands of people that they weren't trustworthy? Since then, thing haven't improved. Since then:

Whoever is trying to sanitize Clinical Reader's online reputation (I assume it's co-founder Allan Marks, but who knows) has been switching the original twitter account's name at the speed of light. This breaks links that people had used in blog posts, but it unfortunately doesn't erase the history from the deep dark recesses of the Internet, or delete people's screenshots from their hard drives. Most of the good stuff is still live on the links in my previous post, and even more lives in this post on the Disruptive Library Technology Jester. (Moral of the story: Don't be stupid online because the stupid never dies.) As of this writing the account has moved from @clinicalreader to @clinical_tweets to @amarks7 to @amarks14 to @amarks_ to @a_marks1 to @allan_marks (See below for explanation of the change in the first two names. And don't expect @allan_marks to be valid for more than, say, an hour. As of 7pm, the name has changed 4 times since 9am today.)

Somebody took over the name @clinicalreader and posted a brief history of the debacle there.

Somebody else took over @clinical_tweets (they claim to be the fired Canadians) and started cockily claiming that they'd done the job they were hired to do because just look at how many people now know about Clinical Reader. Their claim in a nutshell: "You've All Been Used. Bwahahahah." They've now killed the account.

A new twitter account went live: @clinical_reader. This had all sorts of tweets about how the real Clinical Reader wasn't yet "officially" on Twitter but will let us all know when they are (this screencast from the Google Cache shows that if you hovered over an older version of the Clinical Reader site, it clearly linked to the original @clinicalreader twitter account). Then tweeted several rather official looking tweets about what a great service they are. Then denounced the other now-bogus accounts. And all of this while not officially tweeting! This morning, all their tweets had disappeared except for the ones saying that the tweets from @cliniclareader are not coming from the Clinical Reader service (which even whoever-it-is at @clinicalreader says, quite plainly).

Another new twitter account went live: @clinical_tweet. This seems to be the new, new, new official twitter account. Or something. We'll see how long it lasts.

And now, the sockpuppetry really gets started. "Sally Jones" started a twitter account as @kensingtonlib in order to alternately level accusations at @lukelibrarian and laud Clinical Reader. I wonder who could possibly be using the name Sally Jones??

This is just too much fun. I'll update this post if necessary (and add screenshots that I have on a different computer, later).

[Edit: 7pm on July 20th. I think I'm done now. If you haven't had enough, search FriendFeed for "Clinical Reader" and see if more drama has surfaced. I'll just add that I've been almost equally fascinated by the complexity of piecing together a coherent story when that story is playing out in so many social networks, by the flailing about of Clinical Reader, by the lessons this teaches about marketing online, and by the implications of this story in my own teaching. I think I'll have to work some discussion of this parable into sessions I teach about evaluating web content.]

Best Bad Marketing EVER

2009-07-16T14:23:00.002-05:00

I thought I could resist jumping into the fray on this one, but this story just keeps getting better and better.

Have you ever heard of the service called Clinical Reader? Apparently it's a new service that acts kind of like a feed reader, only they decide which feeds you read, and it's aimed at the medical community. The salient facts here being: 1) it's new, and 2) nobody had heard of it. Until this week.

This week they used twitter to threaten legal action against a blogger, explain that they'd overstepped and let some unknown junior colleague too close to the keyboard, argue with the blogger and her ever-growing posse, apologize to the blogger, and now send out bogus retweets.* (See the chronology below for the gory details.)

What fascinates me is how quickly (in the space of four days) hundreds of people have gone from knowing nothing about this service to being pretty sure that everyone at Clinical Reader is completely insane. The social web can be an incredibly rich marketing arena, but it has zero patience for companies that get stuff wrong, and it rather delights in calling out this kind of behavior. This is the flip-side of crowd-sourcing, and companies and libraries hoping to harness online social networks would do well to watch this real-life parable unfold.

Chronology:

The story is way more interesting if you see it unfolding, so here are the best places to get it in kind of chronological order. This blog-version of the summary is necessary because Twitter itself is kind of difficult to reconfigure in a way that makes sense after the fact, and because Clinical Reader has started deleting tweets. Oops.

Nikki noticed some less than ethical aspects of Clinical Reader's site (which now includes edits linking to the apology she received)
Steve summarized day one of the saga
Nikki gathered together links to a bunch of stuff that happened after Steve's post.
The RT shenanigans begin, but these need more space, and screenshots, so here we go...

Clinical Reader went wrong in two completely wrong ways with the retweeting. (By the way, read each of the screenshots from the bottom up, because I forgot I should reverse the order and don't feel like fixing it now.)

First, they thanked people for retweets even if the people had never retweeted them.

Then they seem to have completely made up tweets to retweet.

Amazing. Pardon me while I go pop some popcorn and settle in for the amusing ride. You can follow along on FriendFeed if you want.

P.S. The founder of Clinical Reader now says: "I have taken control of this account & parted company with former acquaintances in Canada whose behaviour I can only describe as schoolboy" (cite), and he is now apologizing to people. [The following sentence is apparently no longer true... which is ironic, since I was poking fun at Clinical Reader for misunderstanding how it works: "The problem is, he doesn't realize that if he starts with one person's name, there's no guarantee that everyone else will be able to see what he writes, since Twitter only lets you see messages directed at mutual friends." Further testing reveals that the other people would be able to see this message if they clicked on their @[username] page but not in their main Twitter feed. So, still weird, but not as egregious.]

* For those who don't use Twitter, RT means "retweet" and is a way to redistribute something somebody else said, complete with attribution. It's very much like a cited quote in a paper, only with links. So if I say "Something Clever" on Twitter, somebody else could say "RT @ijastram - Something Clever" which means "retweeting Iris Jastram who said 'Something Clever,'" and the "@ijastram" part automatically turns into a link to my tweets. Quotation and citation in 140 characters or less. Pretty slick.

An Interesting Thing Happened on the Internet

2009-07-07T15:49:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, somebody pointed me to a FriendFeed thread in which an artist and a FriendFeed user were working through issues of intellectual property and Internet etiquette.

The FriendFeed user, Kol, had bookmarked an image that he found on a site that allows artists to share their work with each other. In typical FriendFeed fashion, this bookmark appeared in FriendFeed with a thumbnail of the image he had bookmarked and with places for other FriendFeed users to comment on, "like," or re-share the bookmark and its related thumbnail image with their own sets of FriendFeed friends. The artist objected strenuously (and not at all politely) to the fact that this thumbnail appeared on FriendFeed. Kol and other FriendFeed users tried explaining that Kol had not, in fact, infringed on the artist's rights by bookmarking her image since thumbnails do not violate copyright and since the image was licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License (though the artist has since removed that license). In short, the artist was well within her rights to ask (politely) to have her image removed from FriendFeed as a matter of courtesy, but she was probably not within her rights to accuse the original poster of wrong-doing. That's the sanitized version, at least, which I reproduced here at some length because of difficulties with the original material.*

So, except for the attendant drama, the issues seem to be garden-variety intellectual property confusion. But all the drama involved in this particular exchange was actually kind of illuminating.

First, it reminded me that as an information consumer, I'm used to the feelings of frustration involved in finding out that I can't freely use other people's stuff however I want to even if I cite my sources. I run up against the flip-side of these frustrations only very rarely, however, and they're good to bear in mind. I happily slap Creative Commons licenses on lots of the stuff I produce, but I remember all too well the first time I found my work being reproduced and shared in a way that I didn't particularly appreciate but that fell squarely within the parameters of the license I'd chosen. There's nothing like working up a good head of righteous indignation only to remember that they're doing exactly what I said they could do and no more.

This particular discussion might also be less straight-forward than it at first appeared. Licenses always trump copyright, and the original image** has license-like language attached to it that prohibits "use" of the work outside of a specific community. The artist clearly thought that this applied to bookmarking and sharing via FriendFeed, though that's not at all clear from the term "use." Kol either didn't read those instructions, or read them but didn't think they applied to bookmarking, or read them but didn't think they constituted a license. (To be fair, I'm not completely sure they are a license, either, but I think good etiquette would be to assume that they do.) And where does all of this leave the artist's fans? If they want to share bookmarks with other fans or potential fans, they can't turn off the "suck in a thumbnail" feature of these social networks. The only way that gets turned off is if the originating site has lock-down features like Flickr does for the images its users make private.

Little did Kol know when he bookmarked this image that he'd bring down the wrath of the artist, spark a huge debate on FriendFeed (and a ton of re-shares of Kol's post), and set this librarian to musing about the incredibly intertangled worlds of intellectual property, etiquette, and the Internet.

* I don't like talking about things without linking to them, but this one has me on the fence for two reason: 1) the link may die suddenly since there was a promise to delete the thread as soon as someone from FriendFeed had seen and responded to the original poster, and 2) the language in this thread is decidedly not safe for work, or for kids, or for me. Still want to see it? Here you go. [Edit: yep, the original post is gone now.] I may or may not screen-grab the post for posterity. I haven't decided yet if that's fair to all involved, or if I want to have that kind of language saved anywhere associated with me. Call me a prude, if you want, but them's my boundaries and it's up to me if I want to cross them.

** I'm aware that by linking to that image, the artist may find my post, so I'll just say right up front that while I welcome constructive comments and discussion, I reserve the right to delete any crude or abusive comments. And I get to decide what constitutes "crude" or "abusive."

Well Hello, Blog

2009-07-03T11:27:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, I had reason to point someone toward a couple of old blog posts I'd written. Popping over here to collect the links brought me up against a sobering realization, though: I posted once last month. Once. And that was a post I'd outlined weeks ahead of time. I've had dry spells before, but never like this.

It crossed my mind that maybe I should just put this thing out of its misery, but I don't think I'm ready to follow in CavLec's footsteps yet. So here I am again, and here's a bit of what I've been up to since last I thought much about blogging.

We had an unusually busy Spring term at Carleton. Budgetary adventures, a new initiative to archive digital versions of all senior capstone projects, revising our strategic plan, and some internal restructuring took up a lot of time and brain space.

My sister got married, my cousin got married, and my youngest brother graduated from college (with honors!), all in the space of a month.

Then I took two weeks off of work to do as much of Nothing At All as I could. In case you missed it, that was TWO WHOLE WEEKS off. In a row. Bliss. During that time, I became a big fan of sitting on the porch with a book, a laptop, and some iced tea. (In fact, I'm reprising my role as a porch-sitter right now, thanks to early observance of Independence Day.) Coming back to work was kind of a shock to the system after that, let me tell you.

It's been a weird few months in which many individual good things happened but the whole felt kind of awful. I was tired. I am tired. But I think things are starting to turn around. And while I'm not sure how frequently I'll post or what I'll write about, it's nice to see this space sitting here and waiting for me.

Four Years

2009-06-16T09:43:00.002-05:00

Since the age of 14, I've been measuring my life in four-year increments. Each increment had its own challenge, and each one culminated in its own major life transition. But now, for the first time in my life, I'm not going through a major life transition after 4 years, and I'm not reaching toward some tantalizing, terrifying, and fascinating goal four years distant

First there was high school. I'd decided to continue being home schooled, which terrified me. How could I be sure that I'd learn enough to get into college if I stayed home? I couldn't. So I learned absolutely as much as I could, fueled by a deep smoldering panic that I'd be horribly under-prepared for college. As it turns out, I wasn't under-prepared. So I graduated from high school and went to college.

Then there was college. That terrified me. How could I possibly both figure out what I wanted to do with The Rest Of My Life (in my head that phrase was always in capital letters) and also learn enough to do whatever-that-was in only four years? As it turns out, I didn't. And as it turns out, this is normal. So I graduated from college and, since I still didn't quite know what I wanted to do for The Rest Of My Life, I went to grad school.

Grad school terrified me. All these smart people, all this work, all this pressure. I had no idea how I'd make it through the reading assignments, let alone the term papers that were twice as long as any I'd written before (with the exception of my college senior thesis). After two years of that, I'd learned enough to decide that English Professor was not going to be my title for The Rest Of My Life, so I skipped out with a masters and moved over to the School of Library and Information Science... which terrified me for a whole different set of reasons. The classes didn't inspire me, and I'd never worked in a library, so I wondered what people did beyond sit at a desk and answer questions all day, which seemed like it could be unendingly dull. But just as I was going to quit and go back to the English Professor idea (the program had said I could come back any time), I got a job in a library and decided that this might suit me after all. As it turns out, it does suit me. So, after 2 years in English and 2 years in library school, I left graduate school and started my first job.

This Carleton job terrified me, so when I took it I promised myself that it need only be for four years. (After that, I planned to find a job closer to my family.) It was a job full of all kinds of opportunity, but also all kinds of responsibility. The people here were wonderful, but I worried that I'd be the weak link in their exhilarating, intense, and creative chain. As it turns out, our individual strengths and weaknesses seem to complement each other pretty well, so the job quickly grew to become my dream job. And so, as it turns out, I'm not looking for a job after my allotted four years.

And now, on this, the anniversary of the day I started here, I feel nearly qualified to hold the position I have. I've done a lot (started this blog, taught dozens of classes, met with hundreds of students, given conference talks, written articles and a book chapter). I've learned to negotiate tricky situations with at least outward confidence. And I've made fast friends for whom I'm continually grateful. These friends have talked me into confidence I'd never have found on my own, and they've talked me down when things seemed to be too much to handle. If it takes a village to raise a child, it apparently takes a sizable chunk of the internet and fair few face-to-face friends to raise a librarian, or at least this librarian.

I wonder what the next four years hold.

P.S. If 4 years seems about long enough to train up a librarian, I wonder how people like presidents feel.

Making FriendFeed Look the Way I Want It To

2009-05-08T08:18:00.004-05:00

I interrupt your regularly scheduled library-related thinking to bring you a brief note about FriendFeed. It recently changed its look rather significantly, and a few of us felt a little claustrophobic every time we looked at it. Luckily, if you're running Firefox you can install Stylish, which lets you modify a site's CSS. Once you install that, you need one or more of the following:

Enough knowledge of CSS to modify the site as you wish
Friends who know enough CSS to do that for you
The Internet, where you can find ready-made styles like this one

I know enough CSS to break things or tinker mildly with things that already exist, and I have friends who put up with my requests for help and whose code I steal mercilessly (hi Steve), and I have the Internet. So I started with this style, modified it to make it look more the way I wanted, begged for help making it look even more the way I wanted, and now have a small suite of style options (which you can copy and paste into new Stylish styles):

For when I'm in friend mode, at home: this cleaned up version. (last updated 5/29/2009)
For when I'm in work mode and really just want text to skim: this stripped down version that gets rid of user icons. (last updated 5/29/2009)
And since I'm not a very picture-oriented person, it seems: a style that makes all posted images into teensy thumbnails that I can click on to view in their larger sizes when I want to.

I have (1) and (3) running together at home, and I have (2) and (3) running at work.

Lest you think I'm at all good at this, I should point out that my tweaks were incredibly minor. Steve Lawson did the big stuff (by which I mean shrinking images to thumbnails, highlighting direct messages, and removing user icons). You'll also notice, if you look carefully at the code, that I just commented out portions of the original code, so you can restore that stuff and tweak it if you want.

A couple of other people really liked seeing which services were responsible for individual FriendFeed posts (like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc). If you're like them, try this Greasemonky script (after installing Greasemonkey, of course).

Just When I Thought Life Needed a Little Spicing Up...

2009-05-07T18:32:00.000-05:00

... Elsevier delivered for me. Ah, the sweet smell of fraud in the evening.

Tuesday, I heard that they'd (oops) published a fake journal under a fake imprint. Now they've admitted it, but not before the LSW had sunk its teeth in and decided that the upcoming zine could be hilariously renamed The Australasian Journal of Library Science (complete with some of the most pesky problems any journal could ever have... seriously, go read the thread behind that link), and that Elsevier could perhaps benefit from some customized Cod of Ethics merch.

Now we're up to six fake journals (sorry for the registration required by that link, but it's free), and Dorothea has contributed some less hilarious, more to-the-point commentary.

If I were writing the "scenes from next week's show" for this particular drama, it'd include revelations that their peer review system is run via seance, or that there's an invisible clause in their author agreements that really does sign over the authors' souls in addition to their copyrights. But since I'm not in charge, all I can say is Stay Tuned!

Crazy Thought

2009-05-07T08:19:00.002-05:00

Thinking about the things that I like about Google or about library databases in comparison with each other after my last post, I realized that library databases need crazy-easy URLs. I don't click through 2 or 3 layers of a website to get to Google. I type "goo" into my address bar, which fills in the rest, which takes me to Google. If I could type "MLA" into the address bar and get to even something as complicated as "MLAbib.csa.com," life would be easier. Sure beats my current option:
http://www.csa.com.ezproxy.carleton.edu/htbin/dbrng.cgi?username=carl&access=[gobbledygook]&db=mla-set-c&adv=1

If I could also set a cookie that would authenticate me from my own home computer, life would be even easier.

Still need to work on the seamless access to full text part of the equation, though.

I Really Wish It Were Easier

2009-05-05T16:10:00.000-05:00

Tipping point: reached.

Up until maybe the middle of last year, it was pretty easy not to worry too much about the problems of doing "real" library research on the free web. "The kids are doing it" was a phrase that simultaneously helped us to worry about the state of information literacy in this web-ified era and to dismiss the problem as one that "the kids" would outgrow, like braces or a lisp or chicken pox, as they became better versed in scholarly research practices.

Well, it's not just the kids any more, folks. Enough journal publishers have opened up their indexing and abstracts to the free web that it's now possible (especially in some fields) to actually do "real" library research on the web. And so people are doing just that. This year, our new faculty orientation session brought questions about Google-friendly access right to our door-step in a big way, and part of this rather disorganized thread on FriendFeed brought it up again.

And yes, ideally everyone could use one nice, big, easy search mechanism to do everything from the most broad to the most narrow topic and then get instant access to the full text of whatever they find. Too bad that's impossible.

Google is more familiar and forgiving, it's faster, and there's a lot of good stuff in it (particularly if you're searching for something that hasn't had any controlled vocabulary assigned to it, yet). But currently, disciplinary databases do a better job of collocating like items based on something more robust than the author's choice in vocabulary and PageRank. Currently, disciplinary databases do a better job of allowing scholars to leverage their disciplinary vocabulary and a better job of helping novices stumble upon key vocabulary terms. Currently, disciplinary databases are the only things that can offer relief to my students who say that there are just too many false hits in everything from Google to JSTOR (free text search may be what they're used to, but they're often relieved to leave it behind as soon as they're shown controlled vocabulary).

But all that aside, neither option does the "access to full text" piece of the equation very well. Unless your library subscribes to the publisher versions of pretty much every eJournal out there (an expensive proposition) Google can't actually help you get to whole swaths of full text, and even then you'd have to be on campus or logged in to your library's proxy server or something. And even if researchers are in a disciplinary database, they'll still often have to step outside of that database to get the full text, and while a link resolver is a wonderful thing, it's still a long way from being a perfect solution to this problem. Either way this lands you at the A-Z list figuring out if we have access to the particular issue of the particular journal you want.

I wish it were easier. I wish access issues didn't make researchers jump to the conclusion that we're "hiding" stuff from Google, or that we're being unnecessarily silo-ish, or that indexing is over-rated, or that you have to do "complex" searches in library databases. I also wish that we could bringing together disciplinary databases in ways that allow easy cross-searching without giving up the time-saving specificity of disciplinary focus and vocabulary.

Right now it feels like we're balanced precariously on that tipping point with a precipice on each side.

And So They Burned It

2009-04-30T22:07:00.001-05:00

As I drove in to work this evening the familiar voice of a piano professor here spilled out of the car speakers that generally only bring me voices of people like Steve Inskeep, Michele Norris, Scott Simon and the other body-less NPR friends that follow me through my days. She was explaining that Annea Lockwood composed an avant-garde piece in which a piano is burned. It's called "Piano Burning" (which strikes me as a not very avant-garde name for such a piece), and tonight they're performing it on campus.

Arriving on campus, there was the dilapidated piano standing alone in the middle of the Bald Spot, waiting to be burned.

Pianos I've known have always lived in warm, homey spaces, or stood in state on a stage. They've always felt like they calmly conceal the potential to thrill you tomorrow or next year or when your grandchildren come to visit. They've always promised great things for the people who can touch them with care and skill, and for the people those artists know.

This piano, though, is just sitting in the middle of its rectangle of cleared earth in the middle of a wide, blank field, hunched under the gathering clouds, and waiting to be burned. I've never seen such a starkly alone piano.

And then they burned it.

It's Been Quite A Week

2009-04-28T20:28:00.001-05:00

Last Tuesday we hosted one of the periodic meetings of the reference and instruction librarians that work at the five Oberlin Group libraries in Minnesota. At least once a year we have a "Round Robin" session where we basically sit down, eat lunch, and then talk all afternoon about what each of our libraries are doing. We'll set a theme for the day, but the themes are broad and nobody really cares if the conversation runs off on tangents. I love these days. This time the theme was about "Looking Forward" and included discussions of everything from mobile technologies to budgets. We also learned that we had about a week to decide if we wanted to purchase LibGuides.

That same day, the steering committee for that group of librarians met to begin planning what I'm now thinking of as the Coolest Project Ever: a day-long mini-Immersion just for us. We'll meet, we'll learn, we'll teach each other pieces of the best instruction we know how to do, and we'll remember again how much we can learn from each other. I can't wait.

Wednesday was full, and neatly bookended by dentist and doctor appointments.

Thursday was a more-than-12-hour day that started with an un-fun budget meeting and finished with evening reference.

Friday I taught two classes and had two meetings before lunch, picked up Laura Crossett at the airport, made her hang out for a while so I could get a complicated research guide published, and then began the Weekend Of Fun. I have a very small handful of "best friends," and two of them spent the weekend visiting me. Martha Hardy came down from the cities and joined me and Laura in what she called The Library Camp of Iris' Living Room. Wonderful.

Monday morning, it was back to the airport and a fond farewell to Laura, followed by probably the hardest class I've ever had to teach, followed by a reference shift.

Which brings us to today. Today we got word that we have rooms and everything for MnObe Immersion, and I filled out paperwork that makes our imminent acquisition of LibGuides official! (I think that makes this the fastest library-related non-book acquisition I've ever been a part of, by the way.) I also started seeing some of the 60 students I've taught in the last 2 work-days, plus some of the students in another class that, yet again, cannot seem to make American Memory work for them. The professor and I have tried so many different ways over the last couple of years to make this particular class understand this particular resource, but for some reason it never seems to work out. I'm flummoxed.

In amongst all of this, in the last few days my cousin gave birth to a baby with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, a friend of a friend's husband killed himself, another friend's father tried in earnest to kill that friend's brother, and my cousin spent all day today waiting for her baby girl to make it through the surgery that will begin the long process of constructing a functioning heart. I was feeling a little sorry for myself last week because of over-long work days full of too many things to do. Perspective gained. I have it pretty good.

The New New OCLC

2009-04-24T07:24:00.001-05:00

Just when you thought you'd gotten to know the new OCLC, it shakes things up again. OCLC is now in the ILS business and WorldCat Local is now free to FirstSearch subscribers.

My first thought on reading about all of this yesterday was that all those pilot WorldCat Local schools must be steamed that this is now free.

My second thought was almost equal parts pleased and worried. I'm pleased that this is yet another competitor against the current lumbering giants in the ILS market, and I like the idea that (if I understand correctly) this will add a hosted option to the ILS market. (Hosted options aren't always the best, but I like the idea of having it available as a choice for people.) On the other hand, this means that that pesky new policy on the transfer and use of OCLC records really wasn't just about protecting a bunch of member-produced data after all. There were bigger plans afoot, and these plans involved leaning even farther toward the vendor model rather than the service model. And if OCLC is a vendor rather than a service, that new policy feels even more like a land-grab rather than an effort to protect member investments.

My third thought, on further reflection, will hopefully be less nebulous and conflicted and more grounded in fact and reasoning.

LSW's Growing Pains

2009-04-22T21:54:00.000-05:00

An interesting thing happened. This little group of friends decided, mostly as a joke, to call themselves the Library Society of the World. Then that Society got big.

The amateur anthropologist in me has been watching the group negotiate this phenomenon for a while now, and it's fascinating. Here's a short sketch.

Two years ago, Josh created a wiki and basically told his friends "Wouldn't it be fun if we called ourselves the Library Society of the World? Sign up, give yourself a silly title, and have fun." At that point, we mostly communicated via Twitter and a Meebo chat room. At that point, we talked just like we'd been talking before. The only difference was that we'd adopted a group name.

Fast forward about a year as friends of friends started joining in the discussion. We still hung out in the Meebo chat room, though Twitter had blown up one too many times and most people had jumped ship for FriendFeed. I now no longer knew everyone I was talking to if I posted to the LSW FriendFeed room, which was pretty cool. My core group of friends was still my core group of friends because we'd been friends for a while now (of course there were a few new friends in the mix, because that's how friendships work over time), but the LSW was bigger and broader than that core group, and there were even whole social networks of LSW members that I hadn't joined (like LinkedIn for example).

Then an interesting thing happened. People started joining the LSW never having known it in its infancy. People started hearing about it at conferences and workshops. Big Names started declaring allegiance. New members figured they were joining A Group, something substantial, something with heft and momentum and growing name recognition (albeit, a Group with a pretty lose sign-up mechanism). Joining and participating in A Group comes with a whole different set of expectations than joining and participating in a circle of friends.

And at this point, with membership estimates topping 800, it's entirely reasonable for new members to expect the thing to feel like A Group rather than just a group. Protesting that it's "just a group" is becoming less and less productive. At the same time, the thing is a grassroots collection of librarians doing stuff and sharing information, which means that there's really no formalized set of processes, governance, or oversight that people might expect from a Group. I'm not even sure I know where all the social networks are that have been created in the name of the LSW. The whole idea is for people to jump in and just do stuff, kind of like we did when we were just librarians doing stuff who also happened to be friends.

I'm fascinated to watch this Group (for it is undeniably too big to protest that it's not A Group) and see how it weathers these growing pains. For my part, if I hear "I wish the LSW were more [fill in the blank] than it is," I hope I'll answer with an encouraging "Then help make it that way! Or at least make your corner of it that way," rather than with something along the lines of "But that's irrelevant because it's really not a formal Group."

Personally, I think this is an exciting development. It means that things are different, sure, and that we should probably take a step back and decide what will have to change and what can and should stay the same. But if more and more people start doing stuff in the name of the LSW, developing friendships, and forming their corners of the LSW into whatever it is that they need it to be, I think this can only be a good thing.

Have Interest - Will Adopt New Conference

2009-04-08T09:24:00.001-05:00

For the last couple of years, I've been wondering just which conference I should adopt as "my" conference. I want it to be one where the sessions are thought provoking and where I'll get to hang out with people I know and like and are interested in things I'm interested in, and where I can meet people I've never heard of before and that have the potential to become my new best friends. So far, the conferences I know about are either so far above my technological abilities that I'd be lost the whole time and not have much reason to apply those skills in my everyday life, or they are at the "no really, the web can help you" level. And so far, I've attended the latter sort of conference primarily because that's where other people who are stuck in the middle like me attend. These are the people I learn from the most, and this is where they go, so that's where I want to go.

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?

Notes from One Who Aspires to Great Public Speaking

2009-04-07T20:49:00.001-05:00

Catherine Pellegrino talks quite well about how active learning could be as much a part of conference presentations as it is a part of our classrooms. I won't recreate her arguments here (go read them!), but they got me to thinking about my own presentation style, the styles of presenters I've seen recently that kept me engaged. I will simply add that active learning may not scale to suit large audiences, or suit every topic, or fit every audience. If, for whatever reason, I decide not to include active learning in my future presentations, it will be by choice, and I will remember that this choice comes with the same huge consequence that I face in similar circumstances in my own classroom: I will have to work even harder to make sure that my presentation is engaging in the absence of mandatory engagement.

While I'm at it, I will remember how comfortable I've become in my own classroom not using PowerPoint, or using it very sparingly. And I won't feel cowed into using it simply by nerves or a false sense of serving future audiences. Back in the day (by which I mean, "I've heard of such things but only seen them in disciplines other than mine these days") people used to present papers, which meant that the actual paper was available for perusing later. Pretty handy if you weren't able to attend the actual session, but unfortunately you have to have a pretty stupendously amazing paper in order to be engaging as you stood in front of everyone and read it. I can't imagine ever having such an amazing paper that I'd be comfortable delivering this type of presentation. My style is much more pseudo-extemporaneous: me, a few notes and an outline, careful rehearsal, and maybe a handout or a PowerPoint. And for me, this PowerPoint does not substitute for a presented paper because that entire genre of presentation is foreign to me. No, if I'm worried about future audiences I'll make a handout or a summary or a blog post or a video or anything that will make sense to that audience without saddling my present audience with stuff they don't need.

It's too bad that knowing and doing are such completely separate acts. I guess the best remedy will be practice... which would mean submitting proposals... and, you know, actually presenting.